The essential pocket guide to making the most of high school, updated for today’s ninth through 12th-graders. Is it too early to start applying for college scholarships in ninth grade? Do I need to take AP classes and AP tests? How important are extracurricular activities when applying to college? What is on the New PSAT and SAT? These questions and many more are answered in this revised edition of Kaplan’s Your College Admissions Game Plan. This easy-to-use guide provides up-to-date information and more than 50 tips and strategies as well as essential checklists for ninth, 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders to help prepare for college. It also provides information for parents and students on time management, stress reduction, and problem solving. Conveniently portable, Your College Admissions Game Plan will help parents and students navigate the path through high school knowing that they took the right steps to prepare for college. Must-know topics include: the application process and finding scholarships; campus visits; working with your guidance counselor; taking important tests like the New PSAT, New SAT, ACT, and AP exams; letters of recommendation; purchasing the right computer, and more. This new edition has been updated with information about the New PSAT, New SAT, revised ACT, and updated APs, as well as a completely revised chapter from Kaplan's annual College Admissions Officer survey highlighting the key trends in college admissions at the top colleges and universities in the United States.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors compete in a game they’ll play only once, whose rules they do not fully understand, yet whose consequences are enormous. The game is college admissions, and applying early to an elite school is one way to win. But the early admissions process is enigmatic and flawed. It can easily lead students toward hasty or misinformed decisions. This book—based on the careful examination of more than 500,000 college applications to fourteen elite colleges and hundreds of interviews with students, counselors, and admissions officers—provides an extraordinarily thorough analysis of early admissions. In clear language it details the advantages and pitfalls of applying early as it provides a map for students and parents to navigate the process. Unlike college admissions guides, The Early Admissions Game reveals the realities of early applications, how they work and what effects they have. The authors frankly assess early applications. Applying early is not for everyone, but it will improve—sometimes double, even triple—the chances of being admitted to a prestigious college. An early decision program can greatly enhance a college’s reputation by skewing statistics, such as selectivity, average SAT scores, or percentage of admitted applicants who matriculate. But these gains come at the expense of distorting applicants’ decisions and providing disparate treatment of students who apply early and regular admissions. The system, in short, is unfair, and the authors make recommendations for improvement. The Early Admissions Game is sure to be the definitive work on the subject. It is must reading for admissions officers, guidance counselors, and high school seniors and their parents.

Book & CD-ROM. Applying to college can be one of the most stressful times in a student's life. Not only are you faced with the task of finding the perfect school for you, but you also have to find scholarships to be able to go to the school you want. These two intertwining obstacles require a lengthy application and a seemingly perfect essay. The essay topic is crucial to demonstrate your values. creativity, and depth of knowledge, and the writing is important because it reflects your power of persuasion, organisational skills and style. This book will teach you how to write effective applications and essays for college admissions and scholarships, helping shoulder some of the weight of applying. This guide provides you with all the tools you need to complete your application and write a winning essay. You will learn how to choose a topic, keep your focus narrow and personal, edit and revise, tweak essays to use them on various applications, choose your tone and structure, avoid the common pitfalls, and how to overcome writer's block. The guide has sample essays and essay questions, and even examples of the essays specific colleges use. You will find those samples on the companion CD-ROM, along with brainstorming exercises and sample applications. Admissions officers have chimed in with their expertise to provide insider information on how to compose impressive applications and essays for admission and scholarships.

Applying to college can be one of the most stressful times in a student's life. Not only are you faced with the task of finding the perfect school for you, but you also have to find scholarships to be able to go to the school you want. These two intertwining obstacles require a lengthy application and a seemingly perfect essay. The essay is crucial to demonstrate your values, creativity, and depth of knowledge, and the writing is important because it reflects your power of persuasion, organizational skills, and style. This newly revised book will teach you how to write effective applications and essays for college admissions and scholarships, helping shoulder some of the weight of applying. The second edition of The Complete Guide to Writing Effective College Applications and Essays has been updated to provide you with all the tools you need to complete your application and write a winning essay. You will learn how to choose a topic, keep your focus narrow and personal, edit and revise your work, tweak your essays to use them on various applications, choose your tone and structure, avoid common pitfalls, overcome writer's block, and make your application stand out from the rest. Additionally, you will learn strategies for getting started, requirements for application, critical writing tips, and what committees look for in an applicant. This book also has a catalogue of websites with scholarship opportunities, sample essays and essay questions, and even examples of the essays specific colleges use. You will find those samples on the companion CD-ROM, along with writing tips and additional resources. Admissions officers have chimed in with their expertise to provide insider information on how to compose impressive applications and essays for admissions and scholarships. Whether you are a high school freshman seeking a head start or a senior hoping to glean some last minute tips, this book is your answer.

Incorporates several innovative and increasingly popular subject areas, including the gamification of education, assessment, and STEM subjects Combines research and authorship from both civilian and military worlds as well as interdisciplinary fields Rigorously defines and analyzes the criteria of selecting, designing, implementing, and evaluating emerging educational technologies while offering implications for future use

The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates? Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer—an imbalance in resources—this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed—ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility. Lisa Nunn’s study of three public high schools reveals how students’ beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way—reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students’ college-going futures. Some schools’ definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions’ definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education. With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure.

Now a USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller! How do you REALLY get accepted to Harvard, Yale, and the Ivy League? Told from the fresh and personal perspective of 26-year-old Crimson Education CEO and Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford graduate Jamie Beaton, Accepted! is an honest and practical guide on beating the odds and getting into Ivy League and other elite schools – the smart way. Beaton takes you behind the doors of the world's top college admissions offices, revealing the highly strategic selection processes applied by institutions whose reputations depend on the number of students they admit, or more pointedly, the tens of thousands that they don't. In Accepted!, Beaton delivers the ultimate insider "how to" and disrupts cliched admissions advice with savvy strategies like: Moneyballing the university rankings and increasing your chances of admission Class spamming your way to academic supremacy and acceptance Playing the early application dating game and understanding how institutions are using it to their reputational advantage Packed with real-life examples from the thousands of students Beaton has helped land a spot at Harvard, Stanford, and other esteemed universities, Accepted! is a never-before assembled culmination of secrets, insights, and application strategies guaranteed to maximize your chances of "getting in" to the school of your choice. From ambitious students and their supportive parents to academic advisors and admissions professionals, Accepted! is the must-read guide to demystifying the often-convoluted and increasingly competitive world of elite college admissions.

The gaze of educational researchers has traditionally been turned 'down' toward the experiences of communities deemed at-risk, presumably with the purpose of improving their plight. Indeed, theorizing about the relationship between education, culture, and society has typically emerged from the study of poor and marginalized groups in public schools. Seldom have educational researchers considered class privilege and educational advantage in their attempts at understanding inequality and fomenting social justice. This collection of groundbreaking studies breaks with this tradition by shifting the gaze of inquiry 'up, ' toward the experiences of privilege in educational environments characterized by wealth and the abundance of material resources. This edited volume brings together established and emerging scholars in education and the social sciences working critically to interrogate a diversity of educational environments serving the interests of influential groups both within and beyond schools. The authors investigate the power relations that underlie various contexts of class privilege. They shed light into the ways in which the success of a few relates to the failure of many --