Have you fine-tuned your teenager's high school course roadmap?

 

 

Our 4-year Roadmap. Image: Rao Advisors

 By Rajkamal Rao  

If you're the parent of a teenager, you're probably having debates at the kitchen table about what courses he or she is signing up for next Fall. You're frustrated that you don't seem to get the required help from your school's guidance counselor. You're anxious that your child is not thinking far ahead to college and are unsure if the right course selections have been made.

Please don't worry! This scene is playing out in homes all over the United States. We know because these families come to us for help. [To check out our Google reviews, please click here].

High school course planning takes extensive thought and deliberation. It has to fit the exact needs of each student. A one-size-fits-all approach, which high school counseling teams often engage in, is never optimal. Course selection and other activity decisions made now will impact college selections and admissions in a profound manner.



Our 4-year roadmap tool considers the following factors to optimize your student's high school experience:

1. Your school district's policies, resources, and opportunities. Here is a summary of the graduation and grading policies of several Texas school districts.
   
2. Favorite topics in school (we conduct the RIASEC test for younger students to determine interest)
   
3. Intended major in college
   
4. Course selections in school during the school year
5. Course selections for convenience (for example, completing the mandatory Health Credit in the summer)
6. Career and Technology Education (CTE) courses.
7. Course selections for acceleration (for example, taking Algebra II in the summer)
8. Extracurricular activities
9. Summer programs & internships
10. Community service and volunteering
11. SAT/ACT/PSAT-11/NMSQT prep
    
12. Additional information (TAMS/IB/Magnet)

When you come to us, we try and understand your child's interests and goals after high school. Most students come to us with the intent of attending college. But some want to work after high school, or pursue vocational, trade, or technical school - and for such students, public schools offer an impressive menu of Career and Technology Education (CTE) courses. 

CTE courses are also appropriate for some students who want to pursue specialized college programs, such as BSMD. These students take several so-called "Health Sciences" track courses that demonstrate to BSMD colleges that they are committed to pursuing a public health career. In general, however, students bound for college should avoid taking CTE courses because the classes are not taught with the same rigor as advanced or dual-credit or IB or Advanced Placement courses.

We recommend a detailed year-by-year roadmap broken into three sections: Activities during the summer leading to the school year; activities during the school year (in school); and activities during the school year (after school).

We consider every minute detail during our course planning session, with one goal in mind: How to maximize the weighted average GPA and therefore, improve a student's class rank. Are there courses which a child should take for CBE (credit by exam) so that a slot opens up for a more advanced course during the school year? Should a student take a summer online course either at the district's virtual school (e-school) or at UT High School? When does the child prepare for admissions tests (SAT, ACT)? How do you maximize your chances of doing well on the PSAT-11?

[In Texas, no prior counselor permission is required to take an online course from UT High School or another approved TEA provider. Please see section 74.23 under the TEA rules. Some school districts limit the number of online courses by grade, so check with your district - but taking one course is always permitted.

But just because state law requires school districts to accept coursework done online or at another school, the law is vague on forcing school districts into accepting grades earned elsewhere and incorporating them into the school district's student academic record. For example, at Plano ISD, grades earned even in courses taken in its own eSchool are not used in computing a student's weighted average GPA and hence, class rank. Such courses appear in a student's transcript as "neutral," meaning like a "Pass/Fail" course. It is PISD's thinking that the purpose of such courses is only to get the student to complete a prerequisite course for topic acceleration (such as taking Algebra I in the summer to take Geometry I in the Fall) or complete a required course to fulfill state graduation requirements (such as Health).

As a general rule, check with your school counselor once before registering elsewhere as district policies keep changing].

Most importantly, our detailed proprietary customized roadmap tool helps free up a student's time so that there is sufficient school-life balance. Each family receives our popular, proprietary 280-page guide to elite college admissions which is the content source for our public appearances, books, and flagship online courses.  Families will also have free access to this website along with regular updates on our Facebook page. All client families get membership to our growing WhatsApp group community.

With a roadmap, you can project-manage your child's high school years limiting the need to come to us frequently. [We recommend a 1-hour discussion once each school year to make sure the roadmap is still working, and fine-tune it as needed].

We're changing the way families help their children succeed in high school. If you still have questions, please contact us - we promise you will not be disappointed.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please contact us for more information.

