All right, let's get started. So welcome, everybody. My name is Laura Barr. I'm the owner and founder of Emerging Educational Consulting. We provide one to one mentorship for students from the beginning to end of the college application process, and my mantra is that we're in the business of growing good humans. And what better way to do that than to educate. I feel like if we can educate parents and students, we can make the process simple, deliberate, and joyful. So I'm super excited to have Bill, best friend, colleague in college admissions. Bill, I couldn't do anything without you. And so many of our students have been a part of the Mindfish community. You and I were talking last week and we kind of pulled an audible and said, let's make this, let's make this podcast happen today because there's a lot of pressing questions specifically related to huge changes around S. A. T. Let's just start. Well, first, just quickly introduce yourself and then why don't you just dive straight into Digital S. A. T. What's the scoop? Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everybody. My name is Bill Houston. I am the co owner and co founder of mind fish test prep. Hence my sweet little hat here. We've been lucky enough to collaborate closely with Laura and her team at emerging for many years. Working with students on SAT, ACT prep, working with students on academic tutoring, even working with younger students on ISEE, SSAT prep. Those are tests to get into independent middle schools and high schools. So Laura and I have been working closely for a long time. And as she said, you know, we were, we were chatting last week and we said, you know, why don't we just record this conversation and we can send it out to people because a lot of you all have the same questions. So what we do at Mindfish is primarily one on one test preparation, tutoring, and also a lot of one on one academic tutoring. We're kind of in the thick of the testing and test prep seasons right now, given that we're in mid November. Can't believe we're in mid November, actually. But a lot of students took the PSAT last month, October. A lot of students are prepping right now for the SAT and ACT. Maybe. As soon as December, maybe in the spring semester. and for juniors specifically, the college prep process is kind of heating up right now. So I'm talking to a lot of families every day about this stuff and really happy to chat with you, Laura, today, about some of the questions that are coming up all the time. So one that has come up very recently and very often is the new digital S. A. T. And I've got I've got a PDF little PowerPoint deal I'll share with you guys. This is way too much information for what we're doing today. But Laura, I can also share it with you and you can put it in the community if you want, whoever, whoever would benefit from it. So the digital SAT is imminent, right now, mid October, 2023. A lot of students who are juniors, and actually some younger students as well, just took the digital PSAT for the first time. The last paper and pencil SAT, We'll be in December, December 2nd. And then starting in March, the paper and pencil SAT and PSAT will be gone for good. And we're now in the world of the digital SAT. So this is a pretty seismic shift to use a cliched phrase in the testing world. Uh, you know, not to date myself, but since I've been doing this work, I've dealt with five different versions of the S. A. T. Since the late nineties, and this is the biggest change that I've seen in the last 25 years to the S. A. T. You know, again, this is way more information in this, this slide deck than we have time to cover today. But here's a glimpse of the current paper version of the S. A. T. Here's a glimpse of the new version. Um, big changes. The new version, the new digital test will be shorter. It will be adaptive, which means the content that any student sees later in the test is based on his or her answers on questions earlier in the test. So if you do well at the beginning, You're going to see more challenging content later in the test. Um, this is interesting. We'll talk about this in a second. But the college board is being pretty cagey, not sharing tests or scales like they used to. And the biggest thing is. All the work's gonna be done on a screen. We got this digital app called blue book. And that's gonna be pretty radically different than the old mode of paper and pencil. Again, I'll share this, but there are some content differences that are fairly different. Also, notably, You look at the slide I just shared. This is a reading passage on the new test. It's only like three sentences, four sentences long, and there's one question attached to it. So we're not going to see anything like this on the old test where you had a page and a half and then on this one, there would be 12 questions. Now, all of the reading and writing questions are one very short passage with only one question attached to them. So the long form reading comprehension of the old test is gone. And we've got this short form going forward. So, you know, I could talk about this all day. Let me look at some other slides here. I think this is, I mean, this is amazing. I think this is enough overview. I think, you know, one of the things that is, I'm going to ask real quick at it, God, we could talk for like a full hour about, learning differences and challenges, people who have. Challenges there. What's happening with that? And then I'm just curious. Well, let's answer that first and then I'll ask you the next. Love it. Laura, you read my minds cause we were in sync like that. And I've got, one of my next slides, digital SAT