SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips

If you've taken the old SAT and the redesigned SAT, you may be wondering which scores you should send to colleges. Should you send all your scores? Should you just send your results from the test with the highest average section scores?

In this article, I'll explain the factors to consider when determining whether you should send old or new SAT scores.

Snacks are one of the most overlooked yet most necessary parts of your SAT planning. Snacks can be an energy fueler, helping you to power through the SAT. However, the wrong snacks can be energy drainers, making you crash during the marathon that is the SAT. In this guide, I’ll talk about the importance of snacks, what makes a good snack and provide 11 SAT snack options. I’ll also let you know what snacks to avoid.

After you take the SAT, your score will be determined by the little bubbles you fill in on your scantron sheet - a sheet where there’s no place to show your work.

It’s normal (even important) to want to take notes and work through problems. Since you won't receive any extra scratch paper in the testing room, your SAT booklet is the place to do it. Here, I’ll go over what, how, and even why you should write in your test booklet. That little stack of paper might end up more helpful than you expected.

With the guessing penalty eliminated for the redesigned SAT, you should guess on any question you can’t answer, because you won’t be penalized for wrong guesses. However, that doesn’t mean that guessing completely randomly is a good idea. You should always use the process of elimination as much as you are able to increase your chances of getting the right answer.

Standardized test preparation has spawned a booming business. Stepping into the vast sea of available resources that have resulted can be overwhelming. What follows is a considered review of one particular resource, Princeton Review's Cracking the New SAT, Premium 2016 Edition. The hope is that this review will help you decide whether that particular book is worth your time—and how to approach it if it is.

Since the SAT has just been redesigned, you might feel like there aren’t very many practice questions around for you to use. The College Board has released four free practice tests, but once you get through those, what should you do?

You might be wondering if you can use old SAT practice tests to study for the new SAT. The answer is yes, you can! I will show you how.

Read on to see why you would want to use old practice tests, what practice tests won’t do for you, and then a how-to guide on the most effective way to use old tests to prep for each section. Finally, I’ll also briefly discuss using the ACT for new SAT prep, since the tests are surprisingly similar.

We've all experienced nerves before an important evaluation, but for many of us the anxiety is much, much worse than a few simple jitters. 

By all accounts, a significant percentage of students experience some level of test anxiety, ranging from significant but livable symptoms to the most severely debilitating manifestations.

Dealing with any level of test anxiety during the SAT or ACT is, at its best, the opposite of fun. This guide will explain what test anxiety is, why it happens, and what you can do to manage it. 

Looking through pages and pages of SAT advice, tips, and strategies can get a bit overwhelming. If you’re looking for the information on the most important things to know about taking the SAT, you’ve come to the right place.

Here, I’ll lay out my best SAT advice: five tips to help you excel when you take the test. Read on to get the short and sweet version of everything you need to know.

Are you preparing for the SAT by taking practice tests? Awesome! You’re on the right track! How can you ensure that you’re getting the most out of each practice test you take? You need to make sure you’re taking each practice test under realistic testing conditions. What’re you doing (maybe subconsciously) that’s ruining your realistic testing conditions?

On June 6th, 2015, the College Board made a huge mistake. This mistake resulted in some sections of the test being canceled and forced the College Board to use an abnormal scoring method. To make amends for the mistake, the College Board offered a free retest for June 6th test-takers in October 2015. What’s the situation today? How did the retest go? What should you do if you took the June 6th test? I’ll address all of this and more in this news update. 

Do you have a high GPA, perform well in school, but can’t seem to do well on the SAT / ACT? This is a common pattern, and there are certain strategies that work especially well for you. First, we'll figure out why this is happening to you, and, depending on the reason, suggest ways to improve your SAT / ACT score. Second, we’ll go over what a high GPA but low SAT / ACT score signals to colleges and how to counter that signal.

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.

As of March 5, 2016, the new SAT is out. This means that those who took the old 2400-point SAT may want to know what their new 1600-point SAT score would have been, and vice versa. This information is critical for when you research and apply to scholarships and colleges that use a different version of the SAT than the one you took.

Here, we give the official conversions between old SAT and new SAT scores. These conversions come directly from the College Board, and we've made automatic conversion tools to make it easier for you!

Participation rate has a huge impact on state average SAT / ACT scores. In any state, the top students on the SAT/ACT are those most eager to take it, so states with low participation rates have artificially higher SAT / ACT scores.  Here, we use advanced statistical methods to adjust for participation rate to get at the real ranking of states by their real SAT and ACT scores.