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Observations from families who have helped their child navigate the college and test preparation process.

Last edition, I started sharing some of my observations of families who (in my opinion) successfully navigated the test preparation, college selection, and college admission processes.  In this edition, I would like to share a few more observations on how some of these parents best helped their students to succeed.

Realistic Expectations

One factor that can negatively impact a student’s SAT or ACT score is the stress of taking a timed test.  Many of us know smart students who excel in their classes yet do not perform well on tests.  While there are strategies that can be utilized to help mitigate the stress, parents should be realistic about how much improvement they can expect to see from their students’ scores.  Adding on the pressure of an unrealistic parental expectation is rarely helpful to already anxious kids.  In fact, often is has quite the opposite effect.  Try to avoid the trap of comparing your student’s test scores to that of other students in the same classes.  Just like some kids have a talent for baseball while others struggle, some kids are talented at taking standardized tests – and some kids are not.

Goal Setting

Once parents know what their realistic expectation are, they can help their students with setting goals.  Those goals can be for a variety of things: test scores, grades, colleges, careers, athletics.  In fact, one of the things I always enjoyed about running track in high school and college was that you could set a goal and make quantifiable progress towards that goal.  A recent article in Insider Higher Education summarized the results of a study on the impact of goal setting in education.  They split their study into two groups.  One group set a goal of a specific grade and the other group set goals related to effort, such as studying for a certain amount of time or committing to hand in every homework assignment.  The group that focused on the effort they would input outperformed the group that was focused on the grade.  The lesson is similar to what I have seen with parents who have successfully helped their children prepare for a standardized test.  These parents worked with the student on a goal of how long they would study, how often, and what they would cover.  Focusing on the inputs that we can control tends to help us achieve the outputs we desire.

Decision Making

While it is a given that the college process is stressful, it can also be a valuable lesson in decision making.  For many students, choosing a college is the first major life decision that they will have to make.  It is thus a great way to educate students on the steps necessary to make a good decision: gather information, seek others opinions and advice, assess the validity of the information you have gathered, and then own the decision.  While there will inevitably be some disappointment during the process, for the most part it does work out for the best.  Students do end up happy and at an institution where they can get a great education.

I hope that you have found some of those observations valuable – perhaps even slightly comforting!  The 2017-18 Common Application became available for students on August 1 so in the next edition I am going to focus on completing the Common Application.