for students with accommodations. This is a big deal. Actually. One of my close colleagues at mind fish is herself dyslexic and is passionate about working with neurodivergent students on test prep. So I've spent a lot of time talking with my colleague Haley about this. We work with a lot of neurodivergent students, both with test prep and executive functioning and academic tutoring. This is an interesting shift because as it says here, historically, the ACT was usually, or often the better test for students with accommodations. I don't think that's gonna be the case anymore. The ACT is still going to be a good test for some students with accommodations, but think about that short form verbal format that we just looked at on the new digital SAT. We really think, both in our own research and from talking to students, that this new digital format could be a really good fit for some students with ADHD. Now another positive, there's a built in calculator for the new digital test as well. It's called Desmos. Could be a great fit for students with dyscalculia, dyscalculia or dysgraphia in some cases. However, the digital SAT might be a tough test for students with, in some cases, dyslexia or other visual impairments. Think about this, if we're doing the digital SAT, all of the content is on the screen in front of you. Now you can have scratch paper in the test, but if you're a student with dyslexia or some kind of visual difference, in some cases, you're, you're transcribing the stuff on the screen to the paper in front of you. Let's say it's on a math question. You write down the math equations on the paper, you do your work there. So you're transcribing it to the paper, doing your work. Then you're transcribing your answers back to the screen. That's hard for some neurodivergent students, right? Historically, we've seen a lot of kiddos who over the years will do great work on paper and then like bubble in the wrong answer on the old school Scantron sheets. That's sort of the same thing, but now kind of amped up on this new test. If you're transcribing to the paper and then back to the screen for some students, it might be a challenge to do that accurately. Um, this all comes down to something that I just firmly believe in this work in general. And Laura, you kind of hinted at this at the beginning of the talk. This is a unique journey for each unique individual going through this college preparation process. So for some students, digital tests might be great for their accommodations. For other students, the ACT might still be the better choice. So I never generalize. I always try to craft this journey on a really unique and customized level. For each individual student. We've got this cheesy phrase in our business, which is the tests are standardized, but students are not. Mm-Hmm. So, yeah. Kind of corny, but it's very true. Um, so we always go out of our way to, to do a lot of diagnostic testing, talk to families, talk to students very closely, and figure out what the best path is for each student. Great. We're not going to get into test optional today. That will be another audible. We pull maybe talk about test optional because I feel like that's a hot topic too. I think 1 of the, um, I think 1 of the things that came up that started this conversation was. The PSAT scores are coming in. Yeah. I actually have a, a, uh, someone in who's in our group right now just said her daughter took the PSAT, she has a adhd and she loved the short reading. She said it was a lot less frustrating than flipping back and forth to look at the answers. So I think that's great. Um, I'm, I wanna talk about the PSAT because. I reached out to you because I could not understand the score report. What does this mean? This looks so different. You help us understand how to read that report and then also address. What is National Merit Scholar, and what does it mean you qualify to be one, and then what happens after that? How does that all work? Yeah, it's a complex process, and I mean, you know, you're like a lifelong professional educator, and you look at these reports and you're like, what is this? I mean, imagine, you know, students or their parents at home looking at these things. They're complicated. So yeah, let's look at it. So I've got... A psat score report here. I'll share my screen again. We can look at it together. Um, and let's see here. There we go. Everybody can see that. So here's a psat score report that I looked at recently. And it's this is actually pretty short, but there's still a fair amount of information here. And a little bit of it is somewhat misleading. So the main thing on the psat score report is this the total score. Now the PSAT scaled out of 1520 points instead of the SAT, which. If you took it back in the day, it's 1600, just like it was back then. that's a little misleading in itself. What the college board has told us for years and years is that a 1280 on the PSAT is the same as a 1280 on the SAT. So even though they're out of different total numbers of points, the scores mean the exact same thing. That's a point of confusion for a lot of parents. Like someone with this test might be tempted to say, Oh, 1280 out of 1520. Is what out of 1600 and like convert the score in that manner. You don't need to do that. You don't want to do that. 1280 means 1280. So even though the score totals are different, the score means the same thing. So it's 1280 out of 1520 here. Um, and that's a total of the 650 and the 630. So 650 on reading and writing, um, which used to be two different sections, actually one more change on the new digital test. Is that reading and writing are packed together as one overall verbal section. And then you've got your math section. So the 12, eight is just the total of those two subscores. A lot of parents and students will put great weight on these percentiles. So this is a 90, 12, eight is a 91st percentile score. Overall verbal was 80. 