In-depth | 4 The Mount December 2019 In-depth | 5

10 STEPS TO THE COLLEGE APLICATION PROCESS

02 FORMULATE A LISTForm a list of your favorite colleges. One of these will most likely be your future school so make sure you have a wide range of options that still match your desires.

03REFINE YOUR LISTOrder your schools from your most desired to your least. Also put them in categories such as reach schools, target schools, and safety schools. All of this will help you in the application process and in your decision.

04VISIT SCHOOLSPick a few of your favorite schools or schools you want to know more about and sched-ule a visit. Visits offer you insight into what life on their campus is like. From classes to living conditions, every college is unique and visit-ing is a great way of experiencing every-thing a college has to offer.

05TEST TAKINGSign up to take the ACT or SAT a month in advance. Study throughout the month prior or even before that to give you the best shot at a good score. Schools look at these scores when considering your application, and they can make or break their decision.

06COMPLETE APPLICATIONSThe application is what the college will judge you on and is therefore a crucial part of the process. You must show colleges everything you have accomplished in the last four years leading up to college. In your application you are telling the college who you are and how you can benefit their school.

07SEND IN EARLY APPLICATIONSChoose your top one or two choices in which you can apply early too. Applying early to some schools can help your chanc-es of getting in and to others it just expe-dites the process and you receive your decision so that you get it back sooner.

08 SEND IN REGULAR APPLICATIONSSend in your applications to all the other schools you are interested in excluding the schools you applied early to and wait for results to come back in the mail or online.

09 RECEIVE DECISIONSAfter a few stressful months of waiting collg-es send their decision either in the mail or online via email. Colleges will inform you if you are accepted into their school.

10FINAL DECISONAfter all the work is over you are left with your final decision. You must choose between the schools that accepted you. Take your time and choose wisely because it is a decision that will impact the rest of your life.

RESEARCHThink about characteristics that you enjoy in a school, or career paths you want to take. Research which schools match your results or which school peak your interest.01

Senior year should be filled with great memories of friends, sports, and extracurriculars. However, mil-lions of high school seniors spend countless hours throughout their fi-nal year preparing their resumé for college applications. It is extremely dystopian of our society to force stu-dents to spend hours and hours in preparation simply to apply to these multi-billion dollar institutions in the hopes that they may be accepted.

Certain students may spend their four years of high school participat-ing in sports or extracurriculars for college applications. Most who do this have no actual interest in the club or sport that they spend their time in but participate in these particular ac-tivities just because they look good on college applications.

Not only do students spend too much time preparing to apply to these schools, but the whole entire process

is also flawed. For example, some students are accepted solely be-cause of their economic standing and race, while, at the same time, others are rejected for it. Just last year, Harvard’s undergraduate ad-missions was accused of discrim-inating against Asian-American applicants.

On top of that, the college ad-missions process is riddled with corruption. In 2013, it was discov-ered that several rings of students had people take the SAT for them so that they could have a higher score. Along with this, a more re-cent controversy occurred when certain applicants were accepted into prestigious universities be-cause their affluent parents faked test scores and bribed college ath-letic officials to recruit them as athletes. The easiest way to resolve issues with corruption in the col-

lege admissions process is to create a government agency that more closely monitors college admis-sions and regulates them.

The largest issue with the col-lege admissions process is how it portrays an inaccurate version of applicants. It chooses two objective numbers that essentially contrib-ute to over fifty percent of a per-son’s application. These two num-bers are a student’s GPA and ACT or SAT score. Meanwhile, the rest of someone’s application is actual-ly subjective and more accurately displays an applicant’s personality. This could be done away with if colleges added different, more in-trospective essay topics and allow-ing for more interviews to be done.

While standardized tests are a good baseline, an ACT or SAT test score, in the end, assesses only one’s ability to take the test.

This can be shown by the hundreds of online and in-person classes that guarantee a certain amount of point increase on the ACT or SAT. Also, a study led by Herman Anguinis says that, on average, ACT and SAT scores are somewhat inaccurate when it comes to predicting freshman year GPA. Overall, the SAT and ACT don’t need to be done away with but rather redone so that the test is an actual demonstration of intelligence.

The college admissions process is out of date. It emphasizes small things about a person without taking into account their work ethic and person-ality, not to mention how every five to seven years there is some sort of a college admissions scandal. The only way to fix this process it through an entire rework of it that emphasizes an individual’s accomplishments, in-telligence, and work ethic rather than scores and background.

ACT scores are often looked to as a repre-sentation of a school’s success, and, year after year, Mount Michael tops the list of school average ACT scores in Nebraska.

Because it has become so commonplace here, students may not see the stories be-hind the scores.

Every year, students put in extra effort to set themselves on track for their futures and push themselves for a higher score on the exam.

The first time Andree Kakish ‘20 took the test, he got a 26. He decided that, for the fu-ture he wanted, his score simply was not high enough, so he studied.

