My daughter is a junior and she’s getting ready for college applications this coming Fall. She scored a 1380 on the PSAT and wants to take the SAT in March. Last Fall, 50% of the accepted applicants at her dream school scored between 1480 and 1550, 25% scored higher, and 25% scored lower. I think she should be shooting for 1500 or better. She has finished all the classes that cover the material on the tests, so she won’t be learning any new applicable material in school.

Given the above, how should she prepare? Buy the Princeton Review Book? Free online test prep, paid online test prep, tutoring? The prices run from free to a few thousand bucks.

I’d really like her to get a good score and be one and done. My oldest son had to take the test multiple times, the test dates conflicted with other activities (state championships, high school graduation, etc.), the process was dragged out, and I don’t want to do that again.

Remember all the other factors that go into play. There should be some local courses. If anything they teach strategy and help with confidence. Some kids do really well on these tests, others do not. Awhile back many of the colleges eliminated the ACT and SAT. Be sure and see what the average scores are for the college she wishes to attend. Eliminate those that have extremely high scores. These tests are huge moneymakers. Years ago you took the test once and that was it.

Let’s just say that other than not playing sports, everything else is good. I’ve looked at the scores and even posted them for her dream school. The school is test optional for 2024-25, but may not be next year and most applicants included their scores.

Just looking for the best way forward with the SAT.

Figure out how she learns and if she’ll do the work on her own and can figure out where she needs to improve on her own. The books using past tests are great but it can be difficult to figure out where you struggle and how to improve in those parts of the test. Then there’s the game part. It’s been decades but I recall there be being an optimal strategy on when to guess and when not to guess. A paid course will cover all of that and help her hone in on solving the test. It’s part knowledge and part knowing how to play the game. The in person classes are expensive. I suggest getting a book with old tests and having her take a test or two at home under test conditions. See where she’s at. Decide if self prep or a class is right for her.

Doesn't the Khan Academy have free SAT prep. courses?

I'm in New York state. Yep, too far away for your situation.
Colgate University (fairly local) is running a free PSAT/SAT preparation course.
It's being offered to any students that feel they need help.
My step daughter is a H/S junior also.
She's smarter (math & science) than any 16 year old deserves to be.
English... Not so spectacular.
Check with your daughters H/S guidance department.
If a similar opportunity is available locally, sign her up.
The advantage of having gifted H/S graduates teach the program is they have recent real world experience taking and preparing for the PSAT/SAT.

She's dual enrolled which means she's taking college classes while in high school and will have earned an AA degree when she graduates from high school. Her college does offer SAT/ACT prep courses for a reasonable price. Thanks for the suggestion! I'll ask her high school guidance consular about those.

Kahn Academy does offer free SAT prep which she has done, sort of. I think she needs something a little more structured.

I recommend she take the SAT & ACT and see which she does better on. She already took the PSAT, so why not take the ACT before the SAT?

Most students prefer one to the other. Could be the way the tests are structured. Could be that one is geared better to a student's strengths.

Test prep is a lot like working out or training for a sport. Some people do well &/or prefer exercising alone or perhaps w/ 1-2 friends. Others need a coach or personal trainer hovering over them.

As previously mentioned, get a book of old tests and practice taking them. You need to get used to how the the test sections are laid out, how they ask questions, how the answer choices are presented to confuse the test-taker, etc. Many people underperform on SATs, IQ tests, & similar, simply b/c they ask things in way that people don't encounter in everyday life.

After grading your exams, take time to figure out the questions you got wrong. It is way, way easier to do this now than in pre-internet days.

I am about 6 months ahead of you in a test prep sense. Meaning my daughter is a junior but we just finished grinding this out about 3 weeks ago. We were leaving the spring SAT tests as just in case if she needed to try to get a better score. Take what I'm saying as my best advise but may sound pompous, I'm not trying to do that, I'm trying to help you.

My daughter first took the PSAT as an 9th grader and got about 1400. She has pushed her math to multi variable calc right now. She will finish that in a week or two and start linear algebra. So math for her might be easier than it is for others.

