SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips

At long last, you get your SAT or ACT scores back, and now you have to make an important decision—do you retake the test and aim for a higher score? What are your chances of improving your score?

The answer can get complicated, depending on how many times you've taken it before and what your score target is. Read on to develop the best testing plan for yourself.

It seems obvious that each ACT / SAT question must have exactly one answer, and this answer must be clearly and objectively correct. However, as we’ll explain below, that simple fact alone disqualifies vast swaths of reasonable questions that you otherwise see in everyday tests at school.  This obvious fact also leads to a little-known secret that, when applied correctly, guarantees the cracking of each question. You don’t have to trust me -- read through this guide and ask any perfect or near-perfect scorer. They’ll agree on the secret.

Do you have great extracurriculars?  Maybe you’re captain of the football team or president of a top debate team.  Your approach to college admissions will be quite different than a typical student’s, and your SAT / ACT prep process should be uniquely tailored to you. In this article, we talk about what unique opportunities you have in test prep and what traps you should avoid.

Not so happy with your score on the Old SAT? You might be thinking about retaking the test. Unfortunately for you, the redesigned version of the SAT – in this post, we’ll just call it the “New SAT” – debuted in March of this year. Which means if you retake the SAT, you’ll be taking a totally redesigned test. So you may be wondering, "Should I take the New SAT?"

This post will help you decide if your Old SAT score is really not good enough for the colleges you hope to apply to. Next, we will explain some potential challenges with studying for the New SAT, and help you decide if it’s the right step for you. Don’t sign up for the New SAT before reading this post!

Are you already scoring well on the SAT and getting a 1400 or above (2100 in the 2400 scale)?  This puts you in a special class, and your strategy for improving your SAT score will be very different from the average students'.  Having made the improvement myself, I'll show you how you can aim for a perfect SAT score too.

Studying for the new 2016 SAT and struggling to remember specific concepts? Flashcards might be a great study resource for you! Flashcards can help you memorize the information you need to know.  In this guide, I’ll explain how to make SAT flashcards for vocabulary and math formulas and how to study with the flashcards you make. 

It's important to learn how to use official SAT practice tests as study resources because they will give you the most accurate reading of what to expect on the real SAT. If you only have twenty hours to prepare, this guide will teach you how to use practice tests to your best advantage within that limited time. I'll walk you through why SAT practice tests are important and how you can use a step by step twenty hour plan to get the most out of them. 

Are you a high achieving student who’s used to getting good grades in school? Were you expecting a similarly high standardized test score and were disappointed when you got your scores back?

I have two pieces of good news: 1. You are not alone; this problem is a lot more common than you probably think. 2. There are ways to improve your test taking skills and raise your score. This guide will go over the most common reasons smart students get low scores on standardized tests and give step-by-step guidelines for solving the problem.

For students who are already scoring high on the SAT, improvement can be an uphill battle. High scorers may need to use different strategies to get the most out of their studying and push themselves into an elite score range.

In this article, I'll go over what it means to be a high scorer and how high scorers can take their prep techniques to the next level. 

If your scores on the SAT are on the lower side, you will benefit more from prep strategies that are targeted towards your specific situation. High and low scorers usually have different struggles and goals on the SAT, so the methods that work best for each of them will differ significantly.

In this article, I'll cover the reasons why high and low SAT scorers should prepare differently and which strategies SAT low scorers should and shouldn't use to have the best chances of improving their scores.  

Choosing the best way to practice for the SAT can be difficult; there are a lot of study options out there, but not all of them may give you an accurate indicator of how well you’ll do on test day. Taking SAT practice tests under realistic testing conditions is a great way to practice for the SAT and get an estimate what your score will be on the real test. 

There are many free SAT practice tests available that you can take in your own home, however; it can be challenging to simulate real test-taking conditions. The closer the conditions of your practice test are to the real SAT, the more useful and accurate your results will be. Read on to learn how you can recreate realistic testing conditions at home in order to get the most accurate results from SAT practice tests.

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 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.

Not on our watch.

To do well on the SAT/ACT, you need to commit to a certain amount of study hours. The higher the score you want, or the more points you need to improve, the more hours you need to put in. (Read more about how long exactly you need to study for the SAT or ACT here.)

If total hours is your main goal for studying, then procrastination is what you need to defeat to be successful. So we’ll talk a bit about why procrastination happens, and then give actionable advice for fighting it.

Read in to conquer procrastination once and for all!

Trying to figure out why your SAT score went down on a retake? Or are you just wondering how much an SAT score can drop if you retake the test?

Find out the likelihood of an SAT score decrease, how much your SAT score could decrease by, and how to make sure your score goes up, not down. Also, learn how to compare a score from the Old SAT (which was scored out of 2400) with a current SAT score (which is out of 1600) to see if your score decreased in the transition.