Six of the eight Ivy League schools require an SAT or ACT score from first-year applicants in the 2026-27 cycle: Harvard, Yale, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell. Princeton and Columbia are in their final test-optional year and require scores from 2027-28. Across the wider Ivy Plus group, nine of twelve institutions have reinstated, including MIT, Stanford and Caltech. Georgetown never adopted a test-optional policy at all, and MIT required testing…

Admissions officers usually do not open applications in the exact order students press “Submit.” Rolling-admission colleges often review complete files as they arrive. Colleges with fixed early or regular deadlines may sort applications by admission round, geographic region, high school, intended program, or reader assignment. Inside the file, readers usually establish academic and personal context first, then evaluate the transcript, activities, essays, recommendations, and any test scores the college considers.…

Two programs at the same price can produce completely different outcomes, and the difference is invisible from the website The SAT went fully digital in 2024 and the ACT changed its format in 2025. Any prep program still teaching from pre-2024 materials is preparing students for a test that no longer exists. Whether a given program has updated is not something a parent can determine from a landing page, and…

Six of the eight Ivy League schools require an SAT or ACT score from first-year applicants in the 2026-27 admissions cycle. The remaining two, Princeton and Columbia, are in their final test-optional year and will require scores beginning with the 2027-28 cycle. The pandemic-era assumption that scores no longer matter is now several years out of date, and it is still driving family decisions. Test-optional is the most misunderstood phrase…

An ACT score tells you how you performed on the test. Your ACT percentile tells you something slightly different: how your performance compares with other students. For the 2025-2026 testing year, an ACT Composite score of 22 is in the 72nd percentile. That means you scored as well as or better than approximately 72% of recent ACT-tested high school graduates. A 28 puts you in the 91st percentile, while a…

Most competitive schools combine your best section scores across separate test dates, which changes what a smart retake plan looks like Most competitive colleges do not evaluate a single SAT composite. They take a student’s highest Reading and Writing score and highest Math score across every attempt submitted, then add them together. The resulting figure, known as a superscore, is frequently higher than any individual sitting the student actually produced.…

SAT and ACT preparation does not begin with a stopwatch or a full-length practice exam. It begins with the academic habits students develop long before their first official test date. Reading carefully, understanding algebra, managing time, maintaining focus, and learning from mistakes all contribute to stronger test performance. Students who develop these skills early can eventually spend their formal preparation learning test-specific strategies instead of trying to repair years of…

There is no trophy for taking your first AP class before everyone else. The goal is to challenge yourself when you are prepared to succeed, not to fill your schedule with college-level work simply because it looks impressive. For many students, sophomore or junior year is the right time to begin AP classes or dual enrollment courses, which are college classes taken while you are still in high school. Freshman…

The College Board fully retired the paper SAT in 2024, replacing it with a digital, section-adaptive test that runs about 2 hours and 14 minutes, roughly an hour shorter than the version most parents sat. The content, the passage lengths, the calculator rules, and the scoring structure all changed with it. Most families have not adjusted. Students are studying long-passage reading strategies for a test built on short passages. They…

Preparing for the ACT can feel overwhelming at first. Between four required sections, strict time limits, and dozens of concepts to review, it’s easy to wonder where you should even begin. Some students spend months studying, while others wait until the last minute and hope for the best. Neither approach guarantees success. The most effective ACT prep isn’t about studying every free moment you have. It’s about studying with purpose.…