What 10th Grade Students Should Do to Start the Year off Strong

Welcome to the tenth grade! After this past year of largely remote learning, going back to school this fall semester may feel like you’re adjusting to high school again for the first time. There’s certainly a lot to familiarize yourself with: the social sphere, the course pacing, and all the benefits and pitfalls that come with daily in-person high school life. To help both prepare you for a strong academic year and set yourself up for strong admissions results further down your high school career, here’s some advice on steps to take as you adjust to your tenth grade experience.

High School Curriculum

Parents and students often ask us which courses students should be taking to make their college applications stand out. Many think that the natural answer is to take AP courses, and a lot of them—but for some high schools, very few AP courses may even be available in the 10th grade, while other schools may not offer them at all until 11th grade. How do admissions readers identify this when reading applications, and what should students do about it?

The answer: rather than valuing college applicants based on the number of AP courses they take, admissions officers instead consider each student’s subjective academic rigor. One Pepperdine admissions officer described this, in fact, as “rigor with reason”. Admissions readers don’t just count up how many APs you took or use your GPA number alone in their considerations; they will consider what courses were offered at your school and what your high school course schedule looked like each year in light of what was offered. Did your school only allow 11th graders to take APs? Did your school get rid of foreign languages recently? Admissions readers will weigh these factors and often recalculate your GPA on their own terms so that they have a more helpful value to compare you with other applicants. Thus, students and parents need not worry about a potential disadvantage to not having access to AP courses, as the admissions readers will understand the school’s restrictions, as well as the school resources that were available to students.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to be limited by your school’s course selection. If you want to explore or show excellence in a particular subject that your school doesn’t offer outright, we encourage you to go find those courses elsewhere, such as through online courses or community college classes. Some long-standing, well-qualified online programs include UC Scout, BYU Online, and Coursera, and your local community college can offer all kinds of introduction classes to new fields as well. Even better, cross-enrollment may allow you to earn additional course credit, boosting your GPA and perhaps even giving you college credit for the future!

Standardized Testing

It’s been a year of drastic change for standardized testing, from cancelled tests to many colleges’ move towards test-optional or test-blind policies. (Read more about test-optional and what it really means for colleges and college applicants here.) Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean standardized tests are obsolete, so it makes sense that many parents and 10th grade students may be concerned about preparing for the exams as soon as they can. However, as far as the actual SAT and ACT go, current 10th graders should not worry about taking the exams now; getting the tests out of the way early isn’t crucially beneficial, and students will want to wait for the 10th and 11th grade curriculums to go over more SAT and ACT-relevant test material before taking the tests.

One test 10th graders will likely be taking this year is the PSAT/NMSQT, or the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which serves both as an official practice of sorts for the SAT proper while also awarding high test scorers with college scholarship opportunities. We do not recommend any official preparation for this test; instead, 10th graders are encouraged to keep their focus on their usual studies and activities. 

Extracurricular Activities

Ideally, you spent much of 9th grade exploring your interests, in the classroom and in extracurriculars alike. Keep pursuing those interests by committing to extracurriculars that match them! Fine-tuning your interests into concrete experiences will not only be great for your personal development, but also for your college applications down the road, when you’ll want to provide evidence that you put valuable time into your interests.

However, if you’re still unsure about your interests, don’t worry too much—it’s okay if 10th graders don’t have their interests completely sorted out already. There is still time for you to explore! If you’re very confident in your skills in a certain academic subject, or if you think you have a passion for teaching others, you could try tutoring (Quarantutors, for example, is a free online tutoring service that is actively recruiting high school students to teach K - 12 students. Apply to be a tutor for calculus, chemistry, creative writing, foreign language, and more here). Maybe you want to pick up a new skill, like coding or painting—look up introductory material online and try your hand at it. If you have a niche interest you’d love to pursue more in an organized club, but your school doesn’t offer any related activities, you could even start a club of your own.

Time Management, Study Habits, and Prioritization 

What is critical for 10th graders this year is to focus on developing (or strengthening!) time management and study habits, especially given the return to in-person learning. Going from spending some 6 hours on Zoom and even more time online for homework to sitting in a classroom and doing in-person extracurricular activities again requires a drastic change in learning habits and self-pacing, and that transition is going to be difficult.

There are certainly many study methods students can use—the Pomodoro Technique, for one, is a great way to keep you on track with your workload while also mitigating exhaustion. Following this technique, students spend a certain amount of time working, followed by a short break, usually starting with 25 minutes working and a 5 minute break. Consistency of the routine is what makes the Pomodoro method effective, and students can feel free to experiment with the exact timing for their schedule and workload.

Every individual student has a different time management system that works for them. What is consistently important, however, is learning how to prioritize.Your homework, extracurriculars, hobbies—not everything on your to-do list is equal, and figuring out which task is of higher priority is the first step to effective time management. Take a look at the diagram below:

In our webinar with Phoebe Jue, we used this framework to explain that we want to live in quadrants 1 and 2 as much as possible in order to plan and control our schedules and activities. If students don’t understand their priorities, their homework might only get done when students try to cram it all in with an all-nighter, which is extremely hard to manage long-term.

To put this framework into perspective, let’s imagine a student with four upcoming activities. Today is Monday. 

• There is a math quiz on Wednesday.

• You also have a vocabulary quiz next Monday.

• You want to play video games with friends tomorrow night. 

• Your friend asked you to read through his essay, which is due tomorrow. 

The math quiz coming up on Wednesday would be urgent and important. Urgent, since it is a deadline coming up soon, and important because it has an explicit impact on your grade. Thus, this activity is in quadrant 1.

The vocabulary quiz next Monday would be important but not urgent. It doesn’t have as urgent of a deadline as the math quiz, so we can plan on studying vocabulary later. Studying for the vocabulary quiz is in quadrant 2 for now but will likely become a quadrant 1 task in a few days. 

Video games with your friends may seem like a quadrant 4 activity: not important, not urgent. That said, if video games are your way to relax, we think it should be quadrant 2: important but not urgent. Many hobbies will fall into this category, and with hobbies, the goal is not to eliminate them but to manage your time doing them. Moderation is key. Although it is more common for students to play video games for too long, it’s also possible that a student reads too many books and forgets about an assignment, or didn’t allocate enough time to finish baking cookies and now needs to juggle another task. 

Your friend that needs the essay help is a quadrant 3 task: urgent but not important. Yes, it may seem mean or rude to tell your friend that you can’t read through it, but you need to study for your math quiz since that impacts your grades. Your friend’s essay grade may be important to him or her, but it is not important to you. Beware of being too nice in these situations and overcommitting at your detriment. 

We recommend that students list out all their activities for the week and fill out this chart at least once just to see where all their activities are! Most students find that they can move items around, especially hobbies and fun activities, from quadrant 4 to quadrant 2 to try and allocate their time a little better.

The topics we’ve discussed here are advice and steps we use to plan with our own students. If you’d like to see how we can tailor a specific plan for you, feel free to request a free consultation!