I decided that in the spirit of reflecting back on the past year (wait, wasn’t that Yom Kippur?) I would dig through my “Most Popular Posts” (as determined by visitor patterns!) and the ARCHIVES and make some personal picks for entries that are as much fun now as they were the day they were written. A lot of my visitors haven’t been here for the entire year I’ve been blogging, so this should help everyone to discover some good back-content.

I don’t claim that these are the 10 best, but they’re not bad. Kill some time, click some links!

10. 51 ways College Board can mis-score your SAT and ruin your life
This is a personal favorite of mine, but only ranks 31st for popularity since it was first published back in a low-traffic lull. Quite investigatory.

9. College Board to make test using background info pt. 1
This is another post where I did a lot of reading and research but there wasn’t a big enough audience to appreciate it at the time. It was posts like this that I think have earned me these frequent visits from the ‘collegeboard.com’ domain (not referrals: visitors).

8. College Visits: Yale University
Ah, July, and a week of college visits. This post with photos detailing my visit at Yale might have been a dead giveaway that it was my first choice, but I tried to stay as neutral as possible.

7. Spend a week inside my mailbox!
This is a good read for marketers, I think, because it details individual reactions to varying forms of print marketing. Fun! For a good close-up dissection, check out my observations on UChicago’s ‘Life of the Mind’ mailing.

6. Authentic? Questioning the value of student blogging
August was, apparently, the month of ’student blogging’ in my mind and this was an exploratory look at the worth of student blogs in the minds of prospectives.

5. Donor dollars trump interests of prospective students in student blogging arena
Yes, even more about student blogging. It sure was a hot topic in my mind. That must have been why Stein Communications asked me to write that article about it for their newsletter… good times.

4. Class of 2006 Senior SAT percentile scores number-crunching!
Currently this is the “most popular” post, but that’s because ‘SAT percentiles’ is a crazy-popular google search term. Still, the post was interesting as it is.

3. WSJ asks: ‘Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?’ [part 1]
This post is a little dry, I’ll admit, but it’s a good overview of Jian Li’s case as we know it. However, the real value is in the comments, where a wonderfully illustrative conversation took place. Check it out.

2. How I judge each piece of college marketing:
The longtime title-holder for reader popularity until about a month ago, this is still an excellent insight for marketers into how to design more effective marketing for prospective students. Honesty works, honestly.

and the number one post from this entire year to date is… drumroll, please…

1. Yale College, Class of 2011 / No Hesitation: Why I’m matriculating into Yale 2011
Sorry, but the news was so good these couldn’t be anything but number one!

Remember, there are 85 other posts, many of which are also great. So again, check them out in the ARCHIVES sometime or maybe do a search using my handy live search box. Explore around some!

Happy Hanukkah / Christmas / Holidays / December, everyone!