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–Duke doesn’t actually suggest preparation for either test, so don’t feel enormously pressured to prepare. In fact, Duke TIP clearly states on the program’s site that they don’t want students to feel stressed when approaching the test, especially because stress on test day may have a negative impact on scores.

–However, if you do want to minimize test intimidation, your student may feel more empowered by actually seeing a copy of the SAT or ACT before test day just to know what she’s getting into. Free sample tests are available on both the College Board and ACT websites. Remember that the SAT does dock scores for incorrect answers—to score around a 500 on an SAT section, one needs to answer just over half the questions correctly and leave the rest of the test blank. Answering or guessing too zealously may be to your disadvantage. However, the ACT does not take off points for incorrect answers, so you want to encourage your student to select an answer for every question on the test (yes—Christmas Tree during the last five minutes).

Investigating the scoring rubrics in either The Official SAT Study Guide, 2nd edition
or The Real ACT Prep Guide: The Only Official Prep Guide From The Makers Of The ACT
can help you sort out how to earn the scores you need.

–Having your student take a practice test, even just at home at the kitchen table, can be helpful for selecting the best test for her. You may want to keep in mind that the SAT employs a far more robust vocabulary than the ACT, while the ACT includes a fast-paced Science Reasoning section that tests data-interpretation skills (rather than high-school level science).

– The Duke TIP cutoff scores are usually at or just above a 500 on each section of the SAT, which translates to roughly a 20 or 21 on the ACT.

–If you decide you do want to prepare your student, some of the faster, more learnable elements of both tests include Algebra, basic Geometry (not proofs, but rather understanding angles, lines, and degrees), and Grammar. Since you’re just out to collect as many correct points as possible, concentrating on a few specific topics may streamline the process of reaching the cutoff scores. Outsmarting the SAT was written for students to learn these concepts from the ground up, it’s a great option for basic skill-gathering for both the SAT and ACT; use it in conjunction with The Official SAT Study Guide, 2nd edition or The Real ACT Prep Guide: The Only Official Prep Guide From The Makers Of The ACT for real practice questions.

–We’re happy to help and congratulations on having such an accomplished child!

Fact #1 In life you will find that there will be a number of things you don’t want to do. While you will be an adult and will have the freedom to make your own decisions, you’re still going to need to get a job, pay bills, mow the lawn, and do the dishes. (Read: you’re going to need to have a work ethic.)

Fact #2 When you have a job, whether you work for yourself or someone else, if you aren’t a self-starter—even when the project is sooooo boring—you’re going to either lose your job or stay in the same stinkin’ position until the end of time.

Fact #3 While your parents may pay attention to your grades and homework now, the only person who is going to notice the grades you make as an adult—as measured in your personal satisfaction with your career and the number of dollars in your bank account—will be you.

What does this have to do with test prep?

Fact #4 It’s not a big secret that preparing for a standardized test is not as fun as riding your bike, playing a video game, watching television, cooking dinner, mowing the lawn, cleaning the bathroom, changing the oil in your Grandma’s car…. Ok, you get the idea. Studying for these tests, while they do have their creative moments, isn’t usually going to be the activity you most look forward to during the day.

Fact #5 It doesn’t matter that it isn’t fun. Lots of things that aren’t necessarily fun lead to great things: sweating it out at the gym leads to great muscles, running sprints at practice means speed to outrun your opponent when you need it, and cleaning out the car means you won’t be mortified on your date on Friday night.

Fact #6 Sometimes, it’s not even the immediate result that is most important; instead, it’s the opportunity you create for yourself in the long run—opportunities you may not yet even realize exist. What does this mean? Well, to be direct, your SAT or ACT score is totally pointless if you don’t see it as a key to get you through the door of your dream school, even if you don’t yet know what your dream school is.

The moral here is that the amount of studying you do for the SAT or ACT today, that one extra vocabulary word you learn or the geometry rule you memorize, can directly influence the number of doors that will be opened to you after you send in those applications.

On those days where you’d rather give Fluffy a bath than do another flash card or practice test, just remember that drudgework today is just an investment in opportunity tomorrow.