Where is she in math class, she needs to be in pre-calc and doing well to score the highest. If not, maybe you need to concentrate on English to pick up the most points.

Her PSAT score was a 1520 (100%), her SAT is high 1500s.

Best key for math success is John Jung SAT cracker online. https://www.admissionhackers.com/sma-intro

She thinks his explanations were far and away the best.

For English you need to take tests and score them, and break them down into figuring out what you are missing and what you understand. Every test you have to score and evaluate the deficiency. Go through your wrong answers and figure out why. It's a process.

She worked for about 3 hours a day for 3 months. You have to grind it. As a family you have to mentally commit to doing the test as a team. Sleep cycle and food habits start 2 weeks out from test. If you're just sending her to her room to study, it's not good enough. You need to invest in the score as a family.

Work together and encourage it's a bitch!

Feel free to email me and I hope this information helps some people.

Thank you, that is helpful.

quote:

Originally posted by iron chef:
I recommend she take the SAT & ACT and see which she does better on. She already took the PSAT, so why not take the ACT before the SAT?

She got a 28 on the ACT she took at the beginning of the month. She took a practice SAT the weekend before she took the PSAT and scored 720 on the math. On the actual PSAT, she score 660 math and 720 English. The SAT looks better at the moment for her. My oldest son did much better with the SAT as well.

I am quite familiar with these tests. They are a big business racket. They are a poor predictor of success in college. Secondly there have been schemes to increase scores. One was the ADHD racket. You paid a psychologist several thousand dollars to diagnose your child as ADHD which at that time allowed you to take an untimed test. One psychologist had parents flying their kids to his office in California.
For a time the more elite colleges eliminated the SAT. Dartmouth recently required the SAT

Agree ETS is a racket and its pseudo-monopoly leads to corrupt back doors. For better of worse, standardized testing is still used to evaluate applicants. As others have noted, DEI caused some schools to discard standardized testing but as DEI is further discredited, there will probably be a return to it. Prep courses can make a big difference. In my view, one of the most valuable aspects of a prep course is the (repetitive) simulated testing under the same time and proctored environment as the real thing. There are some test taking tactics that can help. One I recall is the usual math question about compound interest. The targeted decoy answer is simple interest which is slightly less than compound interest. So if you are running out of time, quickly look over the choices, identify the two choices that are close to each other and choose the higher of the two.

"Last Fall, 50% of the accepted applicants at her dream school scored between 1480 and 1550, 25% scored higher, and 25% scored lower."

Isn't the max score 800 per section for 1600 total? And the average at this school is over 1500? Did something change in the test?

College Board website says 1500 is 98th percentile of actual test takers.

I don't believe in standardized test prep. Either you know the stuff or you don't. Test taking strategies used to matter - skip what you don't know right away and answer everything you can, then go back and work the stuff you skipped, guess if you can eliminate 2-3 choices, don't guess if you can't. With computerized tests, that's changed though.

I don't know what her dream school is but throw in some volunteer work and do some sports, it doesn't matter. She just needs to be able to put in that she did.

On the SAT prep, find one that's comfortable to pay. I don't have much advice in this area as I didn't need to prep and I wasn't such a dedicated student but I scored in the top 2%. That was before they started downgrading the difficulty. So I doubt she won't get into her dream school because of her SAT score.

The volunteer work and any sports activity will make her application pop out more.

I went to an elite college.It was not my test scores that got me in. Everyone in the freshman class had played high school sports and most had worked some kind of job. It does help if you have a special skill. The kids I knew with perfect SAT scores were just plain strange, and the school seem to know it. Having organizational skills is perhaps the most important.

One more thing to consider is the strength, knowledge, and availability of the college counselor at her school. There are private counselors who can be more plugged in than the one at school. They can be especially helpful in crafting an application that gives an admissions office what they really want to see. At the level of school your daughter is applying every serious applicant has the grades and test scores and volunteer work and played a sport and was in clubs and whatever else. The key is standing out in that crowd, and many high school counselors simply don't have the time to devote to each of their students. The resumes of the kids who get rejected from these colleges are often mind blowingly strong. Like they couldn't have done much more but it wasn't enough. A set of eyes focusing on your daughter among a smaller number of clients may be beneficial. An added expense for sure but maybe worth it given the stakes.

