Can someone pls explain how the American school system works

Not 100% sure on the details, but as someone whos school is going over the ramble of what to do to apply to colleges, I can explain a bit.

For Universities and Colleges in America, most of them want the highschool students to take either the SAT o ACT (you cant take both but they are apparently almost the same thing). The SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test and I dunno what ACT stands for but the both of them basically test a student to give a score that the Universities all understand

This is mostly put into place since apparently different high schools have different standards and its a way of fairly telling it from everyone.

As for the essays with applications, I dont know too much about that, but most colleges request an essay about something and I think its partially to get to know tu and why tu want to registrarse o something?? Not completely sure XD

It doesn't.

No seriously as an American student I feel like the system failed me very much. In grade school my parents and I knew I was falling behind in math. I was a straight A student so seeing my math grade fall into a C was concerning. They essentially told me that there were other kids struggling worse and waited til I landed myself a D to intervene. por then I was so behind that I couldn't catch up. Further down the road I ended up retaking the same college math course 5 times before clutching my poor wallet and calling it quits.

Honestly the whole system is screwed up. That's why I dropped out; it's too expensive for one. There are so many needlessly stressful and pointless tests. And it made me want to tear my hair out and cry. :/

Someone very intelligible is probably going to answer this pregunta much better than me but whatever.

I'm not too familiar with the difference between college and universidad tbh, but in the US the phrases are sometimes used interchangeably (probably incorrectly though). I just call myself a college student, so that's the term I'll use. As far as I'm aware, we don't have a specific "score" for high school. We usually start searching for colleges we'd like to attend to in our junior year, but some people start before. Colleges pay attention to our SAT/ACT scores (some colleges require either one o the other, some don't care which one). They're optional, but highly recommended, and it's basically assumed everyone's going to take one of the tests. Because it's technically optional, we sign up for them - we don't technically take the tests through the school. When I signed up for my ACTs I took them at a different high school, although my younger sister took them at our own high school.

Colleges also look at our GPAs. When I was in high school the highest was 4.0 for getting all A's, but if we took a lot of AP (Advanced Placement) classes, we could potentially get a 4.5 because AP classes are just college classes being taken at the high school and it counts for both high school and college credits (but only if we take the AP test at the end of the year). College In School (CIS) classes are also just college classes being taught in high school, and Honors classes are harder but they don't raise the GPA higher than a 4.0. (All of these Advances/Honors classes are optional, and we can choose to sign up for them instead of the regular ones when we sign up for classes.) At my school there was also this really cool thing called PSEO where we could literally take classes at a nearby community college o university, and it again counts for both high school and college credits. So basically you're a high school student and you're attending college classes for free while earning credits for both high school and college and it's just so cool I can't even. I literally have high school students in my classes with me at college. The only requirement for being a PSEO student at my school was being in the parte superior, arriba 50th percentile of your grade, so it was pretty easy and in hindsight I'm really disappointed that I didn't take advantage of that opportunity.

When applying for colleges, many schools require a written essay about ourselves o a particular subject in addition to the application, so in addition to looking at our essays, they're also checking over our GPAs (especially if they include AP and Honors classes), extracurricular activities (colleges love to see a person participating in things, especially charity events, outside of school) and ACT/SAT scores.

Basically, midway through our senior año of high school, half of the entire graduating class has already been accepted into their college for siguiente year.