Part of being a high school student is making a lot of decisions about which classes to take. While your foreign language courses may not be as critical to colleges as, say, which math classes you took, they are still something colleges look at and use to determine if you'd be a good fit for their school.

Also, if you play your cards right, the language you choose to study in high school could have a big impact on your future. I chose to study French and with my language skills I have been able to participate in an exchange with French high school students, get a job improving African schools, and spend a year in France teaching English.

I'll go over what colleges look for in foreign language study as well as the steps you need to follow in order to choose the best language for you.

If your grades have been on the lower side in high school, you might be wondering what steps you can take to improve your situation before you appy to college. With a C average, you may run into some trouble in the application process, so you should start taking measures to mitigate these problems now.

In this article, I'll go over what a C average means for you and how you can make smart changes to your academic strategies to end up with better prospects for college.

Because The Great Gatsby is nine chapters long, getting to Chapter 5 means that we’ve arrived in the exact middle of the story. Thus, it makes sense that this chapter takes a single event - Daisy and Gatsby’s perfectly romantic reunion - and uses it to both tie together everything that has been set up so far, and also to create such a delicate balance of safety and happiness that it’s clear that everything will soon crumble.

But before the bubble of love pops, enjoy the world’s most magical, most carefully planned “accidental” date.

There's a reason why magazines regularly put together lists of the greatest first lines in all of literature: book openings make a huge impression on readers. How a book starts helps us orient in the world that the book is creating.

First, it gives us our first idea of the narrator, and the type of narration we're going to encounter. Will it be a breathy first-person confession? Or a cool and detached third-person observation?

Second, it introduces the setting, letting us know where and when the story takes place - which is very important for modulating reader expectations. What we think about two people kissing in prim and proper Victorian England will be very different than what we think about the same couple in modern day Canada.

So what does the beginning of The Great Gatsby reveal? Read on for the meaning of this work's epigraph, its opening line, and its beginning paragraphs.

Act 2 of The Crucible takes us to the Proctor household, where we learn just how crazy things have gotten in Salem after the initial flood of accusations. We'll also find out the extent to which John Proctor's relationship with Elizabeth has suffered after his affair. By the end of Act 2, characters who were thought to be beyond reproach will find themselves in mortal peril as a result of unchecked hysteria.

Fresh from the world of organized parties that we saw in Chapter 3, now we dive head-first into the world of organized crime. In The Great Gatsby Chapter 4, our narrator Nick gets a short private audience with one of New York's premier gangsters - Meyer Wolfshiem, Gatsby's business partner. But, just as Chapter 4 exposes the seamy side of get-rich-quick East Coast life, we also learn the origin story of Gatsby's love for Daisy.

So, basically: come to The Great Gatsby Chapter 4 for human teeth as jewelry, stay for the thwarted romance.

When you think of how you want to spend your summer vacation, sitting in a classroom is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. However, summer school can be a great way for you to get ahead in high school and give yourself an advantage in college admissions.

These days students with all kinds of grades take summer classes. You might take summer school to understand a particular subject better, to free up more time in your schedule during the school year, or to take an advanced class at your high school, nearby college, or online.

Read this complete guide on summer school for high school students to learn everything you need to know about what summer school is, why people take it, and how you can use it to get ahead.

The road to a good GPA can be paved with setbacks, but if you figure out where your problems lie and put in the effort to get yourself back on track, you can overcome these obstacles. In this article, I’ve compiled a list of dos and don’ts that will be helpful to you in combating academic pitfalls (and learning to avoid them in the first place!).

Read on to figure out how you can improve your GPA by paying attention to your areas of weakness, taking responsibility, and cultivating better study habits.

Do you go to school in California? Chances are you’ve heard of the CAHSEE – the exam all Californians need to take to graduate high school.

You might be wondering how to pass the CAHSEE. In this post, we will explain what the CAHSEE tests, what you need to do to pass, and how to study for it.

Attending a tough high school can certainly affect some of your performance statistics. It's natural to wonder whether these shifts in your numbers are going to affect your chances of college admission. In this article, we cover what colleges are really concerned with when they look at your record, and we explain why you don't need to be worried if your high school is especially hard.

A college fair may not feature popcorn and carnival rides—sorry, folks!—but they are a great source of information for prospective college students. Coming prepared with a detailed plan, including a list of questions to ask at a college fair, will make sure you get the most out of your experience. This is often your first chance to meet with a school's representatives, so use that time wisely!

The hottest news in college admissions these days is the release of documents from the lawsuit filed against Harvard University for unfair admissions practices against Asian-Americans. For the first time in recent memory, an elite institution's opaque admissions practices have been laid bare. More than 90,000 pages of internal Harvard admissions documents have been made available for use in the lawsuit, with excerpts made publicly available in court filings.

In this article, I'll summarize what this lawsuit is about and what we learned about how top-tier schools like Harvard choose which students to accept. (Spoiler: most of it confirms what I wrote about in my How to Get Into Harvard guide. If you haven't read that, I suggest you open it in a tab right now, and read it after you finish this article).

Most importantly, we'll cover what this means for how YOU should be preparing for college admissions.

The 2018 PSAT is coming up in mid-to-late October, and scores should come out by mid-December.

When you get your score report, you'll see a bunch of different kinds of scores, including your total score (out of 1520), your section scores (out of 760), and your Selection Index (out of 228).

Sorting through all of this data to figure out what's a good PSAT score can be tricky, so we've written this guide to understanding your PSAT score report. We'll begin with a quick run-through of the different types of PSAT scores, then get into how you can figure out how your score compares to that of other students.

Answering questions on multiple passages is a little different from answering questions on just one passage. Some of the same advice is still applicable, but there are strategies specific to multipassage questions as well. I’ll go over the different topics you might see covered in paired passages on the SAT as well as giving strategies for paired passage questions.

Even if prepping for the SAT or ACT isn't the most enjoyable of activities, it's easy to see why it's important to do well on these tests. Depending on your point of view, SAT and ACT scores are either tools that colleges use to help figure out if you're a good match for them and if you'll succeed at their schools...or are admissions gatekeepers that you have to conquer if you want to attend most American colleges*.

By contrast, PSAT scores are never seen by colleges. Even if you get a perfect score on the PSAT, it's really only useful for helping you qualify for a National Merit Scholarship—something that only US citizens and permanent residents are eligible for.

So why prep for the PSAT, and what do you need to know about PSAT prep if you're interested in trying it out? Keep reading to find out more about the pros and cons of focused PSAT prep (rather than joint PSAT/SAT prep) and what our PSAT prep recommendations are.