Testing and strategy

Hello and thank you for joining Shellee Howard and College Ready. I am looking forward to giving you an update today. Does your student have a testing timeline? Do they have a testing strategy? Do you know the difference between test optional and test blind? I will cover all of this and so much more. I usually host this on our College Ready page. Unfortunately, the Facebook Live button has been hacked, and so I wanted to at least come to you and give you the information that you can use. So thank you so much for joining us, and I hopefully, uh, will be back on College Ready Page shortly. So as we think about testing and the testing timeline, think about how important this is to your family and what does it actually mean. When I talk about having a testing timeline, that is should your student take the SAT or the ACT. There is a plan for that, and they need to take a diagnostic test in order to know what is their greatest test. They are not the same, and students do better on one than the other. Very few people have the same gift and test well on both. So the first thing you want to do is take your diagnostic test. We do this for our students as part of our program, and you want to make sure that it's timed, and you want to make sure they're using real test questions. These are critical pieces to getting a real diagnostic score. The next piece, once you decide if you're better as an SAT or an ACT, ACT student, then it's time to start planning. Well, how do you even know the score that you want to get? The reality is you need to know, are you going to apply to a top-tier school, a mid-tier school, or a state school or community college? Like, what is your goal? And so once you know what kind of school you're striving for, then we can tell you exactly what score you need based on who got into that school last year. So now you have the score number that you need. You have your diagnostic score, and now you can start mapping out how far away or how close to you, how close are you to your goal? If you are, you know, 5 points away, your test strategy is much smaller than somebody who's 200 points away. So depending on how close or how far away you are from your goal, Then we recommend how to take a test and how to prepare for it. Using a test strategist is critical to your success. Remember, these tests aren't IQ indicators. They're truly, can you beat the test? So you want to make sure that you're prepping properly. Then you have to decide for what kind of school you want to go to. Do you want to do test, uh, optional? Is your school test blind? Will you get merit money if you test well? So far this year, our students have received $3.7 million in free money, and a lot of that is because we believe that these tests are important. Maybe not as much in it in college admission as it used to be, but it still is a great indicator for merit money and how much you will receive. So test strategy is really, if you are thinking that schools are test optional, what does that really mean? Is there a box on the application for you to put the test score? Is there no box on the application for you to put the test score? This is important because if you leave it empty and somebody fills it in with a great score, how can it be optional? Where test blind is, they don't even allow you a place to put the test score. That is truly, I don't want to see your score. Other than that, it doesn't make sense not to take a test. Now we do use it as a strategy. If we have a student with a really high GPA and they're maybe not so good at testing or they have test anxiety, we use that to our advantage. So if you need help deciding on will you go test optional, will you apply to a test-blind school, or how to put together this strategy, please reach out. We are offering, offering a free complimentary strategy session where we can tell you what is the best plan for you. Thank you so much and have a great day.