Are you an eighth grader? Maybe you’re a parent of an eighth grader and wondering what you can do to try to help your student be as prepared as possible to get into an Ivy League school or an elite college or a top 20 school. In this blog, I’m going to share with you guys some of my favorite tips for young students to put themselves on a path of readiness for elite college applications.
If you are looking for support in this process, I do individual consulting with families as early as seventh or eighth grade to help you get a game plan together that’s personalized and on track. We also have essay coaches. If you’re looking for support in essay writing, we have tutors, and you can check all of that out at supertutortv.com. We also have self-paced courses for the ACT and the SAT, which are a great way to slowly roll into test prep if you have a younger student.
Work on Academic Skills That Translate to Standardized Tests
I’m going to give you guys four game plan strategies to get ready to have an awesome application for top colleges. Number one, I want you to use middle school as a way to work on academic skills that translate to standardized tests. Now, I know some purists are going to say to not prepare for the ACT and SAT in eighth grade. That’s crazy. It’s way too young. We even have a tutor at our company that will not work with anyone who isn’t a junior. She won’t do it. She doesn’t want to work with really young kids. She thinks it’s too early. My take is there are some things you can do to get prepared, but you’ve got to be a little bit targeted. And it doesn’t mean you’re going to be prepping for the entire SAT or the entire ACT. It doesn’t mean you’re giving your kid all the College Board practice tests tomorrow. But here is the breakdown for how you can help your eighth grader be test ready.
First of all, what I like to say is when it comes to reading comprehension, that can be really hard to prepare for at the same reading level as the exams themselves. So, I don’t necessarily really recommend that you start dishing out reading passages from the ACT or the SAT to your eighth grader. Though if you had to do that, I would say ACT over SAT. The SAT reading level can sometimes be 12th grade or even higher than that. And I don’t think a lot of eighth graders are going to be able to appropriately comprehend that at this time. So, it’s probably not the best strategy to just be throwing those authentic questions at them. The ACT is a little bit easier if you do want to get started earlier with reading comprehension and you have a strong reader.
But what I sometimes find is more effective at this age in order to get test prep ready is to actually look at tests that are on grade level. If you were applying for a private high school in the United States, you might take a test called the ISEE or another test called the SSAT. And if you’re applying to private high schools, you can prepare for those exams, and that’s going to get you standardized-test-ready for high school. Or if you’re not taking those, you can still take those practice tests and see how you do.
Now I will say there are some students who might consider taking the SAT in eighth grade and really actually getting into SAT prep. And those students are those that are applying for programs such as CTY, which is run by Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, that require an SAT score as one of the metrics that can help you qualify for these advanced courses. For example, one of the students that’s probably one of my best performing clients over time started with me in seventh grade prepping for the SAT, scored over a 700 on his math section of the SAT, and then qualified for classes from that. In high school, he went on to score a perfect score on the SAT, but we didn’t even have to prepare as intensively because we planted so many seeds in seventh grade that grew over time so that he was prepared by the time he got to high school. We prepped for the PSAT a little bit. By the time the summer before junior year popped up, he was already scoring over 1500. We just had a little bit of maintenance to do, and then he got a 1600.
You can’t plant seeds in the same way if you start prep later; that’s part of my point. The other reason that I love doing test prep groundwork in eighth grade is most middle school students are not as stressed out as my high school students. They don’t have hypercritical grades. If you get a B, it’s not the end of the world. They don’t have activities that have a lot of pressure or competitiveness. Not that it actually will in high school, but you get my point. Things are lower pressure. Students tend to have more time. Use that time wisely. This is a great time to use it.
How can you appropriately prep or lay groundwork for prep during seventh or eighth grade? My three favorite areas to focus on are math, grammar, and vocabulary. All of those are at grade level for eighth graders to work on, and they can comprehend complex ideas within them and should be okay.
I’ve written two books for the ACT math section. In my first one, the first section is called Algebra Core. And all of the Algebra Core questions rely on Algebra One skills. So an eighth grader can do the entire first half of this book and be on target, and it’s not above grade level at all for any eighth grader that’s concurrently enrolled in algebra. I also love to do this when I have students enrolled in algebra at the same time. They can do the chapter in this book that corresponds to whatever they just finished in their book at school. And it’s a great way to add a little bit of enrichment, a little bit of standardized test prep into the mix on grade level, and really get them prepared and get that foundation laid.
