Our Proven SAT and ACT Success System

[00:00:08] Courtney: Alright, so we've got these two tests, the SAT and the ACT. How should parents and students be strategizing whether they decide to take both, or they decide to take one or the other? Is there something they need to be thinking aboutwhen they're actually scheduling these tests?

[00:00:25] Andy: So depending on where a student and family lives in the country, there is going to be kind of a go-to, default test, either the ACT or the SAT. The important thing to know is that colleges look at them equally and practically speaking for families, what we always encourage students to do, is to go ahead and sign up to take the default test in your area.

Our recommendation is to also sign up for the other test within a month or so of your first test.

What is very common is that students will do materially better on one test over another.

Now why that is is largely dependent upon the way that questions are asked, the timing, the pacing. For example, the ACT certainly is a faster test.

Students that are really good at pacing and answering questions quickly can tend to do better on the ACT. A different example is that if students aren't as strong at geometry, then they might do better on the SAT because the SAT has fewer geometry questions. So all this to say, don't put your all of your eggs in one basket, given that the 11th grader is already gonna kind of be in test prep mode.

Go ahead and sign up for the other test because after you get your results back, you'll be able to compare from a relative perspective, which one you're stronger at – to then be able to inform where you can double down and really prioritize taking that particular test a second time.

[00:02:00] Courtney: Do you have a recommendation for how many times a student should take a particular test?

And then my follow up to that is what do they actually submit to schools they're applying to? Is it all of their scores? Is it one of their scores? Love to hear your thoughts on that.

[00:02:14] Andy: Yeah, so you're gonna send your best score across any of your tests. So just to exaggerate the point for a second, if you, if a student were to take the SAT three times and the ACT three times, they would submit their best overall score across those six tests. So colleges aren't gonna see kind of all the other ones leading up to that.

And that is exactly why the no regret move is to take both tests initially at least one time, And then from there, I mean, unless you absolutely knock it out of the park, and unless you're already scoring well above the median ACT or SAT score for the college that you're most interested in, then you wanna take it a second time. All right.

Now the big thing is that once you decide which test you're really gonna double down on, you can use the score reports that you're getting back to understand where you need to focus your preparation, Oftentimes, 11th graders will go into their first SAT or ACT, and they'll have spent very little time studying or preparing for it.

They're using it as kind of like a baseline practice test. I do not recommend that. Okay. The reason for that is we wanna be able to know where the student stands after putting in some serious effort to prepare for it so we have the best data to then be able to provide really personalized planning and focus for the second time they take it.

So the first time you're preparing for the ACT or the SAT, you're doing it more holistically. You're focusing on kind of all of the sections. You're also focusing on the pacing. You are doing a little bit of focus on the tips and tricks, but once you get those scores back, right, you know that you're crushing algebra, but you need to double down on your trig, as an example.

You know, you're crushing your reading comprehension, but you need more work on grammar, right? You can only get that insight from your score report. Then when you lean into that, lots and lots of studies have shown that students are very capable of growing anywhere from one to three points, in some cases even more, by taking it a second time.

Now, that doesn't mean that you're gonna score three points if you take it once, you do nothing for three months, and then you take it a second time. But through intentional practice and studying and guidance and coaching, it's very likely that you can grow two to three points, depending on that first initial score by really focused prep.

Oftentimes students will get guidance that strong ACT or SAT prep – if you focus maybe an hour or two a week leading up to the test, you're in good shape. We reject that premise. What we have seen over and over again is that top students are typically studying between five and 10 hours a week, four to six weeks in advance of the test.

[00:04:58] Courtney: I think this one to two hour prep work myth comes out of the idea that school is preparing you for these standardized tests.

How much really are schools helping students get ready for the SAT in the ACT?

[00:05:13] Andy: It is a great question.

So first, the best way to prepare for the ACT and the SAT is to do well in your core classes, right? So I don't want students and families to take away from this that what they're learning in school is totally separate from what they're gonna see on the test, because that just, that just simply isn't true.

To answer your question directly, very few schools actually are providing targeted guidance and support in preparation for the ACT and the SAT. Right now, every so often schools might host a bootcamp or they might do maybe a practice test here and there, but those are gonna be largely focused on tricks, not on mastery, and this is a really, really important distinction when I talk about students studying five to 10 hours a week in advance of the actual test.

What I mean by that is focusing on mastering the content, practicing the skills and doing practice tests, not just the tricks that often are most kind of glorified or glamorized around how to look at an analogy or particular pacing strategy.

And those things are important, but again, it's gonna be the core content that's gonna be most important.

[00:06:29] Courtney: What are some myths that they, that you want parents to know are not true to help guide their students in the right direction?

[00:06:38] Andy: The first myth is that ACT and SAT prep can be really expensive.

There are actually some fantastic no-cost resources out there to help students. One of those, for example, is Khan Academy.

It is free and they have specific. SAT prep on there. That is both helping explain the key concepts that are gonna show up on the test and also include a ton of practice problems.