“I did Aim High test prep and I ended up raising my score 5 points from a 26 to a 31,” Kakish said.

After getting the 31, Kakish still wanted a better score. Starting over a month out from the September 2019 test, he spent 2-4 hours each night studying. He primarily reviewed his old Aim High materials and took frequent practice tests.

“Sometimes, I would get up early in the morning before school to get studying in, because, sometimes, there just wasn’t enough time after school with football and home-work,” he said.

On the September test, Kakish scored a 35, raising 9 points from his initial 26. He is not the only student who put in daily effort to put their best foot forward. Evan Schroder ‘20 also studied hard with the added challenge of a sometimes distracting boarding life.

“Between 8 and 10 p.m. I would go down-stairs to a classroom,” Schroder said. “I re-taught myself from my Aim High course for the April ACT.”

On the April test, Schroeder scored a 32, but he hopes to get his score up to a 34 from the October test.

“I kind of motivated myself through fail-ure, and I knew that I couldn’t go to Johns Hopkins if I didn’t get my score up,” Schroder said. “Once you get into studying it’s okay. If you separate yourself from the distractions, it

can be pretty easy to put in the time.”With near- ly all ACT success stories,

there is a common theme: daily effort and studies. Counselor Noelle Hinrickson has experience with the test prep programs 3MT, Aim High, and John Baylor used by high-scoring students, but, in her opinion, the program is not the deciding success fac-tor.

“It’s not about what program you use to prepare; it’s about how much you prepare,” she said. “It really is the daily preparation and commitment that gives you good results where you can see a 3 or 4 or even higher score jump.”

As underclassmen, students have little say over the majority of their class schedules.

A few elective classes, such as Introduc-tion to Architecture or Academic Decathlon, are available, but their core classes are set in stone.

Many upperclassmen wonder why as freshmen and sophomores they were not able to enroll in Advanced Placement or honors classes.

The school administration recognizes the rigidness of underclassmen schedules, but, according to head of school David Peters, they feel the “core curriculum, is what we want our students to take, it is very essential.”

Offering AP classes to younger students was a topic of discussion at the most recent meeting between the principals of Nebraska Catholic high schools.

Peters said that the schools that do offer the courses to freshmen or sophomores don’t find the success rate that Mount Michael sees with its juniors and seniors.

“We think that, by reserving them for ju-niors and seniors, that our success rate is bet-ter, and they’re more mature [academically] to handle it,” he said. “We don’t really have a great rationale to put them into the freshmen or sophomore’s curriculum.”

Some students disagree with this sen-timent.

“I think it’s kinda unfair. I hear these public school guys talking about [taking] 12 plus AP classes,” Trenton Sedlacek ‘20 said. “It’s just kinda unfair that we can’t take them earlier.”

Sedlacek also feels as though under-classmen who know that they can handle tougher classes like AP courses “should be able to load up their schedules” with what-ever they are willing to put in the work for.

Sometimes it is just a matter of the diffi-culty of the course content.

“If I had the chance to take an easier AP course as an underclassman, I would have,” Dane Storch ‘21 said. “I would want to make sure I could keep my grades up.”

Other students agree with the school ad-ministration’s logic about whether many of the underclassmen students would be suc-cessful taking more difficult coursework.

“Kids would overload their schedule with way too many AP classes and get over-whelmed,” Max Swiniarski ‘20 said. “I think they should get a feel for the environment first.”

The school administration has no plans to change how they handle the core curriculum for the students.

Underclassmen are unlikely to get the opportunity to schedule AP classes anytime soon.

Months of preparation leads to standardized test success

Editorial: Application process warps true perspective of college applicant

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Mount Mich

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AP Statistics

AP Computer Science Principles

AP Computer Science A

AP Calculus BC

AP Calculus AB

AP World History: Modern

AP United States History

AP United States Government and Politics

AP Psychology

AP Microeconomics

AP Macroeconomics

AP Human Geography

AP European History

AP Comparative Government

AP English Literature and Composition

AP English Language and Composition

AP Music Theory

AP Drawing

AP Art History

AP 3-D Art and Design

AP 2-D Art and Design

AP Biology

AP Spanish Literature and Culture

AP Spanish Language and Culture

AP Latin

AP Japanese Language and Culture

AP Italian Language and Culture

AP French Language and Culture

AP Chinese Language and Culture

AP Physics C: Mechanics

AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism

AP Physics II: Algebra-Based

AP Physics I: Algebra-Based

AP Environmental Science

AP Chemistry

10 Steps of the Application Process

Comparing AP Classes Among Omaha Catholic Schools

PREPPING FOR STRESS

BY KOLTON KOUBSKY BY BRAYDEN WHITAKER

Students seeking edge worry about lack of AP course offerings

Illustration by Kolton Koubsky

Photo by Henry Hohman

BY ALEXANDER SCHRIER AND SAM WOOTENBY HENRY HOHMAN

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