I recently realized that, whether you’re an accomplished student or not, that you may not really have a handle on the best way to prep for a standardized test. People argue back and forth about how “coachable” these tests may be, but there are two fundamental things you need to keep an eye out for while studying for either the ACT or SAT. This is one of my best-kept secret tactics. 

For every question you come across (and this is assuming you are using only real practice tests created by the test maker), you need to know what they asked how they asked the question. It’s fairly simple, really. Neither the SAT nor the ACT is a test of everything you learned in high school; instead, they test a finite number of facts/concepts and then test your knowledge or ability to apply them in different ways.

So, while you’re studying any SAT or ACT topic that fact-based (like grammar and math), this what you do for any question that gives you any sort of pause:

• Write down what you needed to know.

New formula? New grammatical construction? How functions work? Make sure you take notes on what you needed to know (and, most importantly, what you didn’t know) so you can make sure you don’t miss it again.

• Write down how they asked you about it.

Did they make the question a two-parter? Was the grammar something that “sounded right” that you might actually say but is, in fact, wrong? Did you miss an EXCEPT question? Did you overlook the different of perfect squares because you didn’t recognize it? Did you have to factor exponents in a way you never did in Algebra class?

Tracking these two simple elements is the key to unlocking and studying for any standardized test. Good luck!

Until now my general rule of thumb for practicing the reading passages on the SAT or ACT is “don’t read them aloud because you have to read silently during the test.” I’m all about practicality and doing things as they should be done, so I’ve always assumed this tactic made the most sense.

But sometimes I have to stop and rethink my strategies and this recent New York Times article has made me do a double take. One of the main tenets of my test prep tactics is based on a single concept: “I’m really good at standardized test; how can I share what I know with others?” Moreover, what are the experiences enhanced my natural test-taking ability and are they applicable to my students?

Reading this article, it hit me: reading aloud at my house wasn’t just something that my mother did with me when I was very young. We weren’t merely a bedtime story household. In fact, some of my favorite memories from my high school years involve hanging out with my mom, reading essays and articles to each other and laughing ourselves to tears.  We read Russell Baker, E.B. White, and George Will to each and talked about what we read. (Yes, seriously.)

The fact is that learning to read with nuance fosters not only an understanding of others’ work but also the ability to edit one’s own work efficiently and masterfully. Practicing communicating—conveying meaning—is integral to developing the very comprehension that the SAT in particular* tests.

What does this mean for us? Well for me and my students it means that we’re going to be doing a lot more reading aloud, and I’m going to be nitpicking their inflection and cadence to more carefully notice when they’ve lost their purpose. For students reading this it means it’s time to start reading out loud, whether to your friend or your family. If you find a funny article online on a magazine, share it with your friends by reading a paragraph or two to them rather than just handing them the magazine. When you’re hanging out on the beach this summer vacation share that funny bit you just read in your beach book.

Join the debate club. Get involved in theater. Consider being part of the literary magazine or yearbook at your school—most clubs that involve writing will involve reading aloud. Most importantly, get in the habit of reading material on a variety of subjects aloud into your daily life. Prioritize it, and you should see your scores increase.

*I say SAT in particular because the ACT’s reading passages are more geared toward testing attention to detail rather than nuance, intention, and implication of the passage itself. 

As a millennial, you have some distinct advantages: you’ve grown up in a home with a computer, you’ve got access to information that used to take major trips to the library to discover, and you can stay connected wherever you are, twenty four hours a day.

The disadvantage: you’re blipped out. You’re the sound byte generation. You can’t focus. You bore easily. You’re antsy. You’re not very likely to read this article in its entirety.

This all puts you at a natural disadvantage for surviving the mega tests that are the SAT and ACT.

So what do you do? Well, I’ll tell you, but you’re probably not going to like it. The best thing you can do for your concentration is to get away from the computer. Seriously. Stop obsessively checking your friends’ Facebook statuses, leave Twitter alone for a while, and press the pause button on YouTube. Step away from the screen. Moreover, once you’ve done that, don’t head for the television; head outside.

Ride your bicycle. Play sports. Start a weekly yoga regimen and stick with it.

Read a book for fun, and don’t put it down when you notice your mind wandering. Go back and read the section you missed again. Keep it up! Work up to getting absorbed in a book for one to two hours at a time.

