This link was posted on College Confidential: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/news/2019/01/sorry-act-kids-accused-of-cheating-can-now-sue-you-nj-judge-says.html A judge has sided with a New Jersey teenager accused of cheating on the ACT exams, saying a clause test-takers must sign giving up their rights to sue the testing company is “unconscionable” and “void as against public policy." It's about time.

Yes, I used the PSAT for my kids starting in middle school. The public school officials initially told me my kids needed to be in 11th grade to sit for the exam, but when I explained to them that I was using the PSAT as the nationally normed test to satisfy the state of Ohio homeschooling requirements, they let my kids sit for the exam.

If he is applying to competitive schools that practice holistic admissions, I would have him sit for the AP exams of the classes he is taking since an admissions office may question why an AP score is not listed for an AP class and then assume that the student scored poorly on the AP exam since a score was not listed. (There is no AP American Literature class though, so if the school is listing that class as "AP" I would question that with the school administration since that would be in violation of the College Board rules.)

I had a similar experience with my daughter when she was that age, but the sport was basketball. She enjoyed the practices and the team drills, but during the game, she would not go after the ball. When we asked her about it, she told us that she felt bad taking the ball away from someone else. I wonder if your son has similar feelings? Is there any way your son can continue to participate in the practice sessions and lessons (which he seems to enjoy), but not play in the actual games until he is older?

Congratulations to your son! My kids really like Ticket to Ride.

No, he didn't investigate why he didn't advance. His guidance counselor had forewarned him that the C might be a problem, so he wasn't surprised when he didn't move forward.

Just to highlight the disparity in difficulty between the 10/24 PSAT and the Dec SAT: Dec SAT Math One wrong in math = 790, while 5 wrong is a 720, and 6 wrong is a 700 Dec SAT EBRW Missing 9 question total in EBRW was a 700. I hope the National Merit Corp gets a lot of complaints about the 10/24 PSAT and takes some kind of action to try to remedy the College Board's screw up.

Yep.

I wonder how much longer David Coleman will be running the show at the College Board? There has been one major screw up after another since he took over. If I were in charge at National Merit Corporation, at this point, I would be speaking with the ACT folks to see if they could develop a PACT test to replace the PSAT. It appears that National Merit is already moving somewhat to the ACT since it will now accept an ACT score in lieu of an SAT score in the step a student takes to advance from semi-finalist to finalist status.

I was in the exact opposite situation as you last year: I wanted my D to be able to take the SAT, but the school told me that as a homeschooler she couldn't. Once I cited the actual law, the school registered her for the test. I realize that there are a lot of rules and regulations that schools need to adhere to, however, it would be nice if school officials would either provide accurate information or admit that they don't know the answer.

I think I am in the same state as the OP. I think the difference between my state and where you live is that the schools here are not penalized if kids don't take the test. Here is the verbiage from the department of education website: "There are no consequences to a district or school report card if a student fails to take the ACT or SAT. " My understanding is that the school has to offer either the ACT or SAT to all juniors free of charge, but there is no penalty if the student doesn't take the test. In addition, the Dept of Education has exempted some of the student body from taking the test. One of the exempted categories is kids who have already achieved a remediation free score on the SAT/ACT test. Here is the verbiage from the ODE website: A student who received a "remediation-free" score on the required nationally standardized assessment and has presented evidence of that fact to the student's district or school. If it were me, I would just phone my D in sick that day. I see no advantage to taking this test, but I do see a potential downside: The student has a bad testing day, ends up with a lower score on her record, and discovers that her college of choice requires all scores to be submitted.

What would happen if your D was sick on test day and unable to attend school?

I don't know how anyone can have any idea what the curve will be for the December SAT because scores have not yet been released.

It is absolutely ridiculous that the College Board was not able to develop two tests that had a similar level of difficulty. This test should be screening for more than simply who can make the least amount of careless mistakes. These kids deserved better than this. Yet another huge fail by the College Board.

As others have said, letter grades matter, not just the gpa. One of my tutoring students a few years ago had a near perfect PSAT score, but had a C on his report card and didn't advance to finalist status.

