HOW: Practice and coaching based on a smart plan tailored to your goals and strengths
WHEN: Summer!

For years, we’ve championed summer as the perfect test prep season. The advantages are obvious. With school on pause, there are fewer distractions: no classes, no clubs, no after-school chaos. Even students with jobs, travel plans, or summer camp can find time to prepare. So how do you make the most of these precious weeks?

1. START

The productive (and poetic) Right Honourable John Lubbock once said, “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” That’s true. Summer should include rest—but also some smart, strategic action. If you want six solid weeks of prep before the first ACT of the academic year, you’ll need to start by August 1. For the August SAT? Back that up to mid-July. Getting an earlier jump improves your chances of hitting your goals. Don’t let summer slip away while you’re still deciding: start now.

2. STUDY

Choose a prep method that suits you. Independent learners might thrive with self-paced books or online platforms. Others—especially those aiming for the highest scores—benefit from the structure and feedback that come with classes or tutoring. The earlier you begin, the more flexibility you’ll have to experiment, evaluate, and find what works best.

3. PRACTICE

Even the best prep plan won’t work without practice. Summer offers the rare opportunity to complete full-length exams without the stress of school competing for your energy. Practicing under test-day conditions builds timing, stamina, and confidence. Want to stand out? Start showing up… ideally, under the guidance of an expert educator. Effective practice every week is more than manageable when your schedule is wide open.

Bottom line: High school students today juggle more commitments than ever—don’t wait for fall to add test prep to that circus. Summer is the best season for SAT and ACT prep if you’re willing to work.

QUICK NOTES

• If you didn’t make my Game Plan For The Enhanced ACT webinar, you can watch or listen at your convenience. Feel free to get in touch if you have follow up questions.

• Our 32-hour live online SAT Super Intensive for the August 2025 SAT begins July 1. If you’re looking for a the kind of small group program that makes a big impact on your score, reserve your seat now.

• Summer tutoring slots are also filling up fast.

Learn thorough answers to the following critical questions:

👉 How and when is the ACT changing?
👉 How do the SAT and ACT differ?
👉 How can students choose which test is right for them?
👉 What does "test optional" really mean today?
👉 When is the best time to take the SAT or ACT?
👉 What is the best preparation for the SAT, ACT, or PSAT?

Start your summer right by learning important information and insights about testing, admissions, and smart prep for free. Join me and Kyros AI on June 5 from 7-8pm EDT. Registration is required. REGISTER NOW. See you there!

The Spencerport CSD is one of hopefully many institutions exploring a change to school start times. Obviously, the logistics required to manage a complex matrix of too many students, too many extracurricular activities, and too few buses demand UPS-level efficiency without the huge market cap or snazzy brown outfits. District resources can only stretch so far, especially when life would be so much easier for everyone else if teens could, you know, get to sleep at a decent hour.

Alas, they cannot.

As a certified night owl, I know how it feels when your circadian rhythms won’t meet your professional obligations halfway. Too many teens are simply wired to stay up late, with little that they or anyone else can do about it, despite the inconvenience. Expecting the adults in this scenario to make a change seems sensible, so keep those fingers crossed.

That said, relief from the tyranny of crack-of-dawn schooldays isn’t coming any time soon, which makes insufficient sleep a personal problem and one you cannot afford to ignore:

• Poor sleep impedes learning.

• Poor sleep feeds test anxiety.

• Poor sleep leads to reduced productivity, concentration and quality of work.

So, if your goal is better grades, higher scores, and greater learning outcomes, find a way get enough sleep, even if your school doesn’t care!

QUICK NOTES

1. Last week’s Brighton SAT/ACT Boot Camp was postponed for, what else, prom. That means all Rochester-area students can still lock in 6 solid hours of prep for the June exams on May 27-29 from 3:30-6:30pm.

2. Do you have a Game Plan for the Enhanced ACT? You can get one for free by attending the webinar I’m co-hosting on May 28 with the awesome Amy Seeley. Register for either the 1-2pm or 7-8pm webinars and tell your friends and colleagues.

3. Do you know how learning really happens? Find out and prosper.

Who could look at this image and not be touched by the sheer sincerity and joy in trying to model exceptional skill? The fact that this novice won’t be mistaken for an expert is too obvious to even mention—her toes aren’t even pointed, for Fagan’s sake. But you can’t get to the top without climbing every rung of the ladder. Mastery begins and ends with effort.

