After 11 years of working with students on the SAT and ACT, it has become profoundly clear to me that a student’s level of motivation for the preparatory process will dramatically impact the testing outcomes. Motivated students make the requisite sacrifices, invest the necessary time, and nearly always come out ahead.

What happens if my child is not motivated to do the work required or does not seem interested in attaining a higher score?

It is essential to understand a student’s motivational profile and college aspirations. The SAT and the ACT are meaningful only in the context of applying to selective colleges. A number of factors influence motivational levels:

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Listen to Jed as he joins Karen Powell, host of Education Forum on America’s Web Radio, to discuss a wide variety of tutoring and education related topics. The whole interview is now available for you to listen online or download.

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Look left: students are working. Look to the right: more of the same. Look up at the board: it’s still there. Okay. Get a hold of yourself. Back to the test booklet. Read the passage. Wait. What did I read? Read it again. Blank. Look left. Look Right. Back to the board. Repeat.

This is the ritual of one of my students who struggles with test-anxiety. When the anxiety switches on, she begins this cycle. And when she begins this loop, her hopes of a good score, the payoff for all the hard work she’s put in, slowly fade away.

Test-anxiety is real. And its effects can be debilitating. One of my former SAT students, so concerned about hitting the score she needed to win the scholarship that would pay for college, had run crying out of three consecutive SAT tests before she came to work with us. One of my GMAT students was able to keep his cool on the semi-pro golf circuit and could focus on sinking the winning putt, but would go into a negative spiral and throw away everything he had learned when he hit a rough patch of problems on the GMAT.

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Having studied student error patterns on standardized tests for a decade, it has become increasingly apparent that careless errors on the SAT/ACT are typically not as “careless” as they seem.  In fact, clear patterns emerge when you sit down to study students grappling with inherent “carelessness.”

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How many Powerball plays does it take to cover the annual mandatory fees for a student at Georgia State University?  1628.  And that’s only for the fees.  As the costs of tuition have sky-rocketed in the last several decades, it was only a matter of time before the proceeds from the Georgia Lottery fell short to cover the costs of the HOPE scholarship program.

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There’s a great article in today’s NY Times: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits.  It spells out some valuable strategies for parents to help their kids get an edge on studying more effectively.

I wanted to outline the main points in the article and add some commentary from my own research and experience.

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You can lead a horse to water, but how can you get it to study its SAT vocabulary? This is the challenge that test-prep coaches have dealt with for years. How do we motivate others? Specifically, how do we influence and motivate teenagers?

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Two friends of mine in the world of Educational Consulting recently published a book which is completely aligned with my philosophy of writing college essays.  Evan Forster and David Thomas, educational consultants in Manhattan, wrote The MBA Reality Check: Make the School You Want, Want You. This book focuses on applying to MBA programs, but all of its lessons are applicable to students applying to college. (read more…)

In June I had the privilege of participating in the summer conference of the Association for College Counselors of Independent Schools (ACCIS). College counselors from the top schools in the country including Harvard-Westlake, Middlesex, Deerfield, Sidwell Friends, Hotchkiss, Trinity, and many others were in attendance. The theme of the conference was testing, and I was invited to participate in a 3-member panel focusing on the ins and outs of the college assessments and test prep. What do the top college counselors in the country want to know about testing? I took some time and wrote up my responses.

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The 70 plus college counselors assembled at the most heated breakout session of the ACCIS (Association for College Counselors of Independent Schools) conference didn’t know the answer to this question. Among peers they felt safe enough to plainly voice their frustrations with a system that is clearly under strain. I was the fly on the wall, the only outsider in the room. I listened intently as dozens of counselors from the top private schools in the country painted a picture of a system that seems to be buckling under the weight of an ever-rising tide of applications.

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