Junior year is the year of the standardized test. It’s the year of PSAT, ACT, SAT, AP, and many other jumbled non-acronymic letters that float around there, and I’ve had (and still have yet) to go through every single one of them. I took the PSAT last October, the SAT on March 1st, and the ACT today. I have SAT Subject Tests coming on May 3rd and another SAT run-through this fall. I took one AP test last year and have two more coming up in May, as well as one more during senior year.

However, there’s definitely one thing about all this that I’ve learned that I would have flat out refused to accept this time a year ago. Doing well on one of these tests doesn’t just depend on you knowing the academics, it requires you to learn how to take the test. Doesn’t that kind of sound like those video games where the only way to win is to buy the book that tells you how to win? Yeah, it’s kind of like that.
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Tags: ACT, Advanced Placement, AP US History, article, colleges, Kaplan, preparation, PSAT, SAT, standardized, testing, The Princeton Review, thoughts, tips

It’s junior year in high school and graduation is *gulp* starting to appear just over the horizon. That means two things for the spring of junior year: tests and college research. I already took the SAT a few weeks ago, and I’m scheduled for the ACT in a few weeks and the SAT Subject Tests in a little over a month, plus I’ll likely retake the SAT in the fall.

As for college research, I’ve been doing that too recently, and am slowly but surely compiling together a list of places that I might be interested in spending four years of my life at. I won’t go into much more detail about this at this point, but you’ll likely be seeing me blog plenty more times about what’s happening with my continuing college search.

However, this week is Spring Break, and thus is the classic week for taking the opportunity to visit and tour college campuses. And since I live in the Bay Area (and cannot stop bragging about it), there’s a bunch of great colleges within driving distance of my house. So this week, I’ll be visiting a couple of colleges in the area, not necessarily because I’m interested in going there (some of them I am taking a good look at, while others are definitely not on my list), but to get the feel of going on a college campus and seeing what there is to see.

Today, I’m going to be visiting UC Berkeley, followed by Santa Clara University tomorrow, University of San Francisco on Wednesday, and Stanford University on Thursday (saving the best for last).

So that’s the majority of my Spring Break this week, which should be interesting…

Tags: Bay Area, colleges, Personal, Spring Break, tests, travelling, visits

On Saturday, March 1st, I took my very first full-length SAT. (Technically called the SAT Reasoning Test.) I thought that I had done okay on it, though it is a very long (and stressful) test, particularly once you get to around section 7 or 8 and your brain starts to say “Enough already!”

However, my scores came out this morning at 8 AM Eastern time (a time which I’ve been counting down to over the past few days in anticipation), and so here they are (note that all scores fall within the 200-800 range):

Critical Reading: 630 (85th percentile)
Math: 710 (95th percentile)
Writing: 670 (93rd percentile)
–>In the Writing category, I receive subscores for multiple choice questions (between 20-80) and the 25-minute essay (between 2-12), in which I got 68 and 8 respectively.

This adds up to a cumulative sum of 2010 for the test (on the 600-2400 scale), which is a pretty good score, although not as high as I was hoping. Except for math, the scores are somewhat below the average scores for some of the top colleges that I’m looking at, although they’re not too far off. I’ll have to decide later whether I want to give this test another shot or not in the fall.

I do have some more tests on the way. I’ll be taking the ACT exam on Saturday, April 12th, and then two SAT Subject Tests on Saturday, May 3rd. We’ll see how well I do on those…

Tags: colleges, Critical Reading, essay, math, Reasoning, SAT, scores, test, Writing