IIRC, the colleges in the Orlando area used to say all their credits transferred to UCF. I never took the SAT, ACT, GRE or GMAT. I always thought a kinda backdoor way to get into undergrad without taking those tests is through a transfer. For the GRE and GMAT, I received waivers.

Now I've started researching the LSAT and waivers for it.

Merry Christmas! And thank you all!

Timdogg6 emailed a couple book suggestions for the English portion: Erica Meltzer’s books and SAT Prep Black Book.

The SAT was never a measure of likely hood to succeed in college, but that’s beside the point. For better or worse, it is used as to evaluated college applicants. A good SAT score isn’t just about getting into a good school. Using Alabama as an example because they have the information right there:

University of Alabama Out of State Freshman Automatic Merit Scholarships:
Crimson Legends 25-26 ACT or 1200-1250 SAT 3.50+ $6,000
Capstone 27 ACT or 1260-1290 SAT 3.50+ $8,000
Collegiate 28 ACT or 1300-1320 SAT 3.50+ $10,000
Foundation in Excellence 29 ACT or 1330-1350 SAT 3.50+ $15,000
UA Scholar 30-31 ACT or 1360-1410 SAT 3.50+ $24,000
Presidential 32-36 ACT or 1420-1600 SAT 3.50+ $28,000

That’s per year! My oldest son’s first SAT score qualified him for the $6k. His final one got him to the $24k level. Doing the math (96,000-24,000)/40 hours it took him to raise his score equals $1,800 per hour of time spent preparing for the test after the first one. At the school he chose to go to it only works out to $1,000/hour.

She’s never going to play sports, ever. I can’t change or affect that. If that’s what keeps out of her dream school, then so be it. Everything else is good. I asked about SAT prep because that really is the only thing I can help her with and have an affect on as far as the strength of her application goes.

I tried once to give her dad advice. It was her freshman year, I was driving her to school on a Monday morning, she had her nose in her phone and wouldn’t talk to me. I asked her what was so important on her phone that could talk to me and she said she was studying for a test. I started to say, “The best time to study for a test is not the morning of” she interrupted me and said, “Dad, the test is on Thursday.”

Granted, I’m not thrilled about the pink highlights, but she’s not “weird”:


That was earlier this month with her school’s Model UN club. She had exams, but she talked to her professors and they let her take them early. I didn’t tell her to do that. She got herself a job that starts in January. We didn’t tell her to do that either, she just decided on her own she wanted a job.

quote:

Originally posted by Edmond:
IIRC, the colleges in the Orlando area used to say all their credits transferred to UCF. I never took the SAT, ACT, GRE or GMAT. I always thought a kinda backdoor way to get into undergrad without taking those tests is through a transfer. For the GRE and GMAT, I received waivers.

Now I've started researching the LSAT and waivers for it.

By law in Florida, your credits will transfer from a public two year college to a public four year university. It is a way to get into a more selective school than your GPA and/or test scores would allow. UF denied my son as a freshman, but because he had his AA degree from FSW, UF suggested he apply as a transfer student. There’s two negatives to that. One, you have to have all of the prerequisite course work done before you can transfer. Two, you are accepted only for the your declared major. You can’t double major, get a minor, or switch majors. In my son’s case, he would have need to take the prereq’s at another school first anyway and didn’t want to lose the flexibility of getting a minor or double major. That was a good thing because he surprised us mid way through his first semester and said he’s going to take the prereq’s for premed. It’s only five or six classes beyond what he already has. Then, it’s only another Chemistry class for a Chemistry Minor. He’s got 4 years of scholarship money and he thinks he can be done in 3.

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
That was earlier this month with her school’s Model UN club.

I went to undergrad in Chicago at the University of Illinois at Chicago.