No at-home SAT this year. Dartmouth and Columbia have gone test-optional for 2020-2021

No at-home SAT this year. Dartmouth and Columbia have gone test-optional for 2020-2021

Dear Foley Prep Family,

These developments should not be surprising, but it’s certainly worth sharing:

• The College Board has abandoned its hope to have at-home SAT testing this coming academic year. Aside from the clunkiness of the AP tests and the outright fiasco of “priority registration” for fall SATs, an at-home SAT would require at least 3 hours of steady video-quality streaming, which is a heavy lift for too many under-resourced families. NY Post article here.

• Today, Dartmouth announced that it would join about 200 colleges who have gone test optional for the coming application cycle (Fall 2021 first-year students). Dartmouth now joins sister Ivy League schools Cornell and Columbia – my guess is most will relent sooner rather than later. Bloomberg article here.

That’s it for the news.

Read on if you are you interested in supporting our inner-city Newark SAT Summer Program.

This is a first for me. I don’t really talk about the pro bono work we have done over the years, but as I began writing this newsletter, an idea for an ask hit me. Every year, we have worked with 3-4 individual students who are underrepresented minorities. We are fortunate to have a network of school administrators who help us to identify these kids, and we support them with 1-on-1 SAT tutoring. I, and my tutors, find working with needy students incredibly rewarding, and a good SAT score, even in this year, goes a long way to helping these kids get access to some of the top colleges, scholarships, and ongoing academic support.

The NJSEEDS/Foley Prep Partnership: For the past 5 summers, Foley Prep has run a very successful SAT program for 20-25 inner-city Newark students who are part of the NJSEEDS program. NJSEEDS kids are placed in private prep schools across the country, including Foley Prep feeder schools such as Pingry, Gil St. Bernards, Kent Place, Newark Academy, Ranney School, Lawrenceville, Peddie, The Hun School, and more. Most of these students get looks from Ivy League schools, and the whole point of the program is to imbue these kids with a sense of giving back to their communities. This summer, we are fortunate to be able to continue this program at-cost. Because we cannot deliver in-person SAT prep in Newark as in years past, we have gone online.

View the NJSEEDS.org pages to learn about their good work yourself. Feel free to give directly if you wish, or read on if you are interested in this specific project, which includes a matching donation from me…

The Ask: With NJSEEDS’s annual SAT prep budget of $5,000, we can deliver about 50 hours of online prep to the 20-25 kids in the program. My concern is that these kids will have a hard time dealing with the online group environment, so if we could increase the funding, we could offer a much higher quality experience by giving these students smaller group sizes. In fact, I figure that if we can get $15,000 more, I will kick in $5,000, and with $30,000 in hand, each kid will get 10 hours of 1-on-1 online tutoring from a Foley Prep tutor. I spoke with the NJSEEDS director to confirm we were “on” for this summer, but this idea only hit me just now, so I don’t know what the particulars are in terms of fundraising like this … I would imagine that all funds would be routed through NJSEEDS, as it is a non-profit, charitable organization.

While I’m happy that I got to give NJSEEDS some publicity, I don’t have a lot bandwidth to devote to fundraising. I suppose that if enough people reply with amounts, I’ll take it to the next step by contacting NJSEEDS – and now that I’ve typed all that out I might spread the word to some friends and family who I know may contribute.

I come back to New Jersey on Friday. Colorado has been amazing, as always (prediction: University of Colorado’s new president will accelerate the system’s overall appeal, and it will be the “it” school soon). Foley Prep plans to open our doors in New Jersey by June 15th. Thanks to all who have enrolled so far – I look forward to meeting as many of you in person as I can.

Oh, don’t miss the new pics below…

Thanks.

Best regards,

Ronald Foley, Founder

Doctoral Candidate, Rutgers University

call/text 732-412-1416

Attention Monmouth County Residents

77% Acceptance rate for our MCVSD Students!

If you are a Monmouth County resident, you know how intense the competition is to get into the MCVSD magnet schools. I’m very happy to report that 77% of Foley MCSVD students got into an MCVSD school, so we have expanded our program this summer. Go to FoleyPrep.com/mcvsd now.

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Foley’s results are proven: +220 point average SAT and +7 point ACT increase.

Go to FoleyPrep.com/data to find out more. Below is a screenshot of one of the interactive data plots – I invite you to go nerd out for a few minutes!

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