[VIDEO ANSWER] Do you recommend that students take both SAT and ACT or focus on one?

Test Prep Authority – Office Hours #1 – Question: “Do you recommend that students take both SAT and ACT or focus on one?”

Do you recommend that students take both the SAT and the ACT or that they concentrate their preparation efforts on only one test? And the really quick answer to this one is absolutely concentrate. You must concentrate. There’s no point in studying for both. The good news is that they test very similar material and, in a lot of cases, they have very similar formats. So, you know, if you are studying for SAT math, you’ll get better at ACT math. If you’re studying for ACT English, you’ll get better at SAT writing. A lot of the material and a lot of the strategies do cross over.

The students who’ve taken my online SAT and ACT programs remark to me a lot that, you know, the material is very similar and that’s because the tests, in many ways, are very similar. They require a lot of the same material and the same strategies, with a few exceptions. That being said, their formats are very different and you really want to find the one that’s best for you and launch in. Some people say, “Should I try and get a good SAT and ACT score?” And there’s really no point in doing that. The reason that that’s pointless is that they both measure the same thing, how good are you at taking sort of a numerically based standardized test. So the analogy I always make is, you go up to somebody and you say, “I’m six feet tall and I’m also two yards tall.” Well, you gave them two different numbers, but you just told them exactly the same information.

So, you know, getting a 2,400 on the SAT and getting a 36 on the ACT, they accomplish the same thing. Doing both, there’s no one at the college who’s gonna say, ” Whoa, I’m so bulled over by the fact that they took the time to take both of these test and rocked them both!” It doesn’t matter. And remember that the SAT and the ACT have one purpose, which is to get your binder opened. Right? They’re not looking at your scores after the fact. They’re looking at your scores right up front. So you know, they get applicant 3,497 and they say, “Oh GPA, good enough, SAT score, good enough.

Alright we’ll check them out,” or, “GPA, not very good, ACT score not very good.” Wham, right in the trash. So, that’s really all you need to know. You don’t need to take both. The way that you can figure this out mostly easily so that we don’t spend more time on this, because there’s a lot more questions to go, is go to testprepauthority.com and check out the SAT versus ACT guide. It’s free and it will show you exactly which one is best for you and kind of a step by step format. It’s a pretty simple process. It takes two weekends to diagnose yourself. But, there you have it. Pretty simple stuff.