An Easy Path to a Killer College Essay
by Aimee Weinstein
There’s never a perfect time to buy a car, catch a cold, have a kid… or write an essay. I am specifically thinking of parents of high school juniors who most often agree that there hasn’t been enough time for their kids to do anything beyond schoolwork in months. The popular parenting-older-kids website, Grown and Flown, agrees that junior year is the most stressful of all the high school years, but it’s right up there with the first few months of senior year too. (more…)
Maybe to call it “bait and switch” is extreme, but we are pretty annoyed. Last fall College Board introduced the redesigned PSAT and SAT, and released the scores in January 2016. At the time, it seemed as if all of the juniors we talked to were doing better on the new test, but we work with small numbers of students and figured that the new (and radically different) test was just better-suited to these individuals. This was also the perception of counselors we spoke to at various schools. Many of these same students also took an ACT in the fall with Inspiring Test Prep and in some cases, based on a comparison of 2015 PSAT scores and percentiles to the ACT diagnostic, we recommended they take the SAT, instead of the 
February 20th, 2016, were throw a curve ball when they read the “ethical essay” question. It wasn’t an essay prompt as they expected, but rather a math question.