Online Learning and COVID-19: How Do Colleges Adjust?
For high school juniors and seniors, preparing for college can be stressful. As schools switch from in-person to online learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, this stress may be compounded by the fact that colleges are physically closed. Your carefully constructed college timeline might seem in jeopardy. However, there are ways to adapt to these […]
Tips and Tricks for Effective Note Taking Methods
Every day, lots of people take notes, though few of us ever learned explicitly how to do it effectively. Instead, most people, whether students in classes or busy professionals in presentations, learned their note taking methods the fly. Note taking is a key part of learning new and vital information, and it’s important to find […]
What Does Test-Optional Really Mean?
Recently, the University of Chicago announced that their admissions process was now “test-optional”, as reported in USA Today (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/14/university-chicago-sat-act-optional/701153002/) last year. This announcement has led many parents, students, and educators to ask us here at Livius questions about what test-optional means and how it might affect the application process of students whether they are […]
Weight Loss: The Truth About Weighted GPAs
One of the most common questions I hear from both students and parents is about the weighted grade point average (GPA) at their school and if it is true to that college “unweight” grades during the college admissions process. The answers to these questions are simple in the sense that these questions can be […]
Tuition and Scholarships: Separating Fact from Fantasy
In the spring of 2015, Stanford University made a big splash on the pages of Money, the Wall Street Journal, and other reputable news sources by announcing that all students whose families earn less than $125,000 per year in income will receive “free tuition” to the university. In those same articles, it was revealed that […]
Understanding Early Action and Early Decision
Over the last few decades, both the raw number of high school graduates applying to college and the percentage of high school graduates applying to college has increased dramatically. One of the results of this trend has been that many colleges and universities have become more and more selective. One extreme example of this is […]
Should I Take the SAT or ACT?
Considering that most colleges and universities in the United States currently accept either the SAT or the ACT as part of the application process, a common question parents and students will ask their college counselors, teachers, and test prep tutors is which one should I take? SAT or ACT? This question used to be purely […]
Is College Still Valuable?
Over the last few years, more and more pundits have asked the question: is college still valuable? Interestingly, many of these pundits have looked to the titans of technology such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Bill Gates of Microsoft as examples of successful business executives who did not graduate from college. What these questioners forget […]
Keys to a Successful Freshman Year of College
Students who have successfully navigated the regimented world of high school education can find themselves confused by the flexible schedule and self-directed nature of college life. For four years of high school and thirteen years of primary education in total, students follow a rigid schedule of classes, lunch periods organized with almost military precision, and strictly […]