Now when you go there, you might be realizing like, oh, I'm taking the ACT, this isn't gonna be particularly helpful. Wrong math is math. Reading comprehension is reading comprehension. Actually, students that are taking the s the ACT can actually benefit a ton from doing the SAT prep on Khan Academy.

Gemini released an SAT preparation tool. So by simply going to Google and typing in "Gemini SAT prep," students and families can access no-cost practice exams. And the really cool thing is that as you're taking the test, it will actually give you feedback on some of the errors that you might have made throughout that in of itself, right?

That's typically what a one-on-one tutor would do, and now it's accessible to students and families. The second thing that I offer is that a myth out there is this idea of, "I'm just bad at tests," right? We hear students all the time say, "Well, I'm just not a good test taker." What is likely more true is that there is a lot of unfamiliarity with the test, what is likely more true is that they might have a bit of anxiety about the test.

And the number one way to reduce anxiety is to know what to expect, all right? So when students are often saying, "I'm just a bad test taker," that might actually just be code for, "I don't know how to answer these kind of math questions," or "I don't know how to move this quickly through a test." Both of those are solvable problems, right? Once you learn more of the math, or once you're doing more of the grammar work, or once you do more practice tests, you actually quickly find out that you could, in fact be a really solid test taker, right?

The third thing that I would offer is that tests don't matter because of test optional schools and policies, right? That is a myth out there right now. Oh, ACT or SAT doesn't matter because so many schools went test optional.

To clarify, yes, a lot of schools went test optional during COVID and many still are test optional, but there's actually a whole score of schools that are going back to requiring tests. The better way to think about this is that you wanna be able to put your best foot forward, and if you have a strong ACT and SAT score, particularly if it's stronger than the median scores at that particular college, you're absolutely going to wanna submit it, right? It helps schools see, oh, not only is this student doing well in their courses and their extracurriculars, but they also have this demonstrated achievement over here. And of course in, in some instances it might make sense for a student not to submit their ACT or SAT scores, and that's gonna be particularly true if those test scores are not as strong as their GPA or their courses.

But again, you don't have to submit the scores. So I still go back to our kind of general philosophy on this: It's a no regret move to take both of them, put your best foot forward, because you never know how you're gonna be able to improve on those. And if it can tell even a better picture of the type of student that you are, then it's probably gonna make the most sense for you to submit those.

[00:10:19] Courtney: Thank you so much for sharing that. I think – circling back to the "I'm not just a good test taker" myth - I mean, this is something that I can remember when I was, you know, way back when I was taking the SAT being a huge point of conversation and it's, yeah, it's really important to know this is not a skill that people are just born with. This is something that you, you work towards.

[00:10:43] Andy: Most students in most schools are not getting explicit grammar instruction. Most students really struggle with comma placements or semicolons and colons. And even if they're good readers, right, if you haven't gotten explicit instruction in teaching on grammar, then that part's gonna be particularly challenging, right? So that is a perfect example with even a student saying, "I'm not a good test taker."

No, you probably just haven't learned these grammar rules before. But we've seen students improve their ACT score on the on the English section in particular, two, three points just by going all in on grammar.

[00:11:18] Courtney: How can parents help their students learn how to study more effectively within the context of these tests?

[00:11:25] Andy: First things first, you have to have a plan, so I really recommend that students and families sit down with a calendar.

And then they actually schedule in when they're going to study, and for how long, and what particular sections.

The second thing that I would offer is that we have to time bound our studying. And the number one technique that I recommend for students to build good habits on this is what's called the Pomodoro Technique.

And the basic premises is that you start a timer, you remove distractions – you, you know, you put your phone in the other room. You set a timer for 25 minutes and you're all in doing the practice problems or reviewing the videos and taking notes, whatever it may be. And then once that timer hits a 25 minutes, you have a five minute break. You get up, grab some water, go to the bathroom, grab a snack, whatever, and then you come back and you do it again.

So over a 60 minute period, you're doing 50 minutes of really intensive studying with breaks built in that hour. That 50 minutes of studying is likely going to be more effective than three hours of passive studying with distractions, okay?

The third thing that I would note in this context is that it is as much about practicing problems and quizzing yourself as it is learning the content.

A big mistake that students make is they will do passive content – they will ingest content passively. What we wanna be focusing on is what's called, " retrieval practice" and "active recall," which is a fancy way of saying, you have to quiz yourself. You have to do practice problems, you have to do practice tests.

That is going to force you to tap into your long, short-term and long-term memory reserves and force you to see if you actually know the content.

So over the course of this week, these five hours or so that you're doing this, you probably wanna balance at 50, 50. 50% of this content coming in where you're learning the material, taking notes, and then 50% actually doing practice problems and practice tests. That, over the course of four or five, six weeks, is really gonna kind of help encode success while setting up longer term study habits that can set you up for success later on in high school and certainly in college.

[00:13:50] Courtney: Amazing. Andy, thank you so much. This is a, this is a challenging topic, test taking, and I know a lot of parents and students feel confused and sort of on their own when it comes to preparing. And this has been so helpful.

So, thank you for sharing your insight.

[00:14:07] Andy: Yeah. Thank you, Courtney. It's been a pleasure.