What 11th Grade Students Should Do to Start the Year off Strong

Congrats! You are already halfway done with high school, and college applications are looming over the horizon. While there’s still distance between you and your senior year, there’s much that 11th graders should do now to set themselves up for strong admissions results in their senior year. Here, we’ll cover the steps that 11th graders should take to be thoroughly prepared for this monumental academic year!

Standardized Testing

First, let’s address the elephant in the room for juniors: what should you do to plan for standardized tests? 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.) 

However, despite this drift away from standardized testing, these tests are not yet obsolete. If you plan on taking the SAT I or ACT, don’t feel as if you need to rush these tests and take them as soon as possible. Although there are testing dates available as early as Fall 2021, you have until Spring 2022 to take them, giving you plenty of time to first take practice exams and refine your understanding of the necessary material. 

Course Curriculum 

There’s a greater degree of variety when it comes to 11th grade course options, much more than students have experienced in the 9th and 10th grades. From language and niche electives to AP courses to perhaps even different specializations of science classes, juniors now face the difficulties that come with choice. Parents and students often ask if there are any particular classes 11th graders should add to their course schedule to boost their chances in the college application process, such as specific AP classes or a certain level of math. However, the answer is not very straightforward.

On one hand, it’s true that admissions officers will generally look upon more challenging classes with more favor. However, their evaluation of students’ course selections aren’t as cut-and-dry as GPA decimals and AP course count. As a Pepperdine admissions officer once said, college admissions boards often look for “rigor with reason” when evaluating students’ coursework—colleges want to see that students challenged themselves, but they consider these challenging courses in light of factors such as your course schedule in previous years and the classes your school actually offers. Did your school only allow 11th graders to take APs? Did your school need to downsize the visual and performing arts programs? Maybe you’re taking a small handful of difficult classes, but are you taking more challenging courses than you did last year, which may show academic growth on your part? 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. Therefore, students and parents shouldn’t worry too much 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.

The key here is to communicate to the colleges that you are ready to challenge yourself when it comes to a college-level course load. With wider course selection options and access to more difficult classes, junior year gives you many opportunities to demonstrate your academic readiness to colleges, come application season.

Extracurriculars and Third-Party Validation

Now that you’re an 11th grader, you’ve hopefully accumulated interests and experiences over your past few years of high school, from the courses you’ve enjoyed taking to the clubs you’ve joined and the extracurriculars to which you’ve devoted your free time. Ideally, you’ve learned not only which activities you enjoy, but also which activities make you want to groan aloud just from thinking about them, and you’ve chosen your interests accordingly. In the 11th grade, we now want you to take these activities to the next level—with a little something our ILUMIN consultants call “third-party validation”.  

“Third-party validation” is a term our ILUMIN consultants often use when discussing the 11th grade. You may not have heard of this term before, and if you have, it may have been used in the context of business or product testing. Third-party validation means that a company will test a new product or service with a third party before going to the open market, in hopes that the third party will validate the strength, qualities, or appeal of the product or service. Usually, third-party validation can mean that a product or service is well-tested and can lead to great reviews or high praise. An example in our everyday world are Yelp or Google reviews; these days, it is rare to go into a new restaurant without going on Yelp or Google reviews to see how others thought about the food. 

At ILUMIN, we use the term “third-party validation” as a way to help students understand how to stand out in the admissions process. Admissions readers may have as few as three minutes to quickly understand the caliber of the student’s profile in front of them. Test scores and GPA are important here, but having third-party validations listed on your resume is important for admissions readers’ quick evaluation as well. For example, consider an admissions reader comparing two students interested in majoring in Computer Science. Candidate A’s resume cites AP Computer Science as their leading driver for studying CS; Candidate B, on the other hand, cites that they built an app with over 1000 downloads that helped the food insecure track food banks in his county. Which student profile are you more intrigued about and would want to spend more time reading?

Hopefully you answered candidate B—and many admissions readers would agree with you! APCS is great, but to stand out as a top applicant, students need to have more on their application, especially on their resume section, where they can highlight activities, accomplishments, and impact. Candidate B’s example above is a third-party validation. It communicates to the admissions reader that 1) the student programmed an application, 2) they were able to get it published online, 3) the magnitude of the application (it got over 1000 downloads), and 4) they were able to impact a group of people—in this example, the food-insecure. Candidate B was able to communicate all four of these points in just a sentence or so on his or her resume. The power of third-party validation is that it quickly communicates a student’s skill, talents, or abilities. This way, rather than you needing to explain and defend your resume, your resume vouches for you. 

How Do I Get Third-Party Validations?

So: third-party validations are great for your college applications. But how do you get them, and what truly constitutes a third-party validation?

There are two factors when considering third-party validations: reputation and scale of impact. Because the point of a third-party validation is to communicate skills and talents quickly, an internship at a lab under a professor at Stanford is going to stand out more compared to a personal project; that said, if you are able to win a local science fair with that personal project or you were able to utilize your findings to develop a solution that others could use, the scale of impact becomes greater. This is not to say that one example is necessarily better than the other, as both of these would be great examples of third-party validation. 

Here are some common examples of third-party validations that may work for you:

• Leadership (President, Treasurer, Secretary of a School Club or Outside Activity): Since these positions are usually elected or appointed by others with more qualifications, a leadership position can show that others have great trust in your ability to lead, as well as your expertise in the subject matter.

• Awards/Competitions (Science Fairs, USACO, AMIE): Winning competitions or achieving excellence in one can communicate your skill level to an admissions reader immediately. For example, USACO (USA Computing Olympiad) Gold usually means that the student is within the top 10% of competitors for USACO—a high achievement with a weight admissions officers can quickly recognize and value.

• Internships/Jobs (Research at a University, Shadow Opportunities, Part-Time Jobs): These experiences show that a student’s talents are at a level such that a company or organization is interested in adding those talents to their team.

If you want some more suggestions or want to chat more in-depth about what third-party validation can look like for you, feel free to request a free consultation with us!