8th percentile math was 91st percentile. I don't, you know, I don't really look at those that much and neither do colleges. Colleges look at 1280. So you might be tempted to say, oh, 91st 88. What does that mean? Honestly, not that much. I would just look at the 1280. That's going to be the more important school score. What's the star? What's the star next to it? It says the percentiles are based out of 11th graders who took this task over the last three years. Last three years. Okay. And just to clarify one thing I said just a second ago, I said colleges care about the 12 80. Just to be clear. Colleges don't care about your PSAT score. Really? They care about your SAT and ACT scores. So really bottom line, if you take home one thing about the PSAT from this chat today, it's really just a practice test. It's not going to determine your chances of admissions at any college or university. Schools don't look at it. Now, the National Merit. System looks at it. And you asked about that, Laura, we're gonna talk about that in a second. But for purposes of college admissions, no one's really looking at your PSAT scores. You can think of the P the P means preliminary, SAT, but I, you can think of it as practice SAT. 'cause there there's really no stakes to taking this test. what the colleges do use this task for is to market themselves and send you a ton of information. the, the college board has this program called connections, and if you sign up for connections, you're basically enabling, you're allowing the college board to share your contact info and your score with schools. And back in my day, a distant and lovely era called the 1990s when, when schools got these scores and they got the information, They would just like blast your, your physical snail mail mailbox with colorful pamphlets and literature and all this kind of stuff. Now it's really email, as you would imagine. But, the PSAT, so in one sense, the PSAT is like the opening of the floodgates for, for your student to get a ton of information from colleges who are trying to kind of market themselves to your kiddo. Let's talk about National Merit. So you look over here on the side here. We've got National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and we've got this National Merit Scholarship Corporation Selection Index score. So, for this particular test taker, the selection index, sometimes called the SI for short, is 193. And what the 193 is, let me put in my teacher mode real quick. And annotate this thing. So what the 1 93 is, is we're going to take your, your reading score. hold on, hold on, everybody. We'll take your reading score with, Oh, come on. How do I do this? Laura? I can't even figure out how to write. Maybe the one right above there. Yeah, it's like black. Well, I don't know. Maybe I'll put it in a text box. That would be easier. there we go. So what we're going to do here is take your reading score, which is 650. This is like an SAT problem by itself, divided by 10 times two. And actually this is like, again, an SAT problem in itself. Plus. Your math score equals your selection index. So that's a, it looks a little bit weird, but basically what we're just taking the zero off the end of this, multiplying it by two, and then we're adding the math score divided by 10. So the math score without the zero. And so this is going to be, if we do the math, it's going to be one 30 plus 63. That's how we get to one 93. So that's what the selection score means. Essentially, interestingly, we're double counting the verbal score. So we're adding two parts verbal and one part math to get your selection in next school. And somebody asked me earlier this week, actually, why is the math worth half as much as the verbal? I honestly have no idea. I don't know why they do it that way. But that's how they do it. And. That's how they get again your selection index score. That's the score that is going to qualify students for the national merit process. Now, Laura, this is what you reached out to me, excuse me, about last week. It says you meet the entry requirements for the national merit scholarship program. Look on page two for more info. So we go to page two, you meet the entry requirements just to be fair. I should have just looked at this because it's so much cleaner. There's, there's the selection index formula. the, this information to me is misleading. 1 93, the selection index 1 93 does not mean that you qualify as a national merit semifinalist or finalist or national merit scholar. What this is saying is because this student is enrolled in high school, is currently a junior, and we'll go to high school for four years. They are entered in the consideration for them to become recognized by the national merit. Right. So this means like you, you've entered the running for potentially becoming a national merit, semifinalist, finalist or scholar down the road. and, and this number kind of gives it away along with 1. 3 million other kiddos. You're in the running to be considered. For this recognition down the road. now again, that's that's based only on the fact that this student is in high school for four years and is now a junior. The qualifying is going to be determined by the 1 93, the selection index down the road. And I'll stop my screen share here. I'll show you some other stuff. So. This gets pretty nuanced and I'll share this screen here for a second. Here are the steps. I like this flowchart a lot of how national merit works. So here's our 1. 