How to interpret PSAT-11 scores for National Merit Scholarships

How to interpret PSAT-11 scores for National Merit Scholarships By Rajkamal Rao Image Courtesy: Rao Advisors LLC If you're a rising 11th grader or a parent of a rising 11th grader who is about to take the PSAT/NMSQT, this post is a must-read! It is also a must-read for students who have already taken the PSAT-11 test. If you are interested to know more about the financial benefits of becoming a National Merit Scholar, read our separate post here. There's a lot of confusion about what exactly the PSAT is. For starters, it's the Preparatory SAT, so it gives students a chance to test-drive the actual SAT with a look and feel that's identical. The exam environment, the proctoring of the test, the questions, answer choices, the balancing of the degrees of difficulty across various questions, the sections, the scoring, the reporting - every aspect of the larger SAT is replicated on the PSAT with great care. The PSAT tests skills in reading, comprehension and math using questions in Science, History/Social Studies, Expression of Ideas, Standard English Conventions, Algebra, Problem Solving, Data Analysis and Advanced Math - skills that high school students learn throughout their careers. It is refreshing to note that at least one nationalized organization recognizes these skills in our teenagers. There are some important differences between the two tests. The SAT is on an 800 scale but the PSAT is on a 760 scale. The SAT's essay is optional; the PSAT has no essay. The PSAT in many ways is a lot more important to school districts than it is to students. Just like the STAAR test is an indicator of a district's performance in demonstrating that children have learned basic math and reading skills, the PSAT is a test which school districts covet because it allows them to brag about how well-prepared their students are to pursue college. After all, SAT (or ACT) scores are still needed at most colleges, so a good PSAT score is evidence of a likely good future SAT/ACT score, which means you're likely a good candidate for college. At least, this is the theory. To the 9th and 10th grade student, other than the "test-drive" features of the test, the PSAT score is not of much consequence. The PSAT score cannot be used in college admissions. Every student is mandated to take the test, so there's no differentiation that one student can claim over another. The PSAT Recruitment For the 11th grader, a good PSAT score can mean significant advantages in the college admissions process for elite universities. Although long known among professional counselors, the recent Harvard case threw additional light on how elite colleges use the PSAT. Students with high PSAT scores are sent "Recruitment" letters which are invitations to students to apply. According to the New York Times, in the fall of 2013, white and Asian-American men had to have scored at least 1380 on the SAT (converted from the equivalent on the PSAT), and black students and other underrepresented minorities had to have scored at least 1100. The PSAT score is the first "academic" factor that Harvard looks at in a long line of factors by priority - Athlete (A); Legacy (L); Director’s List (D) (Royal child); Children of faculty (C); Sparse country; PSAT invite. The ALDC students form 30% of all freshmen admits. What is remarkable is that 60% percent of admitted freshmen received a recruitment letter - which means that doing well on the PSAT is almost a prerequisite to be considered for admission. Either one must be an ALDC student or must have received a PSAT invite letter. These two groups form 90% of the admitted freshmen class. Most elite schools follow admission policies that are close to Harvard's. Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia also send out recruitment letters to high PSAT scorers. The NMSQT Scholarships The PSAT-11 test also serves as the NMSQT and assumes enormous significance, more important than the SAT/ACT. Nearly 1.6 million 11th grade students took the PSAT in 2018. Only 16,000 high scorers, about 1% of the total, qualified for the NMS Semifinalist recognition. While the NMS Semifinalist determination is based only on the Selection Index Score (SIS), the Finalist and Scholar recognition are through further filtration. About 15,000 were classified as NMS Finalists based on other academic accomplishments, including class rank and GPA, and extracurricular activities/leadership and principal recommendations. NMS Finalist Award Letter, Courtesy: NMS Corporation. And about 8,000 will qualify for the NMS Scholar recognition, about 0.5% of the total. How SIS Scores Are Calculated The National Merit Scholarship Corporation piggy-backs on the exhaustive/expansive testing infrastructure of the College Board to use the same PSAT-11 scores to determine its awardees. The NMSC is a non-profit that lobbies thousands of private companies to dole out merit scholarships to merit-worthy students. The SIS, which the NMSC generates, weights a student's "Reading and Writing" skills as 67% important whereas Math skills are rated as only 33% important. A future NMSC could change the SIS computation to make the two sections equally weighty, or even switch the weights given the world's gravitation to STEM fields. But for 23 years, the non-profit has stayed with its current bias towards reading and writing. Suppose a student has a PSAT score of 1480, broken down into 730 on the "Reading and Writing" section and 750 on the Math test. The SIS is calculated as [730+730+750]/10 = 221. In Texas, the National Merit Scholar Semifinalist cutoff for the freshman college class of 2020 (students who took the PSAT-11 in 2018) was 221. The bias in the SIS computation can mean that two students with identical PSAT scores could see different NMSC outcomes. Suppose a different student had a 720 in Reading and a perfect 760 in Math. Her PSAT is 1480, just as the student above. But the SIS would be calculated as [720+720+760]/10 = 220. In Texas, this student would fail to qualify for the NMS. The ranking of the Semifinalist winners is not performed nationwide but within each state. So, while a Texas student with a 221 SIS made the cutoff for the 2018 NMS awards, he would have failed to make it in California where the cutoff was 223. In Arkansas, the cutoff for the same year was 204. <!-- replace with your text END-->

By Rajkamal Rao  

Image Courtesy: Rao Advisors LLC

If you're a rising 11th grader or a parent of a rising 11th grader who is about to take the PSAT/NMSQT, this post is a must-read! It is also a must-read for students who have already taken the PSAT-11 test. If you are interested to know more about the financial benefits of becoming a National Merit Scholar, read our separate post here.

There's a lot of confusion about what exactly the PSAT is. For starters, it's the Preparatory SAT, so it gives students a chance to test-drive the actual SAT with a look and feel that's identical. The exam environment, the proctoring of the test, the questions, answer choices, the balancing of the degrees of difficulty across various questions, the sections, the scoring, the reporting - every aspect of the larger SAT is replicated on the PSAT with great care.

The PSAT tests skills in reading, comprehension and math using questions in Science, History/Social Studies, Expression of Ideas, Standard English Conventions, Algebra, Problem Solving, Data Analysis and Advanced Math - skills that high school students learn throughout their careers. It is refreshing to note that at least one nationalized organization recognizes these skills in our teenagers.

There are some important differences between the two tests. The SAT is on an 800 scale but the PSAT is on a 760 scale. The SAT's essay is optional; the PSAT has no essay.

The PSAT in many ways is a lot more important to school districts than it is to students. Just like the STAAR test is an indicator of a district's performance in demonstrating that children have learned basic math and reading skills, the PSAT is a test which school districts covet because it allows them to brag about how well-prepared their students are to pursue college. After all, SAT (or ACT) scores are still needed at most colleges, so a good PSAT score is evidence of a likely good future SAT/ACT score, which means you're likely a good candidate for college. At least, this is the theory.

To the 9th and 10th grade student, other than the "test-drive" features of the test, the PSAT score is not of much consequence. The PSAT score cannot be used in college admissions. Every student is mandated to take the test, so there's no differentiation that one student can claim over another.

If you're a PSAT student who will complete your high school diploma in the United States, your citizenship or Green Card status should not matter. Students on dependent visas (H-4, L-2) can qualify for NMSQT awards. But if you're living abroad, you can only qualify for NMSQT awards if you are a US Citizen or Green Card holder.