Seriously? Yes. Seriously.

You will probably also want to take a look at what you’re eating. While low carb eating was a big fad ten years ago, foods with a low glycemic index are definitely the way to go. If you’re loading up on sugar and refined carbohydrates (cheap sugars that make your blood sugar spike and plummet throughout the day), you’re certainly in the ruthless cycle of sugar rush and sugar coma.  I’ve got news for you: the words “coma” and “great test taking” aren’t used in tandem very often.

Specifically regarding studying: you’ll want to keep your desk area neat and clean. Turn off the radio. If you’re one of these people that can’t stand the quiet, you may want to check out Simply Noise, a web site that creates white noise to drown out distractions (I like the brown/red noise, personally).

Also, don’t wait until 11 o’clock to do your homework, because that’s when you’re tired. While you most likely would rather use your free energetic time after school to tool around hanging out with your friends, you’re far more likely to focus on and remember what you studied during those times. These are the harsh realities.

Concentration on Test Day

The thing about Test Day is that you’re not likely to turn into Captain Focus if you haven’t been training beforehand. Nevertheless, there are still a few things you can do:

1. Plan to take a mind clearing breath after a predetermined number of questions. If you know you’re someone that loses concentration or tends toward what I like to call the “I’m Never Getting Into College Freak Out,” you need to plan to take a deep breath every few minutes. It loosens you up and gets oxygen into your system. Yes, remembering to breathe helps.

2. Have a mantra. While your mantra doesn’t have to be “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and…,” it certainly can be! Your mantra needs to be something special to you, something personal that reminds you that you are prepared and you are smarter than the SAT. Even “I AM prepared” works. Pick something useful.

3. Take a snack. Just like your brain needs oxygen, hence the breathing, your brain needs fuel too. Since we already talked about the horrors of sugar addiction, you probably know I don’t want you to take a donut along. Take a banana and some peanut crackers (or some version of that) that you can eat quickly that won’t upset your stomach. Think a balance of carbs and protein (for energy) and fat (so that you’ll feel full and not obsess about lunch while doing the double reading passage.

4. Don’t Drink a Red Bull…unless you drink Red Bull every day, in which case, please do. The point here is don’t eat or drink on test day that you wouldn’t normally have. I know those no-crash energy drinks seem alluring, but Test Day is not the day to experiment.

If you’d like more info on the low attention spans of the millennial generation in particular, please check out this great book review on Salon.com.

If you’ve had your finger on the SAT/ACT phenomenon lately, you may have noticed that over the past 18 months or so the content of the ACT has become more varied and difficult, likely in response to the many students who chose to take it instead of the SAT. More kids with higher scores means the test has to get tougher.

So kids are switching back to the SAT, which is great, but it’s leading to a lot of conversations about vocabulary, which ultimately leads to conversations about reading. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the students who work with me directly are very privileged in their educational backgrounds: many of their parents hold several degrees and they attend excellent schools. One would be naïve to think that I’m not having conversations like “seriously, you need to start to reading” with presumed young scholars. However, blame You Tube, blame the television, blame our culture, or blame bad writers… I don’t know, but we’ve got kids who want to go to Brown and Penn who don’t read. I suppose this doesn’t strike them as unusual, as so few of their friends seem to read, but the fact is this:

The most prestigious colleges in the country (and frankly, many colleges that are not so prestigious) don’t give students big homework assignments and expect regurgitation; instead, they intend to challenge students’ thinking, to broaden their intellectual horizons, to encourage them to develop new ideas. If you’re mulling over new ideas, you’re going to need to write to express your thoughts, and you’ll need to do that well if you want anyone to take you seriously. Moreover, if you’re not a reader, your vocabulary will likely suffer as well, which means your SAT score is going to suffer.

All those coveted seats at Top Institutions? They’re going to readers.

Which means you need to go pick up a book or a copy of Vanity Fair, stat.

And if you’re not reading, whether you’ve realized this yet or not, you’re going to struggle to eek your way into the top institutions, no matter who you are. Hate to be heavy-handed, but these are the facts, kids. Now go pick up a book!