3 million entrants who are in high school and are not currently juniors, right? Of those people, 50, 000 students. Will qualify as either commended or semi finalist. And that's where that selection index number, the 193 that we're just looking at, that's where that comes into play. I'll look at another screen real quick. Class of 2025, which is the class we're talking about who are juniors right now, we estimate or people in the industry estimate that a 208 selection index will qualify Current juniors as national merit commended. Recipients that's if we look back over here, 34, 000 students will be commended. So they hit that 208 or thereabouts and they now have the distinction of being called a National Merit commended students slightly higher scores, 16, 000 of them nationally will qualify as semifinalists. So, Laura and I both live in Colorado. This is a state by state cutoff criteria. We think the cutoff in the state of Colorado for the current junior class, class of 2025, will be 217. And you can see the last 3 years in Colorado have been 216, 217, somewhere thereabouts. Colorado is kind of in the, You know, starting to be the more competitive states. If we look at it here, most competitive Jersey, D. C. Massachusetts, but again, Colorado is up there with the 217. so it's, it's tough to qualify for national merit here in the state of Colorado. and that's again where we're looking at that three digit selection index score to either qualify as a commended student or as a semifinalist. We go back to our flow chart of those 16, 000, 15, 000 will become finalists. And to, to become a finalist, that's something else here. And I can share all these links with you, Laura, if you want to spread them out there on our, on our community. I'll just put it, post it in our community. I think that'd be great. Yeah, that would be awesome. So to become a finalist, you first have to be a semifinalist, get that selection index. In Colorado, about 217 or higher. Then you have to have a letter of endorsement from your principal or another official at your school recommending you to the National Merit program. You have to keep your grades up. This doesn't mean you have to have perfect all A's or anything like this, but your grades have to be basically like. Pretty good A's and B's to to check off that box. And you have to take an S. A. T. or A. C. T. sometime in the next year. Now, this is old. This is the net. This is a 2024. we're talking about the class of 2025 now. So, for our current juniors, they'll need to take an S. A. T. or an A. C. T. Before January 1 of 2025. Right? So you've got over a year to do this. You have to take an SAT or ACT and do pretty well. It's not nearly as competitive as the PSAT. You just can't like completely tank the SAT or ACT and still be a finalist. If you qualified as a semifinalist, as you can tell by these numbers, 15, 000 of the 16, 000 semifinalists become finalists. So most of the students will will go on to be finalists. From there at the end of the process, we've got about 7, 100 merit scholarship winners who qualify for scholarships to help them pay for college. Note the number here. 2, 500 is what most of these scholarships are for. Now, I would love 2, 500. It's a lot of money. But in the cost of, in the consideration of the cost of a college education these days, it's not that much. When we're talking about private schools charging 80, 90, 000 a year for a college education still helps, everything helps, but it's not a ton of money. Some of these that said some of these corporate sponsored scholarships can be up to 10, 000. Some of the special scholarships can be more than the 2, 500 as well, but the vast majority of national merit. Scholars who get money at the end of the process get 2, 500 from from National Merit itself. That's a lot of hoops. That is a lot of hoop jumping for 2, 500. I'm really glad that you said that because I think that was shocking to me when I transitioned from my practice, you know, 10 years ago to college. I was like National Merit, it sounded like this great award and it was such an honor and it's like these kids go through so much and only 7, 500 even get it. And then 2, 500. Right. That was shocking to me. All in the, and it's all sourced in the PSAT. So totally. And so, you know, playing off of that, Laura, one thing I would tell everyone watching this, don't stress that much about national merit, right? It gets, it is a lot of hoops to jump through. It is, you know, national merit's got this big title, right? It's not a make or break consideration for most students, either on a financial level or on a college admissions level. I don't think it's wrong. It looks good, right? If you're applying to a top, you know, super selective school and you can say, I'm a national merit scholar, I'm a national merit finalist. They like that, but it's not going to make or break your admissions to that school. Well, the problem too is they don't get it if they're applying early. They don't get the actual final award. They could say finalists are in consideration of it. They can't actually even want it. So that's another thing. Well, I, gosh, this time is going so fast. And I think, I do have a couple of questions from the audience, so see if I can answer those, question. My daughter didn't finish the PSAT reading or writing. She does not have an IEP or any other kind of diagnosis is practice going to be the best way. For her to move more quickly, I would assume we're not so worried about the PSAT. But as we move