The PSAT Recruitment

For the 11th grader, a good PSAT score can mean significant advantages in the college admissions process for elite universities. Although long known among professional counselors, the recent Harvard case threw additional light on how elite colleges use the PSAT. Students with high PSAT scores are sent "Recruitment" letters which are invitations to students to apply. According to the New York Times, in the fall of 2013, white and Asian-American men had to have scored at least 1380 on the SAT (converted from the equivalent on the PSAT), and black students and other underrepresented minorities had to have scored at least 1100.

The PSAT score is the first "academic" factor that Harvard looks at in a long line of factors by priority - Athlete (A); Legacy (L); Director’s List (D) (Royal child); Children of faculty (C); Sparse country; PSAT invite. The ALDC students form 30% of all freshmen admits. 

Harvard's PSAT Recruitment Letter

What is remarkable is that 60% percent of admitted freshmen received a recruitment letter - which means that doing well on the PSAT is almost a prerequisite to be considered for admission. Either one must be an ALDC student or must have received a PSAT invite letter. These two groups form 90% of the admitted freshmen class.

Most elite schools follow admission policies that are close to Harvard's. Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia also send out recruitment letters to high PSAT scorers.


The NMSQT Scholarships

The PSAT-11 test also serves as the NMSQT and assumes enormous significance, more important than the SAT/ACT.

Nearly 1.6 million 11th grade students took the PSAT in 2018. Only 16,000 high scorers, about 1% of the total, qualified for the NMS Semifinalist recognition.  While the NMS Semifinalist determination is based only on the Selection Index Score (SIS), the Finalist and Scholar recognition are through further filtration. 

About 15,000 were classified as NMS Finalists based on other academic accomplishments, including class rank and GPA, and extracurricular activities/leadership and principal recommendations.

NMS Finalist Award Letter, Courtesy: NMS Corporation.

And about 8,000 will qualify for the NMS Scholar recognition, about 0.5% of the total.

How SIS Scores Are Calculated

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation piggy-backs on the exhaustive/expansive testing infrastructure of the College Board to use the same PSAT-11 scores to determine its awardees. The NMSC is a non-profit that lobbies thousands of private companies to dole out merit scholarships to merit-worthy students.

The SIS, which the NMSC generates, weights a student's "Reading and Writing" skills as 67% important whereas Math skills are rated as only 33% important. A future NMSC could change the SIS computation to make the two sections equally weighty, or even switch the weights given the world's gravitation to STEM fields. But for 23 years, the non-profit has stayed with its current bias towards reading and writing.

Suppose a student has a PSAT score of 1480, broken down into 730 on the "Reading and Writing" section and 750 on the Math test. The SIS is calculated as [730+730+750]/10 = 221. In Texas, the National Merit Scholar Semifinalist cutoff for the freshman college class of 2020 (students who took the PSAT-11 in 2018) was 221.

The bias in the SIS computation can mean that two students with identical PSAT scores could see different NMSC outcomes.

Suppose a different student had a 720 in Reading and a perfect 760 in Math. Her PSAT is 1480, just as the student above. But the SIS would be calculated as [720+720+760]/10 = 220. In Texas, this student would fail to qualify for the NMS.

The ranking of the Semifinalist winners is not performed nationwide but within each state. So, while a Texas student with a 221 SIS made the cutoff for the 2018 NMS awards, he would have failed to make it in California where the cutoff was 223. In Arkansas, the cutoff for the same year was 204.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

Rice University: Campus Visit Observations

By Rajkamal Rao  

Image Credit: Rao Advisors LLC

In 2018, we went to Rice University in Houston for a campus visit. Our verdict? It's a world-class school that must be on your shortlist.

All You Need To Know About Rice

The best way to visit Rice is to register in advance and choose any classes you want to take as a guest. Rice is generous in letting you sit in on as many classes your teenager is willing to take.

Rice is smack in the middle of downtown Houston. The neighborhood around Rice isn't the best in terms of street infrastructure and shops, but once you get in to the campus, beauty takes over. For a full set of pictures (including a few shots of a live dorm room) visit our Facebook page.

Parking is $12 a day in the visitor lots. Check-in is easy at Lovett Hall. Campus tours are offered at 11 AM and 3 PM, so if you arrive early, you're on your own to explore. If your child wants to take a class, ask for a campus map and proceed right to the classroom.

While teenagers are in class, parents can sip a coffee at the FLO (French-styled cafeteria) where you can buy your favorite drink at prices double than that at Starbucks!

Our campus tour started at 3 PM with a student guide. Class rooms are relatively small and resemble a large conference room in an office. The library is small too and is of the size of a city public library.  While the campus is large, nearly 300 acres, everything in it is relatively small. This, in fact, is Rice's appeal.

The university admits only about a 1,000 freshmen each year. There are only 4,000 undergrad students from all four years. (Compare this to UT Austin which has 42,000 undergrad students!).

There are 11 residence halls, about 350 students reside in each. Each hall as its own Magister (a Professor with family) to oversee it. There is also a Research Assistant family in residence. Food is served in the servery attached to each hall. Menu options are varied. When you pay your annual fee for tuition, room and board, meal plans at the servery is what you are paying for. Each student gets three chances a day to eat, via an electronic card.

The idea of these residence colleges comes from Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, and Princeton. Students feel an identity first to their residence college, then to Rice and then on to the world. Friendships are made in the residence colleges because this is where you eat, sleep and live. Intramural sports are often competitions between residence colleges. For overprotective parents worried about how their teenagers will adapt to an independent life, residence halls are a great way to transition the change.

Why Small is Good At Rice

Returning to the concept of small, Rice is known for extremely small class sizes. Faculty-student ratio is about 1:6, what you may get at a private tutor! Almost all classes are taught by professors. You can imagine the intellectual intensity if you're surrounded by 6 or 7 bright students overseen by a sage-like professor teaching you.

