By now you probably know that one thing colleges want to learn about you is how you spend your free time. Did you spend high school sitting around playing video games? Or did you get out, actively involve yourself in an activity and your community, and make a difference?

One way of doing just that has become increasingly popular over the past several years: volunteering abroad.

Read on for more on why students volunteer abroad, tips for choosing a volunteer abroad program, and our pick of some of the best volunteer abroad programs out there.

You took the ACT and got your score, but you don’t know how to interpret your ACT score. What does your ACT score measure? Is your score high or low? Will your score be enough to get you into your target schools?

In this article, I'll answer all of these questions and more, so you can go toward understanding ACT scores.

You got your SAT score back, and you're not sure what to think of it. What does your SAT score mean? What does your SAT score measure? Is your SAT score high? Is it low? Will it get you into the college you hope to attend?

I'll answer all of these questions below so you can start understanding SAT scores.

If you took the SAT after February 2016, your test is significantly different from the old SAT. What're the main differences between the old and new SAT? How do you convert between the two tests? How do these changes affect you as the test taker?

Every year nearly 2 million students take the SAT, but what's it out of? I'll answer this question and more in this article.

On average, you’ll need to use an SAT math formula once every four to five questions. This accounts for approximately 20-25% of the combined math sections, which means it is crucial that you understand how and when to employ your formulas on the SAT.

We’ve put together the list of your need-to-know SAT formulas (prioritized in the order from greatest to least that you’ll see them on the SAT) as well as how to best use them for test-day.

Taking an SAT practice test is one thing, and using the results to actually improve your scores in the future is another. If you’re spending five hours on a practice test, you should make sure that you’re getting the most out of it and not sweeping your mistakes under the rug. In this article, I’ll give you some different strategies for making your practice test sessions count.

 You can’t study effectively for the ACT if you don’t know what score to aim for, and you won’t know what score to aim for if you don’t know how the ACT is scored!

In this post, I’ll start off with some important background info on the ACT before getting to the good stuff — the ACT score range and what you should know about it. For example, what do these scores mean? What counts as a good ACT score? Read on to find out!

The first step in preparing for the SAT is learning basic info about the test. If you’ve decided to take the SAT, or even if you’re still choosing between the SAT and ACT, it’s important to understand how the test is scored.

I’ll give you a crash course in the SAT and its score ranges before talking in more detail about what these scores actually mean—what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s average.

When it comes to your college applications, you probably aren’t too worried about your ACT scores— unless, that is, you think your scores will be too low.

Don’t panic just yet! Like most things in life, ACT scores are all relative — there’s no such thing as a bad ACT score in a vacuum.  In this post, I’ll talk about what it means to have a “bad” score in relation to the entire US, your general peer group, your prospective colleges, and (maybe most importantly) yourself.

This article would be a pretty short one if there were a single answer to the question of what qualifies as an excellent ACT score. Like most things in life, however, what you might consider an excellent score depends on your perspective.

In this post, I’ll talk about different ways to understand what counts as excellent test performance. I’ll start off with excellent scores in relation to the general population before discussing more nuanced comparisons: what does it mean to have an excellent score when considering your peer group performance, your target schools, and your own strengths and weaknesses?

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?

Coordinate geometry is one of the heavy-hitter topics on the SAT, and you'll need to be able to maneuver your way through its many facets in order to take on the variety of questions you'll see on the test. Luckily, though, coordinate geometry is not difficult to visualize or wrap your head around once you know the basics. And we are here to show you how.

There will usually be two questions on any given SAT that involve points alone, and another 2-3 questions that will involve lines and slopes and/or rotations, reflections, or translations. This makes up a significant portion of your SAT math section, so it is a good idea to understand the ins and outs of coordinate geometry before you tackle the test.

This will be your complete guide to points and the building blocks for coordinate geometry—how to find and manipulate points, distances, and midpoints, as well as strategies for solving these types of questions on test day.

You probably already know that the gold standard for studying for the SAT is to use the official practice tests released by the College Board. Unfortunately, the SAT is getting completely redesigned after January 2016 – and there aren’t that many official questions for the new test yet. But the great news is that there are many ways to use other resources to study effectively!

Questions from other standardized tests, materials from your high school education, magazines and other publications—there is no shortage of ways to practice the knowledge and skills you’ll need for the new SAT!

In this article, I’ll go through each section of the new SAT and talk about all the possible alternatives to regular practice questions. When it comes to the SAT redesign, the world really is your oyster.

There’s no doubt that a good SAT score will give you a leg up in college admissions, but is this advantage justified? It’s been argued, especially in recent years, that SAT scores are not reliable predictors of success in college academics, the job world, and beyond.

In this article, I’ll explore these claims and see just how relevant your scores are to your future.