Tips for Helping Your High Schooler Get into a Great College

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Helping your high school student gain admittance to the colleges on their short list is, naturally, a goal for most parents. These days, many admissions boards look for a variety of experience and academic achievement. With that in mind, here are a few tips to help your young adult achieve their dreams.

Take Challenging Classes

This should be done all four years. Many advice agencies recommend that your child should take as many challenging classes, such as AP and others with rigorous curricula, as they can handle well. Don’t push them too hard, otherwise you’ll end up with a child with failing grades and no ambition. However, encourage them to push their own boundaries, to explore new concept areas with which they may not be entirely comfortable.

When taking the advanced placement tests, it’s important to do as well as they can on these. Many of the top colleges accept only a score of 5. That said, the act of taking challenging classes and using the knowledge in a productive way can outweigh this if they make less than a perfect score. Colleges do want people who pursue the highest rank of achievement, but they may be less interested in a student who is simply a repository for information.

ACT Prep and Practice

While every student is different, practice is helpful in any endeavor. Tutoring can also help reduce test anxiety, which can be particularly high for the ACT exams. It familiarizes the student with the topics that will be covered on the exam, and bolsters their confidence in regard to their own abilities and knowledge bases. You and your child may consider engaging a test preparatory agency, which specializes in the best ACT tutoring online.

In many cases, they will be given a progress manager, who personally crafts and oversees their work. This can include a specialized workbook, in which topic-specific lessons are given during a session and homework is assigned. Generally speaking, about 24 hour-long sessions are recommended, unless they are already quite advanced in their studies. Once they master the material, the progress manager and tutor will work with them on pacing and strategy for taking the test. The goal is to increase their scores as much as possible, based on diagnostic testing and practice.

Practice with Writing

This should be done all throughout childhood in an easy-going way. Writing is one of the underappreciated tools that can help your child achieve success in college and beyond. The ability to communicate clearly in both oral and written missives is so important that it’s often a specific criterion for positions in the professional sphere.

However, more immediately, it can also help your high school student to amaze the admissions board with their skills in a lateral way. They are able to draw together and express the sum total of their ambition and experience in a succinct missive. By clearly and effectively communicating their desire to attend the college, outlining their experience, and forecasting goals, they present themselves as a wonderful candidate.

Community Service and Life Experience

These days, it isn’t solely about grades. Having interesting experiences that they integrate to learn life lessons and engaging in community service are key to your child’s success with admissions boards. Forbes cites a professionally conducted survey in which 264 admissions board members and faculty were interviewed. An overwhelming 84 percent of the respondents agreed that community service has a positive impact on acceptance.

Why might this be the case? For one, community service demonstrates that a student is interested in solving non-academic problems in their community. By using knowledge gained in the course of study and combining it with empathy, a soft skill with a variety of important impacts, they show they can solve problems, work well with others, and achieve results based on their labors. Perhaps the most important aspect of community service is that it should be chosen by your child. A project that matters to them will have greater impact; they will speak about it with increased passion and fluency in their admissions essay, which will, in turn, make a positive impact upon the admissions board.

Conclusion

Helping your high school student to focus on the larger goal of college is an important aspect of being a parent or guardian. It’s less of a last minute project than an ongoing effort, which will enrich their lives as a whole and help round them out as human beings.