The "speed" at which Rice students learn is therefore incredibly fast. Each student wants to outdo the other, so the rigor is high. Slackers are advised not to consider Rice at all.

We spoke with Dr. Jason Hafner, a veteran Chemistry professor who earned his Master's and Ph.D.s at Rice, completed his postdoc research at Harvard and returned to Rice to teach. He told us that Rice is a very high performing, high-intensity environment which attracts motivated students who want to go the extra mile. He was recounting how most Rice undergrads easily gain admission to elite schools such as Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Harvard for their graduate degrees. And how, because of Rice's rigor, they stand apart at these schools.

So, if your plan is to study further at a top school, Rice, itself ranked within the top 20, is a great stepping stone.

Rice, because of its small class sizes, fosters a strong bond between academics and students. Because each Rice professor is into research, there are numerous opportunities for undergraduate students to participate in research and obtain internships through referrals from Rice faculty.

Getting a job after graduation is easy. Houston is a big city.  Rice has important partnerships with the big Houston corporations and the MD Anderson Medical Center.

Our takeaway

Rice is an elite institution, which at just 11% selectivity, is more difficult to get into than some of the Ivy Leagues. With a change in their financial aid/scholarship plans beginning this year, even more students will apply next year for the same 1,000 spots making Rice even more selective.

It's a great school and should be on your shortlist.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

Go back to "Rao Advisors - Home".

Now, This is Truly a World-Class Extracurricular Activity

By Rajkamal Rao  

With Mason Andrews, World-Record Holder for Youngest Solo Pilot to Circumnavigate the Globe. Image Credit: Rao Advisors LLC.

Extracurricular activities have come to define what college admissions officials say they look for in a high school student when they conduct a "Holistic Profile" evaluation.  For more on this, please read our blog post from Sep 2018.

On Oct 4,  I was privileged to meet Mason Andrews, who is all of 18 years and 4 months old!  His claim to fame is that he will shortly enter the Guinness book of World Records for the youngest solo flight around the world in a single-engine plane.  And for the youngest person to fly solo across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Mason's Dual Extra Curricular Activities

To be fair, he was not a high school student when he completed the adventure, although, he was one when he started planning the trip.

Mason's interests in flying started about 5 years ago.  When he was 13, he went to Europe on a family vacation.  He took a paragliding flight and fell in love with it.  By the time he was 14, he already had a paragliding license.

Back in Monroe, Louisiana, he started practicing flying on a simulator at home.  And he began flying with his dad in his Piper single engine 6-seater aircraft racking up nearly 300 flight hours in just a few years.

When he was 15, he learned of an organization called Medcamps which helps children who are mentally or physically disabled attend summer camp.  He began to volunteer there even as he continued to pursue flying as a hobby.

When he was 17, he had already earned all FAA certifications including those coveted instrument ratings.  This is when he dreamed up a plan to take his Piper around the world to raise awareness and funds for the Medcamps charity.  He had to have his plane modified by having extra fuel tanks installed in the place of two rear seats.  This extended his range to 11 hours of flying.  Remember, Piper planes don't go that fast, nor do they fly so high.

His adventure took a little over 2 months and nineteen stops.  He told me he spent 180 hours flying his plane.  I asked him about his scariest experience.  When flying over the Bay of Bengal from India's southern coast to Malaysia, he got hit by hailstorms so strong that the ice chipped away parts of the elevator on his wings.

He also said that while he was flying between mountains in Siberia, things got so cold that he had to drop to 4,000 ft just so that he could keep relatively warm.  These are unbelievable experiences for anyone, let alone for a young man.

Our Takeaways

Mason has demonstrated several attributes - a commitment and passion to flying, leadership (promoting a charity while simultaneously doing what he loves) and not only caring for those who are not as lucky as the rest of us but doing something about it (by raising awareness and tens of thousands of dollars in funds).  Medcamps would probably have never gotten so much TV and print news coverage around the world were it not for Mason.  He even had the Medcamps logo emblazoned on his plane.

Mason's Piper at the Executive Airport in Dallas, TX. Image Credit: Rao Advisors LLC

Mason could probably have gained admission to all 8 Ivy League schools and performed the "Ivy Sweep".   Instead, he enrolled in Louisiana Tech where he will earn a degree related to flying.

This is what extracurricular activities are all about.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

Go back to "Rao Advisors - Home".

How do you send transcripts to colleges?

Image Courtesy: Rao Advisors

By Rajkamal Rao  

This post is updated with information for international students.

If you're a high school student, a vexing question is:  When it's time to apply to colleges, how do I send my transcripts to them?

This is an important question because in the digital world we live in, high school performance metrics are routinely zapped to colleges and universities from external organizations based on our request.  The College Board sends SAT and AP scores; the ACT sends ACT scores.  But there's a mystery which surrounds how high schools report the most important part of a student's profile - the official transcript.

Enter Naviance and Parchment

Luckily, high school transcripts are seamlessly transferred thanks to the platforms of two private companies - Naviance and Parchment - which have established a wide network of both origin and destination institutions.

Naviance is an older system that has been in existence for decades.  A 12th grader requests the guidance counselor at a high school to upload transcripts into Naviance using its eDocs format.  After the required checks and balances to verify authenticity, Naviance sends the eDocs file of a student to the Common App, the most common platform used by students to apply to colleges.  At the destination college, the student profile from the Common App is matched with the Naviance eDocs file along with similar files from the College Board and the ACT.  This is how all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are assembled to make the student whole again.

