SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips

If you’re a current high school student, then you’re caught in a big transition between the old SAT and the new SAT. You may have thought you were all set with a high SAT score, but now you’re wondering, “Should I take the new SAT?”

Not to worry, help is here! You can easily resolve this concern by asking yourself two key questions. First, find out whether your colleges require the new SAT. If they don’t, feel free to scroll down to the next important question: is your score on the old SAT really high enough to achieve your goals?

Read on to consider one or both of these questions, and determine once and for all whether or not you need to take the redesigned SAT.

Are you taking the ACT soon? This complete guide will go over exactly what to expect on test day, from when to arrive at your testing center to when it’s safe to turn your cell phone back on.

Beyond the logistics, we’ll discuss what you can do in the days and weeks leading up to the test to fully prepare and feel confident. Read on to learn what to expect on ACT test day when you arrive, take the test, and finish up, alongside the most useful tips for doing your best throughout the day.

Stephen King once wrote, "To write is human, to edit is divine." Anyone who has written papers for school knows that first, second, and even third drafts can be full of errors. Through editing and revising, you can polish a piece of writing into its best form.

The Writing and Language section of the SAT asks you to be that "divine" editor. It asks you to improve paragraphs that contain both little picture mistakes and big picture weaknesses.

Writing and Language will be combined with your Reading score, but it’s a unique section that requires its own specific approach to prep. This guide is your first stop for preparing for the Writing and Language section of the SAT; read on to learn everything you need to know!

When test day’s just around the corner, what final steps can you take to feel prepared? This guide will go over exactly what happens on the day you take the SAT so that you don’t have any surprises. 

Read on to learn what will happen at your test center, along with an overview of the materials you need to bring. Finally, we’ll discuss some strategies you can use to deal with nerves and feel confident going into the SAT.

This article is fully updated for the digital SAT!

The SAT has had a complete makeover. Just a quick glance will show you that it barely resembles its previous self. Many students, luckily, will find its transformation quite attractive.

This guide will help you catch up on the changes with a comprehensive overview of the new SAT format. Read on to learn about the test’s new design and scoring, followed by some tips on what these changes mean for test-takers. To begin, let’s go over the overall structure of the SAT.

Did you know that almost half of all undergrads in the U.S. go to community college? In fact, there are 1,100 community colleges nationwide, and they enroll 13 million students!

If you're looking to make that 13 million and one, read on to learn how to apply for community college: from deciding where to apply to enrolling in classes. Before getting the ball rolling, let's review what community colleges offer their students and some good reasons to apply.

You’ve probably felt the pressure to go on college tours, but just how important are they? Are they an essential part of the college planning process, or is it not a big deal if you opt out?

This guide will go over the most important reasons to visit a college, along with some circumstances when you might choose not to tour. We’ll also discuss how you can prepare to make the most out of your college visits.

First off, what are some reasons you should tour your prospective colleges?

Last time we review how you would go about writing great recommendation for a student strong in literature or engineering (click here to see that post!) This time, we continue the series and go over a strong social science recommendation as well as a general hard-worker, conscientious-student recommendation.

When should you ask for a recommendation letter? Many high schools answer this question for you with an official timeline and procedure for your rec letter requests. In addition to school policy, your teachers might also set rules around how and when to ask for letters of rec.

This guide will go over the most common recommendation letter guidelines, as well as some not so common ones that you hopefully won’t encounter (like a lottery system!). To start, let’s consider which guidelines are set on a school-wide basis and which ones fall into the realm of individual teachers.

Colleges ask for all different numbers of recommendation letters. Each college sets its own policy, so it's always a good idea to double check each school on your list to make sure you understand exactly what it wants.

Typically, colleges want you to send a recommendation letter from your counselor. Additionally, they may ask for one, two, or, in rare cases, three letters from your teachers. This guide will go over the different guidelines so you know how many recommendations to collect when applying to colleges. First, let's go over the different options.

Along with researching your colleges’ deadlines and requirements, you also need to figure out exactly what each one’s policy is toward recommendation letters. Some schools may ask for one or two letters, while others may actually prohibit them outright.

This guide is meant to help you locate the crucial information you need. First, we’ll go over the questions you need to ask. Then, we’ll take you through the process of searching for this info, step by step. To begin, what do you need to know?

Many colleges use a holistic process to evaluate applicants, seeking to understand the "whole person" and not solely rely on grades and test scores. One way they accomplish this is by reading recommendation letters from teachers and counselors.

This guide will discuss what exactly admissions officers are looking for in your recommendation letters, and why they’re so important to your overall candidacy. By understanding the purpose of rec letters, you’ll be in a better position to gather strong ones for your application.

To begin, let’s take a closer look at what admissions officers mean when they talk about using a holistic admissions process.

Sometimes the best way to learn about preparing your college application is to know how the process works on the other side. When admissions officers sit down to review hundreds, if not thousands of applications, what are they looking to learn about you? More specifically, what do they want to find out from your letters of recommendation?

This guide will explore how readers consider your recommendation letter for college admissions, along with how you can use that knowledge to your advantage. First, what are the requirements for letters of recommendation?

College Board is mixing things up. With the new suite of assessments starting to roll out this fall, the new PSAT is one of the first tests to debut.

Apart from changes in content and structure, the new PSAT will use a different scoring system than the one used in previous years. This new scale will correspond with, though not match exactly, the scale for the new SAT.

This article will go over the new PSAT score range, along with explaining what your PSAT scores will mean for National Merit and your performance on the SAT. Let's check out the new scoring system.

Since school counselors support students through all four years of high school, they can write some of the best, most personal letters of recommendations. At the same time, they have the added challenge of writing lots, often hundreds, of letters for all the college-bound students on their caseload. 

While almost all counselor references will comment positively on a student, there can still be bad ones that don't offer a whole lot to a student's college application. Let's look at examples that demonstrate the four most common reasons a recommendation letter is bad: it's impersonal and generic, it's repetitive, it gives no specific examples, or it expresses serious reservations about a student.