How can you work on grammar? Here’s what’s cool about grammar. Grammar is actually taught in middle school. So, it’s a great idea to cement all of that grammar learning with the level of grammar you’re required to know on the SAT or the ACT. What’s cool about grammar is there are guides that are just about the grammar by independent tutors that you can find online. The other thing you can do is that if you get our online courses—either our ACT course or our SAT course—we break down the grammar types of problems on the test, and most of them are grade level for eighth graders. They are not the 12th-grade reading level questions on the exam. It’s very straightforward and learnable for somebody with a reading comprehension level of an eighth grader now. And I don’t think there’s any need to wait, so you can jump into all SAT and ACT grammar prep immediately.
Third is vocabulary. Vocabulary undergirds our ability to comprehend passages. And the more vocabulary your student has, the better prepared they’re going to be for either the ACT or the SAT. The tough thing about vocabulary is it takes a lot of time to learn. And we learn it better when we’ve learned it up front, and then we start to see it in usage over time. And that’s why middle school is an amazing time to really try to beef up your students’ vocabulary. It’s going to just be like that seed that’s planted, and it’s going to pay off over time. I would much rather have an eighth grader studying a ton of vocabulary than an 11th grader. Even though you might think you want to learn the words right before you take the test, it’s not as helpful. If you learn the words in eighth grade, as you live and experience and grow, you’re going to see that word in use, and your understanding of it is going to grow over time. And as you see it in the literature that you read in high school, you’re going to know what it means. It’s going to help you in your classes. So, vocabulary building is a great activity for middle school kids. A couple of series I’ve used with middle school students in the past are Wordly Wise* and Vocabulary Workshop*. They have tons of books that are all leveled so you can just continually keep giving vocabulary to your student, which is great. There are plenty of other vocabulary builders out there. If you wanted to do one that was SAT specific, I do like Robert’s Extremely Nerdy Guide to SAT Vocabulary*, which you can check out.
*Please note that these Amazon affiliate links, which help support our blog and free YouTube Videos. No one has paid us to sponsor or include any books on this list.
Explore Career Ideas
Number two: start to explore career ideas. I know it sounds early to explore career ideas, but if you want to build a cohesive narrative—which is one of the components that really makes for a compelling application to a top college—you’ve got to start to think about who you are, what you love, and what you want to do or study. And this is a great time because it’s in eighth grade when the pressure is lower to have them watch documentaries or to have them talk to family friends who are in different careers. I had one student, for example, get an early decision to a top 10 college, and her story started in eighth grade when her parents had a family friend over for dinner who was an engineer and working on some research, and he talked to her about his research, and she thought it sounded really cool. And that started her journey of exploring this little niche area of engineering. So, have your kids ask questions, talk about careers, have them check out books from the library, listen to podcasts, watch documentaries, or listen to TED Talks.
But help your kids start to think about what their skills are. What kind of career personality am I? How can I contribute to this world? What are my talents? How do I want to contribute with my talents? Start to think about those career ideas now so that they can then explore them once they get to high school. It’s not too early to start thinking. Thinking is easy, especially if you do it in advance.
Make Sure You Take Everything Needed to Be in Advanced High School Classes
Number three is to make sure your students have taken everything necessary to be in advanced classes in high school. One of the biggest regrets that I sometimes encounter with students is that by the time they get to ninth grade, they didn’t realize they needed to have certain grades or certain classes in order to qualify to take honors or AP courses once they got to high school. So now is the time to straighten out all of those knots, to ask questions. You can even talk to the counselor at the high school if you can get ahold of them and say you want your student to be taking really rigorous classes and ask what you can do now to make sure that they qualify for those or if there are any prerequisites. Start to get into that space and understand the narrative. Again, if you need to accelerate some math, if you need to take some math over the summer to try to get to where you need to be, you can do what you have to do before high school to hit the ground running in terms of necessary classes and rigor. Rigor is really important in college admissions; they want to see that you’re taking the hardest and most challenging course load that you can handle, but sometimes you can’t have that rigor if you don’t line your ducks up. So, line up your ducks.