Learners at any stage of development can become self-conscious. So can teens, in case you haven’t heard. So think about all those students right now, struggling to reach the highest standards in tough classes, on tough tests, in the studio or out on the field. So many high schoolers I know “get after it,” meaning they pursue their goals with an enviable, often all-consuming passion. Some of them will come up short of their targets: not everyone will earn 5’s on their APs or win whatever championship they contend for. But they’re in it to win it, which means they put in the work in public.

I encourage everyone to take this simple lesson to heart. Be conspicuous in your aspirations and efforts to excel. Every hero, idol, and inspiration you model yourself after has failed publicly, so you can too. Don't be afraid to be seen trying

QUICK NOTES

1. Rochester-based students still have a chance to register for our SAT/ACT Boot Camp at Brighton HS this Saturday, May 17. Register here ASAP.

2. I spoke with Gage Mersereau of GradBetter about calculating True College ROI. Skim the key takeaways or listen to the full conversation.

3. SAT test takers should make sure they know the most challenging words from the May 2025 SAT.

Has anyone else experienced this with athletic recruits? I have a student who is committed to playing volleyball at Dartmouth. She was told her scores needed to align with her high school averages —around a 1368 SAT or 29 ACT. She’s taken the ACT multiple times and now has a superscore of 31. But her mom just shared that the admissions office told them all athletes are being asked to test one more time ‘to show academic commitment.’

Asking an applicant to take the SAT or ACT more times than needed to show commitment seems implausible, if not impossible. Believe it or not, though, it really happens.

Apparently, certain ultra-selective schools will ask athletes—even commits—to keep testing. Why? Many of these teams have a certain number of slots for students whose Academic Indexes fall in different bands, which is to say that they can only accept so many students presenting lower combinations of grades and test scores. GPA can’t be substantially improved at the 11th hour, but test scores certainly can with the right attitude, ability, and prep. If a committed athlete can earn a higher score, they open up a slot for a lower academic performer behind them.

So, if you’re applying to both study and compete at schools like Dartmouth, U. Penn, Georgetown, Harvard, Emory, or Johns Hopkins, testing won’t be done until they say you’re done. You may be asked to take one for the team!

QUICK NOTES

1. National Decision Day is tomorrow. If you know anyone who needs to choose their college in the next 24 hours, be sure to share my essay on how to make the right choice in the latest edition of College Eagle.

2. We just posted our most ambitious group SAT course of the summer. No matter where you live, you can make our SAT Super Intensive your path to a superior score on the August 2025 SAT

3. You may have played 3 Truths and a Lie before. Now try 3 Definitions and a Lie.

However, mid-April is definitely NOT the time for AP students to relax. The exams themselves are more important than ever. In this week’s issue of College Eagle, I explore three compelling reasons to prepare for outstanding scores on the AP exams:

1. Excellence is its own reward.

2. Colleges care more than ever about AP scores.

3. AP credits can save you tons of money.

That third point really resonates in my household, ever since my daughter informed me that her college accepted AN ENTIRE YEAR’S WORTH OF CREDITS from her AP exams! Imagine how much time and money you can save later with a bit more effort over the next month?

I’ve been interviewing expert educators on the Tests and the Rest podcast for years on how to prepare for different Advanced Placement exams. Here is the updated list of topics:

SCIENCE

GETTING READY FOR THE AP PHYSICS 1 EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP CHEMISTRY EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP COMPUTER SCIENCE A EXAM

MATH

GETTING READY FOR THE AP CALCULUS AB OR BC EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP STATISTICS EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP PRECALCULUS EXAM

SOCIAL STUDIES

GETTING READY FOR THE AP US HISTORY EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP GOVERNMENT EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP PSYCHOLOGY EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP ECONOMICS EXAM

HUMANITIES

GETTING READY FOR THE AP LITERATURE EXAM
GETTING READY FOR THE AP LANGUAGE EXAM

LANGUAGES

GETTING READY FOR AP WORLD LANGUAGE EXAMS

Good luck!!

Learn the similarities and differences between the SAT & ACT along with score policies, timelines, and more on Wednesday, April 16 from 3-4pm EST by registering through this link.