to the SAT, digital SAT, like what is the best way to practice? You're gonna have to be fast because I have one really important thing I want to say at the end of this. Love it. Yes, real quick before I answer that question, you mentioned something you won't know if you're a national merit scholar when you apply to school next year. Real quick on the timeline. Semi finalist cutoffs aren't even announced until September of 2024. So that that selection index to 17 that we estimate in Colorado, we won't know that for sure until almost a year from now. So it's a little ways down the road. And just to pick up on that a little bit more, don't go out of your way. Don't stress about national merit. Most of the students who apply Kind of just do their thing and they end up applying. It's not something that they're stressed about or really making a concerted push for. Now, great question. How do you use the PSAT to then prep for the SAT going forward? There are a lot of great tools to do that. I'll pull up the, the score report I shared a second ago, which is this guy. And so notice. In math, it's broken down into algebra, advanced math, problem solving, and data analysis, and geometry, and trig. So this student graded algebra maybe needs a little bit more practice on the other three sections. Check this out. There is an educator question bank on the college board website where, as it says, there are thousands of test questions. So your student can look at his or her, their PSA. I'm not sharing my screen. Hold on. Your student can look at their score report. And say, Oh, I need help on problem solving and data analysis. You go to this question bank, choose the assessment. I'm going to say SAT because we're using the PSAT to then prep for an SAT. We'll look at math, boom, problem solving and data analysis. We're going to search the question bank. 277 practice test questions come up and these are official questions written by the college board. So we can say even, okay. Within problem solving and data analysis, maybe I need help with percentages. Let's look at all these percentages. We'll just put them together. You can build your own custom worksheets to practice this stuff. So that's a really powerful tool from the PSAT score report to learn from that. And then prep for the SAT down the road now to address the specific question that Laura just mentioned, will practice help you get faster? 100%. It's, you know, another cheesy phrase. Practice makes perfect. Absolutely true on the test prep front. and that's one thing I really like about the digital test. Actually, a lot of score reports, not the PSAT, but like, for instance, the score reports we use in mind fish, we actually now have data for exactly how long it took students to answer every question on a practice test. And so when they're working with a tutor, we can say, Hey, you got this question, right? But it took you five minutes and you missed like six questions after that, probably because you're running out of time. So the digital format gives this whole other layer of analysis, which is how much time students are spending on these questions and really lets us dig in to help them strategize. So yes, practice will help a student go more quickly, but there's also a wealth of data from this digital format that we can leverage. to help students learn how to manage their time better and to become more efficient and effective. It's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. I have another question. Do we have stats from the recent digital PSAT showing whether average scores changed compared To the paper test? In general, no. But within my or my own organization, yes, because we have a lot of students who took paper tests last year and then digital tests, in October. I, I haven't crunched the numbers to come up with an average, but I would say. Most students are either doing better or about the same as what they did on the paper test. And that's not true for everyone. As I've said a few minutes ago, I think there's a really individual process. So we certainly have students who hated the new test also. But in general, I've seen a lot of students do at least as well as they did on the paper test previously. And students like this thing. Honestly, they're expressing that they're they like the new test saying that I have been surprised. They're like, that was fun. I know it really well. Like, there's a very positive feeling. And I wonder if that's what I'm not sure what that's all about. I do have something that might be a difficult conversation to have. Yeah, which is, yeah. There's some murmurings that with digital, there may be more opportunities for, students to not make always the best choice. We could use the word cheating. I don't like that word because it's so dramatic, but it's that idea of do the right thing when nobody's looking in both the practice and everything. Is there, is there any truth to that? Do you have, has anybody been talking to you about that? Yeah, really interesting question. Actually, the first thing I would say. A lot of people have asked me, Oh, the new test is online. Can't you just look up your answers while you're doing it? we're talking about the new digital SAT and PSAT. The answer is emphatically no. The official test is given on this, this digital platform called Bluebook. It basically locks you out of any other apps on your screen at that, you know, that could be on your screen at that time. Importantly, also, the test is not online. It's actually given on a digital platform, but your computer basically downloads the whole thing onto your machine. So you're doing it locally. You're not like