Parchment is a competitor of Naviance and works with thousands of high schools in a similar manner.  A key difference is that with Parchment, the student signs up for a free account.  If the high school is a Parchment partner, the student can request transcripts, recommendation letters and other official documents with a few clicks online and have them sent to the Common App or the Coalition App by choosing these destinations from a search box.  Sometimes colleges don't entertain either application platform.  In such cases, the student selects each college from a search box - in an Amazon-like interface.  When the first school appears on the order form, the student can go back and add more schools to the cart.  When finished, a single click will send the transcripts to all the schools on the order form.

There's no cost to the student to use either service, but schools may charge you a small fee for each school once you have crossed a certain threshold. For example, at Frisco ISD, the first three sends are free, and thereafter, it's $3 a school. 

There's one more difference in the way Parchment works.  Parchment also partners with Naviance to "receive" a copy of the Naviance eDocs from schools that do not partner with Parchment.  So when a destination college cannot find the appropriate eDocs for a student for some reason, the college can query the Parchment database for a copy.  In this manner, colleges are not found struggling to gain access to a high school student's transcript.

Some colleges - mostly institutions abroad - are unable to handle electronic transcripts.  In such cases, both Naviance and Parchment will print out official transcripts and snail-mail them (as in the image above).  This again is done at no cost to the student.

Some schools use School Links. For information on how to send transcripts through the College Application Manager in School Links, click here.

SRAR schools

Some schools, like Texas A&M and Texas Tech, employ the Self-Reported Academic Record (SRAR)  system and have students key in their high school transcript directly into the SRAR. The SRAR replaces the high school transcripts used by the Office of Admissions during the initial admissions process in most cases. All freshman applicants, with a few exceptions, will enter their courses, grades, class rank (if provided on transcript) and graduation plan in the SRAR.

Note: Applications that do not include a SRAR at the deadline will not be considered for admission. The SRAR is a required document similar to the essay.

Process for TAMU applicants. You first get started by creating a SRAR account. You can do this as early as Aug 1 as a rising senior - and even as early as the 9th grade. After you enter all the information asked for (this can take 2-6 hours), submit the SRAR, and hold on to the confirmation email.

Separately, you will work on the TAMU application using the Common App and upload the TAMU Main essay, the supplemental essays, the stealth supplement essays in the scholarship section, and so on. After you submit the TAMU application, you will get a Texas A&M Universal Identification Number (UIN). You need to link your TAMU application to the previously submitted SRAR to complete the process.

Here's an excellent set of tutorials from TAMU.

International Students

International schools (even engineering colleges), and especially those from developing countries generally do not invest in such infrastructure because there's nothing in it for them. But for international schools that do, a common electronic credit transfer platform is eSCRIP-SAFE, a Global Electronic Transcript Delivery Network that supplements traditional paper transcripts by providing high schools, colleges, universities, and third party recipients with a network through which official transcripts are delivered in a secure and trusted environment. Think of eSCRIP-SAFE as the international equivalent of Parchment or Naviance.

If the international school is not a member of the eSCRIP-SAFE network, then students must mail documents in. Your school will print out your "marks cards" - on request. It will place a seal on each copy certifying that it is true and an official will sign it. A clerk will then insert the true copy into a school envelope with school markings (student-provided envelopes are not accepted) and along the edges of the flap, the clerk will again place a seal and initial on top to prevent the envelope from being tampered with (like in the image above). Faxed, scanned, photocopied or emailed copies are not acceptable. Also, the documents must reach the school before the deadline, not postmarked before the deadline. Transit times vary, so allow at least 3-4 weeks for your package to get to its destination.

U.S. colleges and universities don't always accept transcripts from foreign countries and require them to be credentialed by a third-party organization like WES. Students from India who require assistance in procuring transcripts from their institutions can utilize the services of a company like ITCS that specializes in providing such support.

It is always a good idea to ask the official to insert a standard letter describing the school's grading policies. Some schools use codes within their transcripts and these are meaningless to the casual reader. This issue is common even with U.S. high school districts. For example, Frisco ISD uses these codes on its transcripts which, without the accompanying explanations, would make heads spin.

MP1 = Marking period, denoting a period of six weeks. There are six MPs in a year.
CM1 = Comment 1, field not used by FISD, so always left blank.
CM2 = Comment 2, field not used by FISD, so always left blank.
CIT = Unknown, field not used by FISD, so always left blank.
ABS = Absent days in the Marking Period.
TDY = Tardy days in the MP.
YTDA = Year-to-date absences.
YTDY = Year-to-date tardy days.

Some destination colleges require you to submit the official grading policy of the school you are graduating from. For example, the University of Texas says this when discussing class rank: "Have your high school send us your official transcript(s) documenting all coursework undertaken during your high school career. If your high school does not rank students, include a statement from your school describing its policy, a copy of your school’s profile and a GPA or grade distribution report."

You now know how important it is to have this standard policy document as part of your transcript record.

With both in your sealed envelopes, you will then take them to the post office to mail out. We suggest that you always mail these envelopes certified mail, acknowledgment due.

One more thing. When you request true copies, you will request an additional copy for your records. You will scan this as a .pdf document and upload into Common App, Apply Tex, the Coalition App or whatever online system the destination institution requires you to use.

For the University of Texas in Austin, the process is slightly different. After you submit your ApplyTex application, you will get a confirmation and the so-called "Status Check Page" update in an email, usually within a couple of days. You will be given login information in that email. Using it, you can log into the Status Check Page and upload the "unofficial" .pdf of the marks sheet. For Texas A & M, you would simply upload the .pdf into the university's Howdy system.

The scanned version will serve as an "unofficial" copy until the original document reaches the destination institution. Admissions decisions are generally made with unofficial copies and are subject to be rescinded if the institution detects a variance with the original.

When to request transcript sends

The rule of thumb is to request transcript sends soon after you finalize your list of colleges. This can be as early as the Common App opens or when your 12th grade starts or before your revised class rank run (typical in some North Texas schools). In general, the most relevant transcript is the one issued by your school at the end of your 11th grade, which also includes information about your class rank. This is the transcript that will serve as the foundation of your application. 