Thanks, Quill and RootAnn! Now I can see the signatures.

The same thing happened to me with the change-over. I had to create a completely new user name. Since the change-over, I am also unable to see signature lines, too, and have no idea why?

In my experience, it can be true. However, as others have stated, it is a verbal agreement between the two parties at that point. A lot can happen between freshman year and when the student signs the National Letter of Intent (in senior year) or gets an official notification of admission to the college: the player may suffer a serious injury, the coach may leave the school, the player may not obtain the necessary test scores, etc. The NCAA is also trying to crack down on the sports that typically recruit at the beginning of the high school years and has implemented some new guidelines that the schools must follow. However, one can usually find loopholes...

The new SAT is even worse than the old SAT in distinguishing between the top percentiles of test takers. It is a shame that a competition that needs to distinguish at the high end of the testing population is using such a blunt instrument as the SAT. I realize that there are some colleges where being a National Merit Semi-finalist results in a large financial scholarship. However, many of these same colleges also offer automatic large merit awards for high SAT/ACT scores. Other than these few schools who court NMSF (and the financial incentives offered by these schools seem to decrease every admissions cycle), this competition, ime, is not a big deal: colleges don't seem to care, nor do employers. It is the SAT and ACT scores that colleges care about, and while some employers have asked my college kid for his Math SAT score, not one employer has ever asked him if he was a NMS. Good luck to all of your kids taking the SAT or ACT and tell them not to be discouraged if they ended up making a careless error on a poorly designed test and end up not advancing in the National Merit competition.

I agree. If the CB did care about mastery of material, many of the public schools in my area would not be able to continue to use the AP designation year after year when their students are unable to score higher than a 2 on the exam.

The kids in my area pay for the AP exams. I think it is unusual for a school to pay for these tests.

Ok, so it is not as bad as I had interpreted the policy to be. I thought it meant that the student had to pay an additional $40. So now, if you have to cancel, the CB is going to keep a little less than half of the testing fee. Still not ideal, but not as ridiculous as I thought.

I would think that they would have to assign names at registration, otherwise, it would be very difficult to enforce the $40 penalty. My guess is that if a student didn't end up taking the AP exam he had already paid for, he would be solely responsible for paying the additional $40 penalty. This fee for be relatively easy for both the school and College Board to enforce: For those students who would like to send their AP score report to their intended college, the CB would not send the report until all fees were paid. If the student didn't want to send an AP report anywhere, the high school could refuse to send a final transcript to his college until the fees to the CB were paid.

I know that the College Board would like us to believe that registering earlier for the AP exam makes the students more invested in the class, but I wonder if that is really true. From what I have seen at least in my area, kids are invested in the grade that they receive in the AP class, not the actual AP exam score. My public school has had a policy for at least as long as I have been involved in AP testing with my kids (so 10 years now) that every student must sit for the AP exam in order to receive a final grade in the AP class. I believe that the school has this policy because a school's rating depends on how many AP exams its students take each year (the actual scores are not used in these national rankings nor are the exam scores used when factoring in the final letter grade awarded for the class.). This new policy of requiring early registration and then charging an additional $40 fee for not sitting for the exam that was already paid for, in my opinion, does nothing but add to the coffers of the College Board. I really see zero benefit to the student.

Plus considering the College Board's pilot program just was implemented at the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year (less than 3 months ago), it is quite impressive that the College Board has already been able to draw conclusion that, "Schools have found, and we’ve verified in our pilot, that having a meaningful stake in the year-end goal of the AP Exam encourages students to persist through a challenging class, do their best work, and take advantage of the opportunities they have earned." I wonder if this same team that was able to miraculously verify results of a pilot that began a few weeks ago was also the team responsible for devising the SAT/ACT concordance tables for the new SAT-- the concordance tables that the ACT refused to endorse for lack of reliable data, but the colleges still used when evaluating applicants and awarding merit awards, and the College Board later revised when actual data proved the original tables to be wrong. Many students in the Class of 2018 lost thousands of dollars in merit awards due to those faulty concordance tables.