A New Trend: Colleges Dropping SAT & ACT

There is a potential trend brewing in the competitive world of college admission: colleges dropping standardized tests (SAT and ACT) from their admission requirements. For years high school students with dreams of going to college fretted over taking such tests. Many feared that their four years of high school performance would be wiped out with one bad performance on one test but the scenario is changing.

Last week Wake Forest University (one of the top 30 schools in the annual U.S. News & World Report on college rankings) joined the growing list of mostly small liberal arts colleges that will no longer require applicants to take the SAT or ACT. Smith College in Massachusetts
also announced similar decision early this month. These schools believe that the SAT is not a good predictor of college success. Instead they will rely more heavily on each applicant's high school transcript, personal interview, and extracurricular activities.

This trend has sparked off a nation-wide debate on pros and cons of the standardized tests. Standardized tests are often the only way colleges can directly measure students from different schools from various states. Large universities — which may have tens of thousands of applications — rely on them to have a cut-off point and concentrate on a selective bunch of students.

Probably, for the time being, most college admission boards would take a wait-and-see approach to this trend and closely watch these 'bold' schools doing away with requirements for a standardized test. This trend may eventually make it easier for potentially deserving students to get into college without the stressful journey in the midst of other academic commitments in school and also may put pressure on the test companies to develop tests with more accurate measures and fewer biases.

About Scholarship Search Services

Scholarship search services charge a fee to compare your profile with a database of scholarship opportunities and report a list of matching awards. They do not provide awards directly to applicants, nor do they help you apply for the awards.

Most of such services are franchises of a handful of large national databases. Before using a scholarship search service, ask them whether they compile their own database. If they don't, find out the name of their database provider. If two franchises use the same database, the cheaper one would report the same matching results as the more expensive one. Charging a fee of more than $50 for a search is excessive. However, read the fine print before paying for a scholarship search.

The fact is that very few students receive money as a result of using a scholarship search service. Less than 1% of the financial aid awarded each year comes from the private sector. The guarantees offered by these services are usually worthless and refunds are often very difficult or impossible to obtain.

The success rates reported by scholarship search services usually refer to successfully finding a match in their database, not necessarily winning a scholarship. Ask the service how many students have actually won scholarships as a result of using their service, and if they can provide references.

In fact, you need not pay a scholarship search service to use their database when you can get the same information for free. Such information is available at no cost in your local public library and the financial aid offices of many schools. The Financial Aid offices may also let you search several scholarship and fellowship databases online for free.

'Gap Year' : Deferring College Admission

Increasingly, colleges are offering their accepted students the option to defer admission for a year. Although taking a year off between high school and college is very typical in some of the European countries, it is now catching up as an even bigger trend in America. Once seen as detrimental to educational progression, such a 'gap year' is becoming a respected and encouraged option for many students. For example, Princeton University recently announced a program that will eventually require 10% of its incoming class to defer college acceptances for a year.

A current college student who has attended school consecutively since preschool have spent more than three quarters of his/her as a student! For many, the summer between high school and college is hardly enough of a break, especially if that time is consumed by menial labor and pre-college stress. Worn out by twelve or more years of straight schooling, many students are finding that summer isn't a substantial enough transition into their first year of college and are taking a year off.

Although it is most common for students to apply with their graduating class and then defer a year once accepted to their college of choice, some students who didn't get into the school of their dreams the first time around may take a year off and re-apply the following winter. This option is common among student athletes, for whom there will often be the option to either take a post-graduate high school year, or time off in general, in order to gain a spot on a college team when one couldn't originally be afforded.

Some high schools are even helping their students find entire programs devoted to prospective post-high school plans. The Council on International and Educational Exchange (CIEE), a popular study-abroad program for high school and college students, also organizes an array of gap-year programs for recent high school grads that often include community service.

Seniors: April's To Do List

• Watch the mail for college acceptance and financial aid award letters.
• Compare financial aids you receive from various colleges.
• Check with the college that you have selected about the details of signing and returning the financial award letter.
• Note in your calender important deadlines at your selected college (Housing, Financial aid, etc).
• Make your final decision and send in a deposit by the deadline.
• Notify the schools that you will not be attending of your final decision.

NCAA Eligibility Certification

A prospective student-athlete is someone who is looking to participate in intercollegiate athletics at an NCAA Division I or Division II institution in the future. If you are a student-athlete and wish to participate in athletics at an NCAA Division I or II institution in 2008-09, you must first be certified by the Eligibility Center.

