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Home › College Admissions Consulting › Admissions Counseling FAQ
Admissions Counseling Frequently Asked Questions
That’s completely understandable—choosing an admissions consultant is a big decision, and we want you to feel confident before you commit.
We recommend two things:
The best first step is scheduling a free consultation call. You’ll speak with one of our expert Academic Advisors who can walk you through our process, answer your specific questions, and help you figure out whether we’re the right fit. The call is free, with no obligation and no pressure.
The second option is to experience the process firsthand. Every package comes with a 3-day risk-free trial. After your first consulting session, you have three full days to decide if it feels right. If it doesn’t, just let us know. We can either refund 100% of what you paid or match you with a different consultant. Full details are in our Terms of Service.
We assign you a single personal consultant who follows you throughout the entire application process, through every school and essay. We believe one dedicated person who understands your full background yields far better outcomes than the fragmented approach some competitors use, where multiple ‘specialists’ each own one piece of your application. The result there is that no single person ever fully understands your complete profile or tells your story cohesively.
Your consultant is also backed by additional layers of support. They can consult our Admissions Advisory Panel, composed of three former Admissions Officers from the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and Rice University, for additional perspective on your application. PrepScholar administrators also oversee all students in our College Admissions Counseling packages, guiding application strategy and narrative development. You’ll have multiple expert eyes on your application at every stage.
Every PrepScholar admissions consultant has a proven track record of student acceptances at competitive colleges. They are educated at Ivy League institutions or Top 20 universities and experienced across every stage of the admissions process, from profile building and school list strategy to essay coaching and final application review. Collectively, our team has over 100 years of college admissions experience.
But credentials alone aren’t the whole picture. We carefully match each student with the consultant best suited to their goals, strengths, target schools, and personal background. The result is a dedicated mentor who understands your student’s full picture and knows exactly how to position them for the schools that matter most.
All of our consultants are overseen by our Head of Admissions, a Johns Hopkins graduate with 10+ years of counseling experience, who supervises every match and maintains high quality standards across the program.
We personally and thoughtfully recommend the best consultant based on your profile.
We start our work by getting to know you in depth. With the help of our Student Profile Questionnaire (and optional Parent Questionnaire), we ask relevant questions about your academic profile, challenges, and admissions goals. To gain a deeper understanding, we also ask thought-provoking questions to get your insights about your formative years, personal interests, hopes, and dreams.
Your questionnaire is personally reviewed by our Head of Admissions, a John Hopkins graduate with 10+ years of counseling experience. They have worked closely with all the consultants on our team and understand their areas of specialization and track record. Based on your answers, our Head of Admissions matches you with the best consultant to help you reach your goals.
Our matching process is carefully designed and consistently leads to successful consultant and student matches; as a result, reassignment is virtually never necessary. However, if the need for a reassignment arises, we are happy to accommodate such a request.
Our goal is to maximize your chances at the schools that excite you most, while making sure you always have strong, real options to fall back on.
We build your school list with you, blending our expertise with your goals, interests, and preferences. Whether you’re starting from scratch or already have a solid draft that needs a second pair of expert eyes, we’ll help you shape a well-balanced list you feel excited about.
That list will include a mix of safety, target, and reach schools. As a rough guide: safety schools are those where we estimate a >70% chance of admission; reach schools are those below 20%; and target schools fall in between.
Your chances at any given school depend on a range of factors, including your GPA, course rigor, SAT/ACT scores, extracurricular involvement, letters of recommendation, essays, awards and honors, and athletic recruitment (where applicable), weighed against each school’s admissions rate and average academic profile.
We recommend applying to a well-balanced list that’s long enough to keep great options open, but not so long that the quality of your applications starts to suffer. For most students, that sweet spot is around 16 schools.
If you’re a competitive applicant targeting highly selective schools (admission rates below 10%), a balanced list might look like 8 reach schools, 5 target schools, and 3 safety schools—all of which you’d genuinely be happy to attend.
One practical note: applying to multiple University of California campuses counts as a single school toward your package total.
As for which package is right for you. Our Complete Admissions Package comes in four tiers covering up to 7, 12, 16, or 20 applications. Our Academic Advisors can help you figure out which tier fits your list during your free consultation.
Your SAT, ACT, and AP/IB scores are meaningful factors in your application, so test strategy is built into our advising from the start. The Complete Admissions Package includes:
Test-taking decisions — whether sitting for additional tests will meaningfully strengthen your application at your target schools
Overall test prep strategy — how to study effectively and track your progress
Test date timing – when to take tests in relation to college application deadlines
Timeline management and accountability — keeping test prep integrated into your overall application schedule
Students enrolled in multi-year packages receive complimentary access to PrepScholar’s Complete SAT or ACT Prep program—a $495 value.
If you need additional support on test content beyond what’s covered through advising, all PrepScholar Admissions students are eligible for significant discounts on our SAT prep, ACT prep, and 1-on-1 tutoring programs.
Our process is fully online and built around consistent, structured communication. You’ll connect with your consultant through regular live video calls via Zoom or Google Meet for strategy sessions, brainstorming, essay reviews, and progress check-ins. Between calls, all document work, including essay drafts and application materials, is handled through email and our online portal, which connects to Google Drive and Google Docs for easy collaboration.
We work with students across the US and internationally, including India, China, Europe, and the Middle East, and are accustomed to navigating time zone differences. Many of our consultants are available as early as 6 AM ET or as late as 11 PM ET to accommodate your schedule.
No matter where you are, the experience is seamless and fully supported.
The first steps vary a bit depending on which program you’ve enrolled in, but the foundation is the same: we start by getting to know you deeply.
If you’re in the Complete Admissions Package, here’s what happens right away:
We send you our Complete Student Profile Questionnaire (and an optional Parent Questionnaire), which includes a thoughtful set of questions about your academic background, key influences, goals, and more. This usually takes 2–5 hours and is designed to help us understand your full story before your first consultant meeting. We then match you with your personal consultant and schedule a live video chat where your consultant digs deeper into your background. Parents are welcome and encouraged to join this call.
From there, we build your college list and overall application strategy together. What schools belong on your list? What’s the narrative thread that ties your experiences together? What story will make colleges excited to admit you? That’s where our work takes shape, and we stay with you through every application, every essay, and every decision until you’ve heard back from all your schools and accepted your top pick.
If you’re in the Annual Mentorship Package, we start with a slightly different Student Profile Questionnaire (and optional Parent Questionnaire), then match you with your consultant before shifting into your 12-month profile-building plan covering extracurriculars, summer activities, coursework, major exploration, and early SAT/ACT strategy. The goal is to make sure you’re as competitive as possible well before senior year begins.
Ready to get started? Schedule your free consultation today.
Yes! Our referral program is a perfect way to help someone find the right admissions consulting service while also earning a referral reward for yourself.
If you know someone who could benefit from working with PrepScholar Admissions, please share their contact information with us or send them our way. As a token of our appreciation, for every referral that you send our way that results in a purchase, we will send you a Gift Card with a value of 5% of the purchased package’s price.
This offer applies to current/past PrepScholar Admissions clients. The purchased package must be our Complete Admissions Package, Annual Mentorship Package, a Multi-Year package, or a Full Essay Service. To refer someone or to ask any questions, please call (866) 811 5546 or email [email protected]