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…

After months of preparing for the SAT, the final week can feel surprisingly stressful. You might wonder if you should squeeze in one more full-length practice test, learn a few last-minute math concepts, or simply hope everything you’ve studied sticks. It’s easy to feel like there’s still so much left to do. The truth is, the week before the SAT isn’t about learning everything you don’t know. At this point,…

The most common question I get from families starting college prep is which test their student should take. The most common answer they get from other people is “take both, see which is higher, and submit that one.” That advice sounds sensible and is almost always wrong. Preparing for two different tests simultaneously is expensive, exhausting, and dilutes the depth of preparation on either one. Very few students have the…

The single most expensive mistake families make with the SAT isn’t picking the wrong prep program. It’s starting too late. The default assumption in most American households is that SAT prep is a junior-year activity, something you begin sometime in the spring of eleventh grade and finish before senior year applications. That timeline works, but it’s also the tightest possible window for the highest possible stakes, and it forces families…

https://vimeo.com/1205569713 – For decades, many middle-class families had an important financial aid advantage when sending multiple children to college at the same time. If you had two children enrolled simultaneously, the federal financial aid formula effectively recognized that reality. Colleges understood that a family paying two tuition bills at once had less financial flexibility than a family supporting only one student, and the calculation reflected that. That advantage is now…

Junior year is the most demanding stretch of high school. Three or four AP classes. Whatever sport, music, or extracurricular commitment you’re going to lean on for college apps. The first round of standardized tests. College visits starting to fill weekends. And then, sitting on top of all of that, the SAT, which most students start prepping for sometime between the fall and spring of this exact year. The math…