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This year was filled with applicants applying to Yale University single choice early action (SCEA) and all were, of course, in search of information about how they might gain an edge in the application process. What this article intends to supply is as accurate a portrait of what Yale admissions is looking for in a candidate—most of which is taken directly off the Yale admissions website—
Ken Bain, a professor of history, and an ardent educator who never stops searching for a better way to educate students in how to discover the truth, published a book, ‘What the Best College Teachers Do.’ A key chapter deals with the expectations these best teachers have for their students. On page 85 he focuses on students’ ‘Intellectual Development.’ Bain actually captured this ‘inventory of reasoning’ from Arnold Arons, a physicist at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Critical thinking entails, at a minimum, a series of 10 reasoning and abilities and habits of thought:
The College Board and Khan Academy are offering free SAT prep tutorials to boost scores on the new (as of March 2016) SAT. The site is at https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat.
Students studying 20 hours through the Khan Academy personalized lessons, on average, showed a 115-point improvement between their PSAT and SAT scores. This was double the average of students who did not use the Khan tutorials.
According to College Board President David Coleman, "It is good news that practice is an equal opportunity employer. And the great news is that it is free."
More information can be found at: https://edsource.org/2017/free-khan-academy-sat-tutorials-boost-scores-study-finds/581450.
Concord Review (http://www.tcr.org/) expanded its 2-week summer program to Seoul, Korea. If you're contemplating submitting a paper to TCR and you want a better chance of achieving Emerson Award Winning status, this might prove a worthwhile summer enrollment. Though be forewarned, the price tag for Seoul is $4,500 without room and board; regardless, for the summer of 2017, all seats have been taken, but a wait list is available.
The program consists of lectures on the research and writing process, as well as 'mapping out topics', searching out new evidence, refining a topic, note taking, cross-referencing citations, annotating, developing a bibliography, understanding historiography, editing and revising. A more comprehensive description of the program can be seen through the eyes of a recent participant, Ryan Chung, at http://www.tcr.org/resources/Documents/summer_program/%20Ryan%20Chung%20on%20TCR%20Summer%20Program.pdf.
Many times students who have applied to a campus, whether Princeton or another, and gotten wait listed or even rejected, can build after a year or more of college elsewhere the credentials to successfully transfer in.
Better still, there will be a new Transfer Common App in 2018 making the transfer process that much easier, especially for the nontraditional applicants, to submit transfer applications to multiple campuses. According to the Common App: "This new transfer application will not only better serve returning adult students (over the age of 25, now representing 38% of undergraduates) and students applying from community colleges (43% of all undergraduates), it will also facilitate the process for recommenders and member institutions."
