Distinctive

By Victoria Tillson Evans, Ph.D.

The arrival of Covid-19 has disrupted education in a way that we have never experienced before. While the impact of the pandemic on your high school education, admissions prospects, and financial aid packages is nowhere close to being known, we are providing you with information that we do have as well as suggestions for being proactive.

Grades

We know that many of you are concerned about the impact that being out of school will have on your final grades for the year. Please rest assured that everyone is in the same boat and that colleges are working hard to think through and provide solutions for you. Harvard University recently sent out this notice, and we imagine that most if not all colleges will follow in its footsteps. If your school does go pass/fail for the semester, that’s okay. Many high schools are making that decision around the world and you will not be negatively impacted.

If you were hoping to bring your grades up this term, please speak with us individually. We will discuss ways that you can try to mitigate the impact of not having new and improved grades to share with colleges.

If your school has gone pass/fail, this is not an invitation to stop learning. Don’t forget that you will be starting new classes next year and your teachers are going to expect you to be prepared!

Testing

As you are now aware, the SAT and ACT have been cancelled until June. The APs are being shortened and delivered online. The IB and A-Level exams have also been outright dropped for the year.

Some changes that you may not have seen, yet, include the decision of some colleges to go test optional for at least the next year. For a comprehensive list, please check out FairTest, which has been monitoring the Score Optional Movement for years. There are some surprising institutions on there, so let us know if you would like to now consider a new school for admission. With that said, keep in mind that we are in a constantly evolving situation, and some colleges may not publicize their testing preferences for a few months. You should not add a school that is a bad fit, just because it is now test optional!

More and more colleges are dropping the SAT Subject Tests, including MIT, CalTech, Cornell, and Harvey Mudd. We’ll continue to keep you individually updated on this matter, if Subject Tests were going to be part of your process. With the limited number of testing dates, there is speculation that they will be fully dropped for at least this year.

You can guess that the ACT and College Board are having very serious discussions about moving all tests online. This will certainly curtail the spread of Covid-19, but this will create issues for proctoring and for students with accommodations. We will let you know what they announce as soon as they release statements. 

If you are preparing the AP tests, preparatory materials are now available on the College Board’s website!

College Events

We strongly believe that students should make decisions that protect their health, and avoid campus visits, in-person information sessions, and college fairs for the rest of 2020. We are working with our juniors one-on-one to ensure that they know where to find online Q&A sessions as well as tours through CampusReel, college websites, and colleges’ YouTube channels. We also encourage juniors to develop questions to ask admissions reps, so that they can get in touch and demonstrate interest over the phone or via Skype.  

While no colleges have released information about interviews, they will likely all be conducted online for the year. Make sure that you are on each of your colleges’ mailing lists so that you can stay on top of updates. 

Activities 

While we know that you were hoping that this would be a big year for you out of the classroom, we want to encourage you to pivot and seek options that fit with the time. While we previously sent out this piece to inspire you, do check out Nora’s latest blog post on alternative summer plans. Just because a program gets cancelled doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to do. The creativity that you show between now and when you apply to colleges will speak volumes about you as a person!

Financial Aid

As of right now, we are just seeing speculation regarding how this current crisis will affect financial aid packages. We do know that many institutions are worried about meeting their budgetary needs, especially as they refund tuition, room, and board fees to current students who were sent home for the year. The Department of Education has suspended the collection of student loans. We will let you know more as soon as we hear any news.

If you would like to learn more about financial aid, we do recommend that you attend a webinar hosted by the College Funding Coach. You may learn something that you can use down the road.

Additionally, a ruling by the Department of Justice within the last year opened the door to colleges to compete with others for desired students. This may mean that you will receive an unexpected financial aid boost by a college that you’ve turned down after the May 1st deadline. If this happens to you, please let us know.

Admissions Chances

We imagine that next year’s admissions decisions will be far more unpredictable than ever. While we are assigning admissions chances to every student’s list of schools based on past years’ information, there are now a variety of other factors that are going to impact institutions that we can’t account for, including: students choosing not to return to campus to stay closer to home; a lack of real grades; a lack of tests; unrealized extracurricular ambitions; changes at home; etc. Please bear with us as we gather information for you to help you make smart and cautious decisions in these times.  

The Best You Can Be

As always, the best way to help your college applications is to do the best you can with the opportunities you have. Colleges will be able to see if you have done this, even if you’ve done it from inside your home.