Even better, my seminar is part of a larger Summit on Summer Opportunities for High School Students. Your free registration provides access to information on all kinds of high-value topics:

• Scholarship GPS 'Scholarship Summer Camp'

• Academic Research (with publishing potential)

• Internships

• A week-long speech and debate camp

• Applications and essay writing

The first seminars will be offered on Monday, April 14, so REGISTER NOW and share with your friends who need this information!

What’s so great about the ACT on paper?

1. First and foremost, the ACT is a native paper exam, designed to be best delivered in that modality. One example of this is the length of passages and the number of items per passage. The ACT features long Reading, English, and Science passages, often requiring lots of searching for information to answer multiple questions in a way that is much easier on paper: testing on computer entails lots of scrolling back and forth. The SAT, which is a native digital test, delivers one passage per question with no scrolling required.

2. Annotation tools on the digital ACT currently fail to fully replicate the underlining, annotation, and sometimes even manual manipulation (e.g. putting your finger on a data point in a graph) required for test success.

3. You’ll find exponentially more practice material for the paper ACT.

There’s simply no scoring benefit to taking the Enhanced ACT at all during the field testing period and likely no benefit to choosing a digital version even when the Enhanced Exam goes national in September. Sure, the test is shorter, but it’s not better in any other way. Choose paper until you hear a good reason to do otherwise!

(That said, if you are planning on taking the ACT online on a national administration, dig into the only official practice material on the ACT website.)

I’ve been speaking with a lot of parents lately who really want in-person tutoring for the SAT or ACT, either because of their own perceptions of efficacy or because their teens were traumatized by Zoom school during the pandemic. And while I used to be a major proponent of elbow-to-elbow instruction, I’ve shifted Chariot Learning to 99%+ screen-to-screen for individual tutoring.

But isn’t in-person better for the student?

My answer to that reasonable question is almost always NO. In fact, I recently wrote about 7 Strong Reasons Why Remote Tutoring is Better. In most instances—especially for students seeking high test scores—remote instruction with expert tutors is usually better than working at the same desk, at least the way we implement it. That said, there are some important exceptions:

1. The student has certain substantial learning challenges

2. The student lacks an acceptable learning environment or equipment

3. The student requires very high levels of structure

Obviously, preference may also be an issue, but is it really worth giving up the benefits in quality, cost, and convenience of remote tutoring just to be able to smell your tutor’s perfume or cologne? After more than 30 years as an educator, I just find online instruction much more effective.

Please share your thoughts and experiences, positive, negative, or neutral!

APPROACHING DEADLINE: The registration deadline for the May 3 SAT is April 18. Make sure you know how to register and always give yourself at least 30 minutes for the registration process.

1. FREE PRACTICE SAT AND MINI-TEST: Curious about how you’d score on the SAT, but properly concerned about wasting valuable Bluebook exams. My friends at MentoMind offer a free full-length diagnostic SAT. Even better, we can review that test with learners for maximum experiential value. If you can’t spare 2.5 hours, try the 40-minute mini test.

2. AP HISTORY BOOT CAMPS: For the last 14 years, my friends at Edison Prep have been offering live in-person (Atlanta) and remote (everywhere else) AP US and World History Bootcamps in preparation for the May AP exams. Their U.S. History teacher is brilliant and hilarious!

3. HTTPS://SATQUESTIONBANK.ORG: I can’t believe a high school student found a way to make the Bluebook SAT Question Bank even more useful and easier to work with. Check it out, but be sure to exclude active questions to avoid compromising the full-length tests.

4. SAT VOCAB AUDIT: MARCH 2025: Check out this analysis of the most troublesome tested words on the most recent SAT.

Here’s what ACT has to say about How ACT My Answer Key Helps You:

By showing you what you got right and where you went wrong, it can help you learn faster and score higher, giving you a better opportunity at getting into your dream college.

Spot Your Mistakes: Find out exactly what you missed.

Learn Faster: Focus on the areas where you need the most improvement.

Score Higher: Boost your chances of getting into your top-choice college.

ACT My Answer Key is available to purchase for up to 6 months after taking the ACT test. If you took the February ACT, let’s set up a time to review it in order to score even higher on the April or June tests! If you’d like to schedule a review of your February ACT, just reply to this message.

Are you more focused on the SAT? Good news—March SAT scores are coming out now!

