The SAT may be digital now, but that does not mean you can take it on any device you have handy. The digital SAT is administered through College Board’s Bluebook testing app, and College Board has specific rules about which computers and tablets can run it. There are also separate rules covering phones, watches, headphones, calculators, and other electronics you might normally carry. Knowing those rules before test day can…

Once a family has decided that test prep is worth investing in, the next question is which format to choose. Group class or one-on-one tutoring. These two options are usually framed as competitors, as if there’s a universal right answer about which one is better. There isn’t. Both formats can produce excellent score gains, and both have students who thrive in them and students who don’t. The question isn’t which…

You paid for the prep course. You cleared Saturday morning for a practice test. Now your teenager has missed an assignment, and you are about to email the instructor. For Prep Expert® founder Dr. Shaan Patel, that last step deserves a pause. Asked whether parents should be coaches, managers, or bystanders, Shaan challenged the categories. He has seen highly involved parents help and hurt. He has seen the same from…

DISCLOSURE: This article is written by the founder of Prep Expert®, a test prep company, and discusses what families should spend on test prep. The student reviews quoted are from Prep Expert® courses. The University of Alabama publishes exactly what an out-of-state student with a 3.5 GPA receives automatically, by SAT score, with no separate application. A 1330 to 1350 earns $15,000 a year. A 1360 earns $24,000. Ten points…

“I was the valedictorian of my high school and I scored a 1760 the first time I took the SAT.” That is how Prep Expert® founder Dr. Shaan Patel answered the question of whether he was always a strong test-taker. For context, while today’s SAT uses a 1600-point scale, that score was earned on the test’s previous 2400-point scale. In other words, it wasn’t a bad score, but it was…

There is a right answer to this question, and most families don’t land on it. Some students take the SAT exactly once, trust the result, and submit it to colleges regardless of what the number actually says about their ability. Other students take the test five or six times, grinding away at a score that stopped improving three attempts ago, often producing a worse final submission than if they had…

The College Board published research on 23rd September finding that 92% of AP teachers surveyed worry generative AI will leave students overly dependent on technology for basic tasks, and 90% worry students will be less likely to develop critical thinking as AI use grows. The brief, Teacher Perceptions of GenAI in AP Course Redesign, draws on surveys and focus groups with thousands of AP teachers conducted between April 2025 and…

If you’re preparing for the SAT, you’ve probably heard a lot of familiar terms: Reading and Writing, Math, sections, questions, scores. But the digital SAT added another term students need to understand: modules. Modules are more than just a new name for parts of the test. They are central to the SAT’s adaptive format. How you perform on the first module of a section helps determine the questions you see…

The 24 hours before a standardized test are more consequential than most students realize. Not because you can learn anything new in that window (you can’t), but because you can undo months of preparation through a small number of specific mistakes. Students who did the hard work all summer and fall can walk into the test tired, unfocused, and anxious because of choices they made the previous evening. Other students,…

At the University of Oklahoma, a resident National Merit Finalist entering in autumn 2026 is offered a package the university publishes at $146,850. The non-resident package is published at $153,450. Both are built on a tuition waiver covering 100 percent of tuition for up to five years, with further awards stacked on top. The qualifying exam for that money is the PSAT/NMSQT, taken on a single Wednesday morning in October…