Do colleges ask for senior year first semester GPA and class rank too? Generally only for applications that have Jan 1 deadlines and beyond (like Early Decision 2). If you apply to colleges before your first semester ends, you generally don't have to send your first semester transcripts (always check the FAQ of your target college). Exceptions are when you are waitlisted OR you are sending a letter expressing continued interest OR when you are submitting an honors or scholarship application after the initial application (and you have your Fall semester transcript) OR when you are appealing a decision.

Be liberal when sending out transcripts because postponing this step and forgetting to send them during the application season rush could result in your application being turned down only for this reason.

The cost per send is very low. You may send your transcripts to colleges and then decide not to apply. This is fine because colleges will simply toss your transcripts if they don't have an associated application from the Common App, Coalition App, ApplyTex, or another platform. 

Our takeaway

To protect the integrity of the college admissions process, students are not permitted to send transcripts to colleges on their own.  Companies like Naviance and Parchment are critical cogs in a complex wheel to ensure that the correct information of millions of students is sent to colleges, on time, in an unbiased manner.  Naviance alone processed over 6 million transcripts in 2018, so it is difficult to imagine how the world of higher education would work without the heavy lifting that these companies do.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

Why Advanced Placement (AP) Courses Are So Important

By Rajkamal Rao  

High school students and families have all heard about the AP Program.  Many are already taking AP courses. More than 6000 AP Daily video lessons are available in AP Classroom to help you prepare for AP Exams.

More than 6000 AP Daily video lessons are available in AP Classroom to help you prepare for AP Exams. https://t.co/lrmSPXjDyM pic.twitter.com/UelAFwrbbt

— AP for Students (@APforStudents) March 1, 2021

 

 

 

 

But why are AP courses so important? There are four important advantages which a student gets by taking AP courses.

1.  Colleges Love The AP Program

By definition, the U.S. high school curriculum from state to state is different.  Someone taking U.S. History in New Mexico will not be challenged in the same way as someone taking U.S. History in Kansas.  The U.S. K-12 education system is managed and administered at the state level.  Efforts to nationalize the curriculum (Common Core) have repeatedly failed because there are clear advantages to having local control.

But when it is time to apply to colleges, it is only fair that students are evaluated on topics which are not only nationally standardized, but internationally so.  The topics, the format, the questions and post-test evaluation are all standardized and administered by the College Board which conducts 34 different AP exams around the world with remarkable efficiency.  The New Mexico student and the Kansas student will then confront the same exam if they take AP U.S. History on the same day.  For colleges, evaluation and comparison of student performance become a lot easier.

 

According to the College Board, more than 90 percent of the about 2.5 million test takers in 2015 sat for three or fewer of the exams. But the percentage of students who took 10 exams, while very small, more than doubled over the decade between 2005 and 2015, to 0.7 percent, or 16,580 students over a four-year administration range.

2.  Earn That GPA Bonus

High school students earn a significant bonus on their Grade Point Average if they take an AP course in school and pass the AP exam.  Check out our primer on grades to understand how this works. Higher weighted average GPAs translate into a better class rank.  In some states such as Texas and California, getting ranked in the top 10% could win you automatic admission into public universities.

All school districts allocate grade weights based on the strength of curriculum of courses taken. AP and IB courses always rank as the most difficult of courses and earn the highest GPA bonus. Pre-AP, Honors, GT, Dual Credit courses are the next level down. On-level courses don't earn any GPA bonus.

[Read the following italicized text if your school district inflates Pre-AP courses].

 

[Unfortunately, some school districts (Katy ISD, Cypress Fairbanks ISD, Round Rock ISD) artificially inflate the degree of difficulty of Pre-AP courses by lumping Pre-AP courses together with AP courses awarding both the same GPA weighted bonus. This is a disservice to students and families because apples and oranges are not the same fruit.

Let us examine why Pre-AP courses don't deserve to be in the same category as AP courses.

Rigor. The rigor of AP classes equates to what college students typically experience in the first semester of college. Certain topics like AP Computer Science, AP Physics 2 and AP Calculus BC are even more challenging. AP Calculus BC, with topics such as Advanced Integration Techniques, Advanced Sequences, Series, Convergence and Error Bound, Taylor Series and Polynomials, Parametric Functions and Vectors, and Polar Coordinates and Polar Graphs, equates to a second-semester college-level Calculus course.

Why some school districts provide a teenager the false hope that taking Pre-AP Precalculus is no different from someone taking AP Calculus BC is head-scratching. The argument just does not compute. An apple is not an orange.

Evaluation. Student performance on an AP course is not only evaluated by a high school teacher during all 36 weeks in school, but is also anonymously and independently evaluated by the College Board on a separate exam (anonymously, because the evaluating teacher does not know the student and there can be no favoritism in grading). The multi-level evaluation of a student provides colleges an extra layer of assurance that the student's performance has been fairly measured. It is this assurance that allows institutions to offer college credit (see section 4 below) for strong performance on AP exams.

College Credits. No college credit can be earned by taking Pre-AP courses.

Yet, many students in these school districts gladly take an Honors-level course in place of a tougher AP course, effectively gaming the system to earn a better class rank with much lower effort. Families need to be aware that colleges can and do tell the difference when admission teams review student transcripts. Top universities want to see that students take the "toughest" courses offered by their high school. If a student could take AP Human Geography but has instead settled for the easier Pre-AP World Geography, this fact is plainly visible to college admissions officers. After all, "Strength of Curriculum" as a factor has consistently been the #4 rated factor in college admissions, after grades and SAT/ACT scores].

3.  Enhance Your Brag Sheet

The College Board recognizes students for their achievements in AP.  These academic distinctions can make your brag sheet look better because they are "good things to include on résumé and college applications." And some awards will appear on your AP score report which you send to colleges.  Check out the various AP Scholar awards and see if you have already earned a level.  The College Board does not always inform you if you have won an award.  You need to log in to your account to print out a certificate.

