High School FAQS

All SAS students have a login and password for Cialfo. By logging in they can see personal information such as their test scores, GPA's and scattergrams of college acceptance data. If a password is selected and later forgotten, students must use the "I forgot my password" option on Cialfo to get a new one.

Parents of students in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade also have their own password to Cialfo. Parents of ninth graders recieve theirs in the second part of the freshman year.

People are often surprised to learn that the SAS calculated GPA is rarely used to make college admission decisions. Since each high school calculates GPA's differently, nearly all colleges recalculate a student's GPA based upon what they think is important. They may give more or less weight to honors or AP courses. They might eliminate fine arts, PE, and other courses, or drop a plus or minus. In California, for example, universities calculate a new GPA based upon sophomore and junior academic courses only. All colleges put more emphasis on academic course and the grades earned in them than they do on a GPA.

A frenzy can easily develop among students and parents when it comes to the topic of college admission. We want to avoid that. The SAS counselors feel that during the first couple of years of high school, students should concentrate on doing well in an appropriately challenging academic program and become involved in an extracurricular area or two. If they do these things, they will have a wide range of college options open to them as seniors. While the grade 9 counselors meet with the younger students individually and in groups, the focus is about being successful, involved and happy. There really are no college specific tasks that need to be completed early in high school.

No. Hardly any private college preparatory high school provides rank-in-class since to do so would put our students at a disadvantage. Think of it this way - the full range of students often found in US public schools (e.g., students who are not college bound) are not present at SAS. An SAS student could have a respectable B average and still not be in the top half of his or her class. With our talented student body, earning just a few B's in high school could also remove a student from the top 10 percent of the class. All of our students are better served by not reporting class ranks.

Since there are such a large number of schools like SAS that do not report class ranks, even those colleges that appear to "require" class ranks are able to proceed just fine without them. In a letter to SAS counselors, Kathie Fagan, Associate Director of Admission at the University of Texas - Austin has said, "I respect the reason your school chooses not to rank..." She lists the alternate criteria UT-Austin uses to analyze a student's performance when rank is not provided. All of these items are included on our school profile accompanying each student's application.

Colleges require students to send their "official" SAT, ACT and/or TOEFL scores. A score is official if it is sent from the testing agency directly to the college. This can be done through the test organization's website. SAS does not have and cannot send official scores for students. The only exception to this is AP scores. Those scores are not sent until the end of the senior year and go to a college's registrar's office so that credit can be awarded.

High schools around the world are assigned a six-digit code by the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB). This code is used by the ACT, SAT, and colleges to identify high schools. The SAS school code is 687225.

The short answer is, "Generally not until the second half of the junior year." The longer answer goes something like this: All juniors take the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) in October and the results are available in mid-December. The PSAT is just like the SAT. Unlike the SAT, however, the PSAT results are never sent to colleges. This gives students a chance to have an early indication of how they might do on the SAT without having it "count." Each time a student takes the SAT Reasoning Test, the scores become a part of the student's computer record at the SAT/ETS headquarters in the US. While it's true that most colleges "use" the best scores, colleges see all of the scores--and a low score never helps. Students who take the ACT or SAT as freshmen, sophomores or even early in the junior year are not as well prepared as they will be later--and generally the scores will be lower. Most students take the ACT or SAT Reasoning Test at the end of their junior year (May or June) and again in the beginning of their senior year (September, October, November, or December).

During late October when we get about 400 document request forms, and in early December when we get another 500, there is a backlog. Just like you can see the college’s deadlines on Cialfo, we can, too. During these peak periods we focus on those with the earliest deadlines first. Sometimes there is a delay in sending the materials because we are waiting for a recommendation letter to be completed. Once recommendations are finished we submit the documents.

For about 90% of US colleges all documents are submitted electronically and arrive at the college almost instantaneously—although there is often a week or more lag time before the college’s website shows the documents have been processed. For a few colleges we must mail transcripts, and by international agreement, documents are considered to be on time if they are postmarked by the deadline. After the semester ends in December we will automatically submit updated transcripts to all colleges in which our students have applied.

The concerns you may have heard in the past about missing transcripts were often related to backlogs in colleges’ mailrooms. Transcript were mailed but delays in college mailrooms and in the filing of documents sometimes resulted in a two to three week backlog.

If the college has their own website to track documents you should also monitor the application there—understanding that status changes on the college website may take a week or more. If you get a note from a college saying that a piece of your application is missing, DON’T PANIC. In all likelihood, it is at the office and simply hasn’t been entered into the system yet. SAS counselors have close relationships with admission officers and can troubleshoot any problems.