By Purvi Mody. The last few weeks have been really difficult for many students. Every year we brace ourselves for a more competitive admissions landscape and the notion that the bar is being raised to incomprehensible levels. Coupled with these changes is the fact that students and parents alike are misinformed about the process. A student recently asked me, "Did the Ivies get a lot harder to get into this year?" Another family tried to create algorithms about where their son would have been admitted and was surprised when the actual results varied from the expected results. Others questioned every piece of their application and wondered which one element kept them out. The truth is that college admissions is more of an art than a science, and the real dirty little secret is that it is not as much of a meritocracy as we would like to believe it to be. That is also real life. More...

By Beckie Supiano. Fit is a big deal at Brigham Young University, where the admissions office looks for students who share its values academically, socially, and spiritually. To select those students, the university uses a holistic process that three campus officials described here on Monday during a session at the American Association for Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ annual meeting. More...

By Iro-Anna Mamakouka. College Board President and CEO David Coleman, announced changes in the content of the SAT exams for the entrance of candidates interested in applying to American Universities. These changes are expected to be the most significant ones made in the last 10 years.
The SAT exams will no longer be examining students on specialized vocabulary knowledge and the essay will be optional instead of mandatory. On the contrary, the exams will include texts which may have references to historical U.S. documents, such as the Declaration of Independence or speeches by Martin Luther King. See more...

By Pamela Dockins. The company that administers one of the two most widely-used U.S. college admissions tests recently announced its first major revisions to its test since 2005.  The College Boards' changes to the SAT exam drop infrequently used vocabulary words and the mandatory essay, and add passages referencing U.S. historical documents.
When Howard University students from Nigeria and Jamaica were applying to college, they were among the approximately 100,000 foreign students each year who took the SAT. More...

By Natasha Khan. A planned overhaul of the SAT is fueling concern in Beijing classrooms and is set to pose a fresh challenge for Chinese test-prep companies seeking techniques to crack the admission test.
The revamp slated for spring 2016 is intended to make the exam more reflective of U.S. high-school work and require students to show critical-thinking skills by analyzing science and history texts. The changes are causing anxiety for Chinese applicants, who often rely on months of cramming at schools of companies such as New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (EDU)
Close to a third of the 339,993 international undergraduate students in the U.S. came from China during the 2012-2013 school year, data from the Institute of International Education show. Chinese prep classrooms have for years used detailed dissections of prior exams, lengthy word lists and canned essays to help even students with limited English fluency master the SAT. More...