Source: The College Board

4.  Lower College Costs

Many colleges award you with college credit for completing AP exams if you earn a certain minimum score.  AP exams are graded on a 1 - 5 scale with the 5 being the most accomplished.  As the College Board says, "each college and university makes its own decisions about awarding credit and placement." Check out this College Board website to see what it takes to earn college credit at your favorite institution.  Once you get an idea, visit the actual college website because there could be information that may not have been updated on the College Board website.

During the college applications process, you don't have to send your scores. All platforms and colleges accept self-reporting of scores for the purpose of college admissions.

But you MUST send all of your scores to the one college that you will ultimately attend. The deadline date for this is the middle of June of your Senior year, around the time you graduate from high school. The College Board allows you to send all of your AP scores for free to one college. Colleges require the official scores from the College Board in order to grant you course credit or permit you to skip a course. Every year you take AP Exams, you can send one score report for free to the college, university, or scholarship organization of your choice. Score reports include this year's and prior years’ AP Exam scores. Most students don't take advantage of the free score send all years, but only at the end of the Senior year after they know their future college.

Just because a college rewards you with course credit, it does not always mean that you should exempt out of a particular course.  If you're studying to become a medical doctor, you might think that you could accelerate your path by exempting out of a freshman year Biology 101 based on the strength of your AP Biology performance in high school.  But it may make sense to take the Bio 101 class in college after all because learning in a college environment is far different from doing so in high school.  You would have matured more and your ability to grasp things would be higher in college.

The way to request that certain AP credits not be applied toward your degree will depend on the college and will involve an in-person meeting with the counselor or an official letter. Explain to them that you desire a stronger foundation in a subject and don't want to skip a prerequisite although you have AP credits for that course. In effect, while you can't choose which scores are sent when you request the free score send, you can often choose how they’re used.

Also, just because the AP Credit Policy Search shows that you can earn college credits does not mean that every AP course that you complete, even if you meet performance requirements, will result in an automatic granting of college credits. All students pursuing an undergraduate degree must complete the so-called core curriculum of standard courses. 

If your school does not offer AP exams or you want to earn college credit when in high school, you can also pass CLEP exams. Modern States, a charitable organization, allows you to take CLEP exams for free and apply those credits to colleges. 
 

In Texas, the 42-hour statewide Core Curriculum applies. Examine this link to see a detailed list of all core courses for your destination Texas institution. There are three fields on this page:

1. Select Fall Semester of Calendar Year
2. Choose an Institution
3. Choose Component Area - we suggest that you keep this as ALL.
   

Core courses may be chosen from a large menu of classes offered under broad topic areas such as English Composition, Humanities, History, Government, Social Sciences, Math, Natural Sciences, and the Arts. In the image below for UT Dallas, only one Math course of three credits is required for graduation from UTD. Students can choose from at least a dozen Math courses to fulfill the Math core curriculum requirement. Students can generally proceed to take classes in their major only after completing core curriculum requirements - and will generally start taking a majority of their courses in their discipline only after three semesters, assuming 15 core credits are completed a semester.
 

UTD Core Curriculum requirements (partial). Source: Texas GECC WebCenter

Your AP courses will often exceed core curriculum requirements. Suppose you completed AP Physics, AP Chemistry, and AP Biology with a score of a 4. All these will technically get you college credits. But if your destination college requires only two Natural Science courses to be completed as part of its core curriculum, only two of the three AP courses that you worked so hard for will qualify for credit. This is one reason that students who have 15 AP courses are often able to transfer only 8-9 AP courses for credit.

The College Board allows you to cancel your AP score if you are not happy with your performance in an exam. Score cancellations are permanently deleted from your record. You will need to fax or snail-mail the form to the College Board with your signature. The form will ask you for the exam code. Find it on page 4 here:

Nearly all universities disallow changes to a student record once an AP credit is claimed. Contact us if you have questions about which courses to transfer for your desired major. 

Summary

Gaining admission to colleges and obtaining college credit using your AP scores are entirely different things and handled by two separate organizations within each college.

The first is handled by the undergraduate student admissions office which looks at your grades in school, accompanied by any self-reporting of AP scores that you have done in your Common App as a way to evaluate your merit. This is a subjective exercise as your record is compared against the record of other students.

AP scores for credit transfer are handled by the counselor's office within each department of your target college. This process is resolved a month or two before you start at a college, generally after orientation. The university will have strict rules about granting college credit for AP classes - and a counselor has no authority to override the process.

The College Board allows you to report one set of full AP scores for free to one destination college, the college in which you enroll and to which you pay a deposit. You can do this in early June, two months before starting in the Fall.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

#MeToo Tips For College Bound Families

Stanford University. Image: Rao Advisors

By Rajkamal Rao  

Anything that is disruptive and destructive is bound to lose steam after a while - whether it be a hurricane or a human-inspired movement.  We have had numerous campaigns come and go including Black Lives Matter, protests to support refugees in Europe and a movement against income inequality (remember Wall Street’s Top 1% riots?).  Each of these stayed on in the public sphere for some time and slowly, fluttered out.

But #MeToo has been a remarkable exception and will likely stay on as a powerful movement for gender equity for years to come. This is because, at its core, it indirectly impacts every one of us, not just for our actions today, but as it played out in the confirmation battle of now Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for alleged actions 35 years ago as a high school student.

#MeToo has empowered women to come forward knowing that there will be consequences for the men involved. While doing so will not erase unfortunate instances in the past, it has the advantage of acting as a deterrent against future abusive action by men. For anyone who believes in equity and justice, #MeToo as a force has no parallel because it can help prevent gender abuse whereas the best laws to date address grievances after the fact.

