COllege Admissions News and ACT / SAT Strategy

If you really want to get a high SAT score, perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that “talent” or “IQ” matters far less than you think. There are not really “math people” or “natural readers.” What matters is the amount and quality of your SAT prep, which of course is influenced in large part by how passionate and genuinely interested you are in doing well on the SAT or ACT. So if you want to get a 99^th percentile SAT score or a 34 on the ACT, it’s possible that you can do it.

What is the best way to prepare for the ACT or SAT?

Well, it’s true arriving at a useful answer to this question does depend a lot on your timing and the context. If you are a junior with average grades, but aspire to get a high SAT score, and you take the SAT in 30 days, this article should be able to help adopt the right mindset and bring some calm and confidence to exam day. But practically, with only 30 days until the exam, you should be considering online SAT tutoring or an SAT crash course to get the best SAT score you possibly can. SAT tutoring and courses can and will help you get a higher score.

Since we are an SAT tutoring company, you might expect us to argue that hiring an SAT coach is almost always worth it. But we don’t believe that to be true.

Parents of high schoolers frequently ask me when the best time is to begin planning for college. My answer is usually “now!” which often, and more importantly, leads to talking about “how.”

When applying to competitive colleges, every aspect of your application is carefully scrutinized. We’ve interviewed several admission officers during the pandemic and asked them what they look for in students. All said the same thing: They are looking for students who step up and make a difference (even a small one) in their community. 

In the first post of our SAT review video series, we approach working through a standard reading comprehension question.

The SAT reading comprehension section can often be a time crunch for many students. This video demonstrates a systematic approach to quickly reading and analyzing a passage in order to answer questions.