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 The pandemic-era assumption that scores no longer matter is now several years out of date, and it is still driving family decisions.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.…

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…

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…

Only one PSAT administration counts toward National Merit scholarships, and most juniors walk into it without preparing Roughly 1.5 million American high school juniors sit for the PSAT/NMSQT each October, and only that single administration qualifies a student for the National Merit Scholarship Program, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. There is no retake. Most of those students treat the test as a rehearsal. Schools present it as a…

The debate over whether ninth graders should be doing SAT prep divides parents into two camps, and both camps are usually wrong. The first camp insists it’s absurd to start test prep at 14, that freshmen should focus on high school and let college testing come when it comes. The second camp signs their freshman up for full SAT prep courses in September of ninth grade, drills them through practice…