SAT and ACT Test Prep

One of the most common questions I am asked as a school counselor is, “what can I do to prepare for the SAT and ACT?” The answer is, there’s a lot. A ton of exam prep materials exist that can help students squeeze a few more points out of these important assessments.

However, to begin this conversation it’s important to temper expectations. The purpose of the SAT and ACT is to compare the aptitude of students who are applying to college from a national and sometimes international pool. These tests separate the elite from the average in an unbiased way that a GPA might struggle to do. And, the tests do a pretty good job of this. In a sense, they represent your body of intellectual work for the entirety of your schooling so a little time spent preparing for these tests is only going to elevate a student so much. Test prep can improve scores but no one should expect that can turn an average score into a perfect one.

So, how does a student prepare for a test? My belief is that it is possible to overdo it. I wouldn’t want a student to ignore their classroom studies for the sake of preparing for an exam. Plus, it just seems like a good way to burn a young person out. However, some dedicated time spent preparing for an exam in the six to eight weeks leading up to the administration can be beneficial.

The College Board has partnered with the Khan Academy for their test prep and the ACT has partnered with Kaplan for theirs. I think these are the best places to start. It makes sense to me that the people who publish the exams are going to have the best insight into how to prepare, so I think any test prep should include these services at least in part. Both services allow a user to look at previous test attempts, explore weaknesses, and target those weaknesses within the test prep. This is an extremely valuable tool and one that any student will be wise to take advantage of.

These are not the only means for SAT or ACT test prep though. A multitude of third-party resources exists that are aimed at SAT or ACT preparation. They can carry different approaches or different methods of delivery and I won’t suggest that any one of them is better than the other here. You can find these at places like Amazon.com or in the big box book stores like Barnes and Nobles, so it’s probably a good idea to do a little shopping and find one that looks like it’s a good fit for you.

Those products will often be self-directed which means they’ll require a level of self-discipline that not every high school student has. In that case, many high schools offer some after-school or weekend workshops in the days or weeks leading up to test. Colleges and private tutoring services sometimes also offer test preparation classes. These can be the most expensive options for test preps but they occasionally come with money back guarantees to improve your score a certain number of points. I have had good feedback from these sorts of classes in the past and I imagine they wouldn’t offer the guarantee if they weren’t confident they could meet it more often than not.