Questions for my Amerifriends...

[kellifer]

I swear these aren't for my SPN/HP story that I'm not writing because I have dozens of other things I should be writing.

*looks shifty*

So:

What age do you (approximately):-
- sit your SATs
- Apply for college
- Get accepted for college
- Are a senior in high school

I'm not really sure because in Australia people can be a year older/younger depending on when they started school and I also started thinking that maybe you guys get all your college stuff before you finish your senior year unlike us who apply after we get our results and then apply to Uni. I was always a little confused because it seemed like people had their college acceptances and were still going to classes?

ETA: Wow - you are all very awesome. I'm going to mem this as a reference for US school stuff because there is a *LOT* of info here.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I took PSATs (Pre-SATs) my sophomore year of high school (15 years old). I scored in the 95th percentile, just one percentile too low to qualify for entry into the competition for a National Merit Scholarship. (I had a friend who made it all the way through the process--he's absolutely brilliant--and got disqualified for actually receiving a scholarship from them because he flunked a class senior year because he forgot to turn in his homework.)

I took the SATs as a junior and again as a senior. Note that most people on the coasts take the SATs; most people in the middle take the ACTs. It tests more areas than the SATs do.

Scores for SATs and PSATs get sent out to colleges unless you tell them not to, so as soon as you take them you start getting a bazillion brochures from various colleges and universities if you get anything like a decent score. I would get five or ten a day, sometimes. And they all look the same--glossy brochures with success statistics, heart-warming blurbs about the institution's history and student life, and the pictures all looked about the same, too. (Two students walking down a tree-lined path in autumn, three students sitting around a table in a library, a professor in front of a class, etc.)

The summer between my junior and senior years, my family took a road trip to look at colleges so I could check out the ones I was interested in (I had a short list of about five by that point.)

I applied for colleges at the beginning of my senior year and (with early acceptance) knew where I was going by Christmas. I promptly dropped my Honors Physics class because it didn't matter any more. By the middle of second semester I'd sent off my housing form and gotten assigned a room and roommates.

I was 17 as a senior in high school all the way through the year; my birthday is July 30. There were a lot of kids who were seventeen, but also a lot who were eighteen. It depends somewhat on how you developed as a young child. Most kids, the parents have a bit of leeway on when they go to school; it's not uncommon for kids with birthdays in the right part of the year to send their kid to school a year earlier than he/she technically should (if he/she is very smart) or keep them out for a year longer than he/she technically should (if he/she needs time for social development before facing a classroom).

[beatrice_otter]

Why did I say I took the SATs twice? Gah. I have no idea where that came from. Took them once, as a junior. In the school cafeteria on a Saturday morning, two students per table. Incredibly boring.