NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM ACT & SAT STRATEGIES

With many juniors signed up to sit for an ACT and/or SAT test on one of the dates scheduled for April, May, or June, we would like to offer some short-term and longer-term advise to students.  

You may have heard one of your teachers or counselors advise that the best “college test prep” for any standardized exam is to complement one’s hard work at school with test preparation that links clearly back to and reviews the foundational materials and skills you have learned over the years in school. This is sound advice and we encourage you to take it to heart.

Clearly, such an approach requires some advanced planning.  We advise students to target a test date and design an approach that allows for approximately three months of test prep and curriculum review leading up to the chosen test date.  Such an approach assures enough time for a diagnostic test, SAT or ACT assessment of a student’s strengths and weaknesses, the mapping out of an individualized to test preparation, and the completion of the planned course of study. Following such an approach, one could still devise a schedule and work towards the June 6^th SAT and the June 13^th ACT exam dates.

Of course, there is not enough time for such an approach to the  April 4^th ACT or the May 2^nd SAT, so over the next month, we will offer 5 last minute pieces of advice to April/May test takers.

Know your timing.  Many students run out of time because they do not know how to pace themselves.  Time management is a key to success.  Bring a silent stopwatch to the test and pace yourself to spend more time on English and Reading sections and less time on Math and Science.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 9:06 am and is filed under Athletic Scholarships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.