Digital SAT Time: Help Your Child With College Admission and Scholarships

For those of you who saw the recent NY Times article on The Misguided War on the SAT, you know….

Yes, the SAT does still matter and will matter even more as colleges come to grips with the fact that grade inflation has made the only other objective (or at least numerical) criteria for college admissions not as critical as the anti-test crowd thought.   Given that so many students have A or near A averages and that grading systems in different schools are so wildly different, admissions officers have been left with way too much subjective judgment.  So, for example a student with a 94 average from a top high school such as Lyme-Old Lyme faces being compared to students with the same GPA from far lesser high schools.  Moreover, no one is quite sure what to do with “weighted averages” since schools weight differently.  Is a 4.2 GPA better than a 97.

The subjective criteria – how do you compare someone who has spent a hundred hours volunteering at a hospice to a student council president?  A dedicated violinist to an all-conference soccer player?  – has always been a luck of the drawer based on the admissions officer who read the file.  As I’ve written before, what brilliant luck if a student wrote a paper about his love for playing the French horn and an admissions reader had the same passion.

Last year, the evidence was clear: those who had better SAT scores fared far, far, far better than those with lower SAT scores.  More admissions.  More scholarship money. Facts.

Our class will help.