1. Teachers have to move faster and assign more in order to cover mandatory content.

2. Winter activities and sports roll right into spring activities and sports with barely a week between in many cases.

3. Spring break is a key opportunity for extended college visits.

4. Advanced Placement exams in May demand extensive preparation and study.

5. Academic fatigue sets in as we creep ever closer to summer break.

For decades, I've watched this dynamic play out over and over. Students who planned with the best intentions to either complete testing by March or pursue prep after winter commitments suddenly face the reality of a tough sprint to the end of the year. The spring months present abundant challenges for any consistent prep efforts. This means that if you have to take the June SAT and/or ACT, you have to start prep much earlier than you'd expect.

When author Marie Lu wrote, “June will break your heart,” she was talking about a person, not the month that begins with two influential college entrance exams in rapid succession. Long ago, I described the tepid case for taking the June SAT & ACT. Basically, June testing is far from ideal but still better than waiting until the fall if you need to reach your target scores.

If you are planning on testing in June, make those tests count. If you haven't already begun, start prep now to account for Spring Break, AP exams, or any other predictable and valid commitments that may demand your time. Be mindful of the challenges June testing can and will throw at you, and you can still put yourself on track for success!

Test takers should know exactly what they can and should do to manage their test experience and, with hope, avert some of the expected impediments to a secure, standardized experience: start here and follow the other links for details.

But students should also hedge their bets by ensuring that their entire application process doesn’t depend on a single test date goes smoothly. On any given test administration, some experiences are compromised and some tests are rendered invalid, often through no fault of affected students. That has always been the case and will likely get worse, thanks to the complexity of digital testing.

So accept reality and begin testing early enough to allow for attempts on subsequent test dates. Retesting is a natural part of the process anyway, especially in the superscore era. Planning for multiple test dates that fit within both your busy schedule and application deadlines protects your downside while lowering the stress attached to any single exam experience.

Consider the following recommendations when determining your Plan A and B test dates:

• I find that testing as early as makes sense in 11th grade—ideally by December—takes a lot of pressure off students likely to engage in selective admissions.

• The SAT and ACT often occur at intervals of one or two months, so there’s always a test coming up soon.

• Never plan to test during important extracurricular activities or seasons.

• Never plan to test during May or June if you are sitting for multiple AP exams.

• Never ever just take an official test just to find out your baseline. Every official test should count, which means you should prepare for it.

A little planning combined with the right amount of prep goes a long way towards making sure that you are ready to test when the opportunity presents itself and only mildly inconvenienced if a scheduled date is postponed. Even better, those who prepare well often find that they never even need to exercise Plan B!

(Not sure what your plan should be? Get in touch and I’ll help you figure it out!)

Fortunately, many educators are paying attention to this critical issue. During a really informative conversation about college readiness with Carey Dukes of The Readiness for Change Institute, we reviewed some of the fundamental success skills students might not sufficiently develop in high school. Many of them, according to Dukes, might best be mastered with a fundamental change in perspective: look at every semester as a distinct project.

How does viewing a semester or term as a project with critical milestones cultivate future success?

• Requires creation of a unified time allocation schedule and study time goals

• Encourages students to view all classes (not just the ones they enjoy) as part of a unified goal

• Helps prevent students from giving up on challenging classes

• Promotes consistent effort across all courses throughout the semester

• Establishes a framework in which success in a long academic year is broken down into more manageable chunks

Project management skills are critical for any student managing a matrix of classes, each with their own requirements, assignments, and deadlines. Don’t wait until college to build skill you’ll need there… take on this project now!

Second and more valuable in many ways was a Comparison of the Legacy and Enhanced ACT® Test, which presented the new test structure and content redistribution. This is to say that ACT is keeping all of the legacy (current) Reporting Categories but shifting some priorities. If this topic interests you, I recommend diving into my full analysis of ACT Enhancement Content Rebalancing. Here are the main points:

• ENGLISH: Items testing Production of Writing (topic development and organization, unity, and cohesion) and Knowledge of Language (word choice, style and tone) will be more common.

• MATH: Test takers will see far fewer Integrating Essential Skills items—the ones that test mastery of concepts typically learned before 8th grade—and maybe less wordy problems.

• READING: Shorter passages!

