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…

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…

https://vimeo.com/1223129515 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…

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…

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.…