Think About an Activity Strategy
Number four, start to think about an activity strategy. I know people get really ruffled when they think about the idea of doing activities just to impress colleges. I don’t like it either, I will be honest. But there is something to be said for being intentional about how you spend your time outside of school and what activities you take on. It’s also good to note that if your goal is to go to a competitive university, think about what are the ways that you can take your passions and your interests and apply them in ways that don’t just help you enjoy what you do but also help you qualify yourself for the opportunities that you want to qualify yourself for. If you’re doing both at the same time, maybe that’s okay.
So, a few notes. One is that generally at this age, if students are not excelling at something, you might consider swapping that activity out for something that a student does excel at. A lot of times kids have multiple interests. They like lots of things. Can you figure out which things they like and they’re good at? The more of those you can pile in, the more successful their activities roster is going to be when they get to the point of applying to college. Additionally, I also like to paint a landscape for a lot of families that I work with in terms of what elite colleges tend to favor when it comes to activities, just so they’re aware of it as their students choose from different options within the range of what their student is passionate about or interested in.
One thing to think about is the idea of institutional goals. And that is the idea that every college or university in the United States is typically using holistic admissions. They’re not just admitting you because of your scores or because of your grades. This isn’t an input-output process. They are looking for individuals to fill a mosaic of diversity or whatever constructed diversity that is at their college. Colleges and universities don’t have one or two majors. They have many. They don’t want all of the people at their college to just major in computer science or economics or business or nursing or whatever it is. They want a diverse student body that fills all of the holes that they have to fill.
How that translates at this point when you’ve got an eighth grader is if your kid has some funky niche interests, let them pursue them. Are they really into the classics? Do they want to learn the Greek language? And do they really like Greek competitions? That’s cool; nurture that. Or maybe you have Greek relatives, and they want to learn Greek. That could be a really cool tip on their application if it’s something you want to major or minor in. I have one kid who got into an Ivy League top 10 college, and I think a lot of it was the fact that he had really built a narrative of interest in religious studies. It was something he was genuinely interested in. Over time, he ended up majoring in something else, but he ended up minoring in philosophy. The pathway is not always a straight line, but if they can pursue an interest that fulfills an underfilled niche, that can be valuable in the process. And if they happen to love it, great.
Number two, most students who are getting into top universities have some kind of wow factor, and often that wow factor has something to do with independent, self-driven projects. What are some examples of independent self-driven projects? Starting a nonprofit to teach robotics to kids or starting a nonprofit to collect canned goods and growing it to one of the biggest food drives in the state. Doing independent research on some particular area of science, whether that’s a particular disease or modeling proteins in software you taught yourself over the summer, making groundbreaking progress in that research, or coming up with innovative solutions to environmental challenges. So, I’ve had students talk about fire or flood sustainability ideas or engineer them or come up with factors that might help. I’ve also had students look at those sorts of events from an economist’s point of view and do research papers.
You can come at things from different angles, such as engaging in political action to a point where you’ve got conversations with real politicians that are pretty impressive, or your face is in a national magazine, or whatever it is because you’re doing this political activity. You could write a novel, a musical, a play, or a nonfiction book on a specific niche area of interest. You can also create other media. I’ve had students produce student films, documentaries, YouTube channels, or other media. And generally when we have media, I want it to either gain traction, meaning you’ve got tens of thousands of people interested, or you’ve won some award of some sort. But in any case, those are the kind of things that tend to stand out. It’s not just joining the debate team and debating or working on the school newspaper. It’s usually something bigger than that.
I’m not saying your eighth grader has to do any of those things at this point, but maybe start thinking about the idea of your eighth grader doing an independent project of some sort on something that interests them.
The third thing in terms of activity strategy to think about is excellence. If your student is really good at something, it’s usually good to keep with it. And whether that means you’re the best musician in your high school, the top piccolo player in the state of Wyoming, or the greatest luge athlete in Utah. If you’re really good at something, especially sports that are recruitable, that’s probably top of the list. If you’re in a recruitable sport and really good at it, stick with it; stay with it. That could really help you in admissions. And even sports that aren’t recruitable, right? Luge, rhythmic gymnastics, partner ice skating, or table tennis. If you’re really, really good at something and are competing at an international level, that can still be very helpful in terms of the wow factor for your application.
If you are looking to do a consultation to get personalized suggestions, you can check out our website and what services we offer at supertutortv.com/tutoring. I wish you guys all the best of luck!