Go to http://www.ncaaclearinghouse.net/, and click on “Prospective Student-Athletes” to start the process if you have not already done so. Send your transcript to the Eligibility Center. "Transcripts need to be sent twice: once after the student-athlete finishes at least six semesters of high school, and again, after the student-athlete graduates."

Transcripts that are faxed, or transcripts that come from the student (or parents/guardians) cannot be used. You need to go to your school office, and request that your transcript be mailed directly from school to NCAA. Make sure you indicate that the transcripts get mailed to the Eligibility Center in Indianapolis.

Test scores need to be sent to the Eligibility Center directly from ACT or SAT. Make sure you select code 9999 (the Eligibility Center code) as one of your free test-score recipients when you take the SAT or the ACT. If your forget to use code 9999, you will need to contact SAT or ACT to have the scores sent officially by the testing agency, which will cost you some extra fee.

Amateurism Certification: For seniors, April 1 is an important start-date. After April 1, you may log in to complete the final steps of your amateurism questionnaire. Failure to complete this will keep you from participating in college athletics.

Shivani Sud is Intel 2008 Science Talent Search Winner

Shivani Sud

Honoring the next generation of American innovators, Intel Corporation today announced the winners of the Intel Science Talent Search. Shivani Sud, 17, of Jordan High School, Durham, N.C., won the top award, a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation. For her research project, Sud developed a model that analyzed the specific "molecular signatures" of tumors from patients with stage II colon cancer. She then used this information to identify those at higher risk for tumor recurrence and propose potentially effective drugs for treatment.

This year's Intel Science Talent Search finalists hailed from 19 states and represented 35 high schools throughout the United States. Of the more than 1,600 high school seniors who entered the 2008 Intel Science Talent Search, 300 were announced as semifinalists in January. Of those, 40 were chosen as finalists and invited to Washington, D.C., to compete for the top 10 awards.

Also achieving top placement in the competition were:

2nd Place: Graham Van Schaik, 17, of Columbia, S.C., received a $75,000 scholarship for his 2-year project studying the effects of pyrethroids, a common type of pesticide, on breast cancer and nerve cell degeneration.

3rd Place: Brian McCarthy, 18, of Hillsboro, Ore., received a $50,000 scholarship for developing new types of solar cells in order to provide a less expensive, renewable form of energy.

4th Place: Katherine Banks, 17, of Brooklyn, N.Y., received a $25,000 scholarship for her geometric analysis of the number of lattice points inside polygons with nine sides.

5th Place: Eric Delgado, 18, of Bayonne, N.J., received a $25,000 scholarship for discovering a new way to improve the efficacy of antibiotics against multidrug-resistant bacteria.

6th Place: David Rosengarten, 18, of Great Neck, N.Y., received a $25,000 scholarship for his physics research showing that Einstein's General Relativity Theory, in principle, could modify rotation curves in the absence of dark matter.

7th Place: Xiaomeng (Jessica) Zeng, 18, of Iowa City, Iowa, received a $20,000 scholarship for her social sciences project in which she found a positive relation between government and private funding of public libraries – as one increases, so does the other.

8th Place: Philip Mocz, 18, of Mililani, Hawaii, received a $20,000 scholarship for designing and using a statistical algorithm to discover hidden patterns of nearby stars.

9th Place: Alexis Mychajliw, 16, of Port Washington, N.Y., received a $20,000 scholarship for her project studying the importance of both wetlands and meadows as habitats for dragonflies and damselflies.

10th Place: Evan Mirts, 18, of Jefferson City, Mo., received a $20,000 scholarship for using a scanning ion conductance microscope (SICM) to observe the changes in size and shape of spinach chloroplasts over a period of time without destroying the sample.

The remaining 30 finalists received $5,000 scholarships and a new laptop featuring the Intel® Core™2 Duo processor.

Caltech Named "Best Value" Private School in Kiplinger's

Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine has ranked California Institute of Technology or Caltech as the best value among private universities in the United States. According to the April issue, Caltech "boasts an impressive three-to-one student-faculty ratio, the lowest among all major universities. Students work side-by-side with Nobel laureates and enjoy occasional lectures by physicist Stephen Hawking." The Institute was also commended for its "generous" financial-aid policies.

Yale, Princeton, MIT, Rice, Harvard follow Caltech in that order in this list.

For more information, visit Kiplinger's webpage on 100 Best Values in Private Colleges.
Here is another link for public colleges: 100 Best Values in Public Colleges.