CareerCampaign.com

College Counseling --> FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why aptitude testing for the teen?

Our college admission counseling and testing services are equally appropriate for high-school juniors and seniors about to choose a school or major, children and adults with learning disabilities, as well as to career changers.

What type of college should I attend? What should I choose for a major? How do I make an intelligent choice of careers? The college counselors use attributes testing to give young students knowledge about themselves and their abilities so they can more easily find answers to difficult questions like these. This is a major part of educational counseling and career college planning.

2. How can testing help me choose a college and major?

Many people do not think much about the future until they have graduated. Career college planning is often ignored. Family and financial commitments may make it difficult to change careers. The best time to ask these necessary questions is when you are in your teen years. A college advisor who does not represent a particular school can be a powerful college counselor and education counselor to help you see a clearer picture.

The choices of a school and a major are a college-bound student's most immediate concerns. There are over 3,400 colleges and universities in the United States, and they offer more than 230 major courses of study, ranging from architecture and accounting to engineering, mathematics, psychology, and zoology.

Because of the problems of variety and cost, it has become more important than ever to plan your education carefully with education counseling. Testing administered by a college counseling professional can provide critical information to begin. The education counselor will interpret the instruments and the more information available to you, the better your decision will be.

Certainly, college counselors can help you appraise your interests, academic achievements, and personality characteristics. Your parents can give you the benefit of their experiences. But most important is knowing yourself-knowing your own attributes. You will benefit more from your education counseling when you have at least a general idea of your goals, values and interests determined by evaluating a number of factors.

3. What are your aptitudes?

Aptitudes are natural talents--special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things easily and quickly. They have little to do with knowledge or culture, or education, or even interests. Musical talent and artistic talent are examples of such aptitudes.

Some people can paint beautifully but cannot carry a tune. Others are good at talking to people but slow at paperwork. Still others can easily repair a car but find writing difficult. These basic differences among people are important factors in making one person satisfied as a banker, another satisfied as an engineer, and still another satisfied working as an editor.

Every occupation, whether it is engineering, medicine, law, or management, uses certain characteristics. The work you are most likely to enjoy and find satisfying is that which uses your aptitudes. must have knowledge. Personal attributes suggest the directions in which learning might best take place, but they are no substitute for the learning itself.

Our attributes testing program assists you in discovering the course of study and the type of work that will fit your pattern; it will help you to understand why certain courses of study and occupations are likely to be more satisfying or rewarding than others.

4. What is a good age to take the tests?

That is an excellent question. We test students as young as fourteen; many students find it is useful to wait until junior or senior year in high school. The testing can provide the younger student helpful information for choosing high school courses and extracurricular activities. However, younger students often have not yet held any part-time jobs and are not aware of all the career opportunities available to them. A junior or senior in high school, on the other hand, would get help selecting the types of colleges and possible majors that would work well for his or her attributes pattern. Some students prefer to wait until they are sophomores in college to help them declare an appropriate major. We encourage parents to get involved in helping make this decision.

5. Why Should Adults Take Aptitude Tests?

A mother came to our office for a discussion of her teenage daughter's attributes pattern. She listened intently to the explanation of her scores. Afterwards she remarked to the test administrator, "I wish I had been tested when I was still in high school or college. Now I suppose it's too late."

We often encounter this attitude of doubt regarding the value of attributes testing for people past the age of 30. The basic assumption behind this feeling is that a young person in high school has more options available for the use of his or her attributes. Granting that this is often true, we still feel there are many situations in which aptitude testing may prove useful for those over 30, and one should not automatically decide it's "too late" to be tested.

6. How does Self-Knowledge advance my career search

The ultimate goal of our testing program is to help people learn about their skills and aptitudes and areas in which these attributes might be put to use. This knowledge may seem superfluous or unnecessary to the executive recently laid off. But employment experts agree the first step in looking for a new job is to learn more about yourself. Attributes testing can provide an unbiased outside assessment of the inherent abilities you can offer a potential employer.