actually on the World Wide Web taking this test. That's kind of a technical distinction, but I think it's an important one. So, I mean, the College Board is like a billion dollar non profit organization with a lot of really, really smart people working there. They've designed this thing to be totally foolproof. You just, because it's on your computer in front of you, you cannot look up answers. To the point where if you like power down your computer on purpose. And try to start it up again and like, look up some stuff in between. You, they won't let you do that. and so it's, it's, it's very foolproof and you know, this is not new technology. Other high stakes tasks like the GRE and the GMAT have been digital for many years. the ACT has been giving digital ACTs outside of the U S for five or six years now. So anyway, yeah, students will not be able to look up answers on the new digital test. It does bring up another point though, which is we, in my company, mind fish, we give practice tests to students all the time. and we started back in 2020 doing a lot of tests on zoom for obvious reasons. COVID hit, we used to do a ton of in person practice tests. All of a sudden spring 2020, we're like, okay, we're going to proctor these things online. And students are going to take them out at home. And right away, starting in 2020, we had students who were pretty, pretty clearly looking up answers for these tasks. It's not hard. You know, mind fish, we only use official practice tasks that were released by the college board or the ACT. And so our students are all digital natives. They've, they've developed skills for finding information. And I don't mean that in a negative way, you know, part of being a digital native is knowing how to use the digital tools that you have at your disposal. to do your work to get stuff done. But I think we've had a lot of stressed out students over the last three years or so. Who've been looking up answers on practice tests and it's been a little bit challenging. But any students out there, any parents out there, I would just reiterate, you know, it's important to do your own work on these tests. If you're looking up answers on practice tests, first of all, you're sort of short circuiting your own prep and there's no way to game the system on the real thing. So I urge you. to just take these tests in as realistic a manner as possible. Put your phone away, close your browser, open the test for the first time when you're doing it in your practice test setting, it's only going to help. Great. We're going to wind this down. I think what you just said kind of warmed my heart and hurt my heart in a way that this process. Adding this level of testing is stressful for kids and for parents, and there's a lot of misinformation about what's test optional, what's not test optional, what does that mean? And we're not gonna get into that today. I just read, Jennifer Wallace's book Never Enough this past weekend. Yeah. And you know this, a lot of this is, I know the parents that I work with, I mean, I work with loving parents who are. I mean, I pretty much hand selected the parents that I work with for parents who are more holistic, right? But even, and I know from raising my four kids that it doesn't even matter if you, if you raise your kids that way, they still feel the stress from their friends, from the parents, from the conversations. And all of that. And I think it's just is a good reminder for all families that there is a college for everyone. There are so many, a hundred percent. I think, your approach is also so holistic and I, I love hearing, you being able to help us and all of this information, and we'll just keep the conversation going and if anybody else has anymore. Questions. just let us know and we can, in our community, you can keep asking questions and I will follow up with questions that didn't get answered in our 30 minutes. We went over today, which I don't usually let happen, but I had to hear, I had to hear your answer. Thanks. And just, you know, to say a quick word on that again, Laura, it is a stressful process for a lot of families, a lot of students. There's another book that's been really popular in recent years by Jeff called who gets in and why he makes this point, this point over and over. You will go to college. It's actually easier to get into college than it ever has been because there are just more options for students. Now it's harder to get into Harvard than it's ever been, but. If you want to go to college and find your passion and find your, your area of study and build a career, you will do it. And in this process, Laura was hinting at this a second ago. It can be stressful. My job as a test prep guy, I know Laura thinks a big part of her job as a college admissions consultant. is to help de stress this process. That's why we do events like this. That's why we, we, you know, run our businesses in the way we do. It's to be an empathetic advocate for students and families and to try to help navigate this process with less stress and less mental anguish, and still be successful. That, that's the way I've always thought about it. And I know Laura's on the same page. So, you know, we're here and if, you know, there, there's a network of people who are like us, who are out there, you know, to advocate for students and families as well. So the resources and the, you know, the people are out there, if you seek them out. Thank you. Boom. That's a great way to end. Thank you so much. I, we are so grateful. Thank you. Everybody who joined us today. We really appreciate it. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Laura. Bye.