Why #MeToo Is Different

#MeToo shines a spotlight on the way powerful male colleagues, often in roles of authority, have abused their power to advance the careers of those women who submitted to the men’s sexual fantasies and limit the careers of those who refused.  It illustrates sexual harassment of the highest degree, exemplified by a powerful line in Michael Crichton’s 1990’s movie Disclosure:  “Sexual harassment is not about sex. It is about power.” Although, in this movie, the perpetrator was female and the victim was male.

#MeToo is different from all other movements to date because once uncovered, action occurs at lightning speed.  The consequences are usually terminal because decades-long careers, mostly of men, are lost overnight for transgressions which occurred decades ago under social environments which permitted, even encouraged, gender bias.

Risks

But there are risks of such a shoot-from-the-hip approach. For one thing, there is no due process.  Judgment is passed in the court of public opinion at breakneck speed as tweets and posts go viral.  There are no courts of law where the accused is given a chance to defend himself.  In fact, the accused is often never heard from again.  The circumstances and evidence are also not always fully understood.

While most stories of the women are credible, there is always the suspicion that some stories may not be true and some women may, yes may, be deliberately misstating what occurred (as in Disclosure) or may have a different view of what happened a long time ago.

#MeToo in college

Traditional college sexual assault cases cannot be technically classified as #MeToo because, by definition, they don't involve workplace sexual harassment.  And long before #MeToo, there has been due attention given to what happens in college, especially in elite schools.

A few years ago, an explosive story in Rolling Stone magazine described how a woman was gang-raped by men at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia.  Later investigations showed that the woman had made up the whole story.   Rolling Stone had to pay damages because it lost a defamation suit when a professor at UVA sued the magazine.

And there's confusion about what constitutes assault.  The hook-up culture in today's colleges - as described by Lisa Wade in her book - is shocking, pervasive and extensive.  Wade says that alcohol acts as a catalyst and hundreds of students reported being completely inebriated before casual sexual encounters.  Most people did not even remember what occurred because parties were loud and the lighting was dark.  In such a situation, the line between consensual action and assault becomes rather thin. The most dramatic case was one at Yale, where a male student was acquitted of wrongdoing by a criminal court of law in March 2018, but the public outcry was so intense that Yale expelled the student anyway in Jan 2019.

These things happen in part because of the relative immaturity and young age of college students. They could be in what they think are consensual relationships, and when these relationships turn sour, the girl could claim later that she was assaulted during the weeks leading to the breakup.  This is the most controversial situation because liberties taken by partners when things are going well are immediately held to a different, higher standard by one partner, often without adequate warning.

This is what happened at Columbia University a few years ago when a female student, Emma Sulkowicz, claimed that her ex-boyfriend assaulted her.  She became famous for dragging a mattress all over campus for years, including to her graduation ceremony.  For her, the mattress represented the painful burden rape victims carry throughout daily life.  But Columbia later settled with the male student after he had charged Columbia of enabling a harassment campaign by a fellow student who had accused him of rape.  Prior internal investigations by Columbia had cleared him of wrongdoing. Under the #MeToo lens of public scrutiny, Columbia may not have settled with the male student.

Tips For College Bound Families

Both boys and girls should be aware of their rights and duties when they first arrive on the college campus.  They are away from home for the first time and exploring new friends in an unsupervised setting is the essence of the college experience.  But this freedom also comes with enormous responsibility because a single act, however innocent or misconstrued at the time, can spell disaster.

Boy or girl, we advise you to avoid parties which involve alcohol.  Not only is possessing or drinking alcohol illegal in most states until you're 21 years old, but alcohol has also proven itself to be the cause in most things bad - traffic accidents, negative health effects from binge drinking and of course, assault.  

The best tip we could provide all boys is to treat all girls the same way they would treat their sisters or mothers at home. And of course, to avoid any encounter which could become intimate and wait to have a serious relationship until after graduation when they are no longer in a campus setting.

For sure, these are moral questions and each person has to decide the course of action here.  But be aware that the issue is also legal because the definition of what constitutes consent is murky.  There are now smartphone apps such as We-Consent and Legal Fling which can record consent that could protect you later.

Under the Obama administration, the burden of proof for reporting campus sexual assaults was dramatically lowered.  As the New York Times reported, these policies led the government to investigate many universities and colleges over their handling of sexual assault cases under the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination by any school that receives federal funding.

The Trump administration has slowly begun to raise the burden of proof making it harder for victims to press assault cases.  Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, is reported to have said that “there are lives that have been ruined and lives that are lost in the process,” referring to students accused of assault.

Update from the Wall Street Journal, 05/06/2020:

The Department of Education has revised its rule for due process for sexual-assault accusations on campus. The new rule says college tribunals must give the accuser and accused the chance to present and challenge evidence and to cross-examine witnesses. Both will receive the same written notice about allegations, and both will enjoy the same right to appeal. The department issued the new rules after considering more than 124,000 public comments.

Update from NBC News, April 6, 2021:

One of the hallmarks of the Biden administration has been to undo everything the Trump administration did and reverse policies, at a minimum, to the standards that existed during the Obama years, or, make the policies even more progressive. As expected, the Education Department announced next steps in overhauling Title IX campus sexual assault rules. But the overhaul will likely take time and is subject to court challenges from organizations that lobbied for the changes implemented during the Trump administration. For now, the Trump administration rules will stand.

Our takeaway

This is a topic which parents must confront and discuss with their college-bound teenagers. The problem is compounded because teenagers tend to over-estimate their abilities and parents are already anxious about sending their wards so far away from home. Worse, there are no easy answers and it is often embarrassing to have such conversations.

But the price of avoiding difficult conversations can be devastating to young minds and hearts. It is our hope that this blog post can function as a conversation-starter. If you don't like what's in the post, please go ahead and blame us - we don't mind playing the role of a bad cop!

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

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