• SCIENCE: Optional as far as ACT is concerned. Look for the addition of an engineering and design passage and the inclusion of more items requiring scientific background knowledge.

Last but not least, anyone sitting for the March 8 SAT should be taking a full practice test in Bluebook this week. Consider that your dress rehearsal for opening night of an important performance. Contact us to schedule a review if you haven’t already!

• Is grade inflation really a problem?

• Do you know the difference between affect vs. effect?

• February ACT scores are in!

• The deadline to register for the March SAT is Friday, 2/21.

If you live in the Rochester area and are looking for one of our in-person SAT/ACT Boot Camps, we have two starting next week in Pittsford (2/25) and Brighton (3/1). Check out calendar for details.

Have a great week!

persistence (noun) - firm or stubborn continuance despite difficulty or opposition; perseverance
BREAKDOWN: PER- (through) + SIST- (stand firm) + -ENCE (act or state)

Persistence has a specific connotation in the context of college. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracks both college persistence and retention (another word everyone should know):

• Persistence rate: the percentage of students who return to college at any institution for their second year

• Retention rate: the percentage of students who return to the same institution

Why does this matter to each and every traveler on the road to college? Because the numbers behind these rates are not pretty:

Basically, the national persistence rate for students who started college in the fall of 2022 was 76.5%. The national retention rate was 68.2%.

• Put another way, nearly 1 in 4 students fails to make it to the second year of college.

• Nearly 1 in 3 students fails to graduate after 6 years of college.

Yes, there are ways to improve your individual odds—mainly meeting college readiness benchmarks and attending as a full-time student—but research makes abundantly clear the reality that getting into college is no guarantee of graduating. Always keep the meanings of persistence and retention in mind during your college journey!

This word is shared as part of the Words We Love Substack Carnival, a lexicon of lovable language compiled by some of your current or future favorite educators and writers on Substack. Enjoy all the Valentine’s Day vocabulary on the Words We Love 2025 page.

While school counselors traditionally cover student pathways after high school as part of their overstuffed portfolios of responsibilities, their role differs substantially from that of an independent college counselor. Yes, both roles share the intention of helping students succeed and unlock opportunities after graduation, but school counselors handle way more than college admissions:

• Often overburdened with large caseloads and diverse responsibilities

• Primary training is in mental health, with college counseling as a secondary focus

• Limited time for in-depth college research or campus visits

• Must balance mental health crises with college planning duties

• May be constrained by school policies or local expectations

Ultimately, a school counselor’s first responsibility is often student social-emotional wellness. After that comes a slew of administrative functions like scheduling. Then comes college counseling, which often has to be compressed into large presentations by year at most public schools.

If you spend any amount of time in a school building, you know how busy and indispensable counselors are. Wish yours a Happy National School Counseling Week today!

Since the introduction of the digital SAT, the Bluebook app has been the sole source of official digital adaptive practice tests. I consider these exams the finest practice tests available because the questions come directly from the source (not to say that excellent third-party tests don’t exist).

College Board has shown an admirable commitment to providing tests that reflect the most current content distributions and score scales, even though the first three released tests lacked accuracy. No wonder they just retired those tests and replaced them with four new ones!

The current state of practice digital SATs in Bluebook is as follows:

• SAT 1-3: GONE

• SAT 4-6: Still intact and unchanged

• SAT 7-10: NEW, though each includes a handful of items from SAT 1-3

Until research proves otherwise, let’s assume that the new tests are most closely aligned with the current version of the SAT. This means that test takers should work with these tests in order, saving what are assumed to be the most predictive exams for the end of prep.

Most importantly, make every one of these exams count by following our instructions on how to take a great practice SAT.

College interviews are mainly used by top ~50 selective schools (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Georgetown) and, while often claimed to be optional are strongly recommended. Interviews are typically conducted by alumni, less often by admissions staff or current students and usually take place in fall of senior year, especially for Early Action/Early Decision applicants.

Always Accept and Prepare for Your College Interviews

• Research common questions (e.g., "Why are you interested in our school?")

• Prepare specific, memorable answers that go beyond generic responses

• Practice with friends, family, or counselors

• Be ready to discuss aspects of yourself not covered in the written application

Interviews can be highly impactful for individual cases, once admissions decisions have moved beyond GPA and test scores. I’ve seen what happens when a student turns down an “optional” interview—don’t make that mistake!