No tutor, no formal test prep. She took SAT’s twice, a year apart; and ACT in spring and fall. ACT superscored would have been 28 - the problem was that on a retake I think the highest subscore fell a point or so. Submitted both ACT’s to selective colleges. I couldn’t get her to spend more than about an hour or so on test prep for retakes, but there was other stuff going on in her life at the time (grandfather was dying of cancer). Didn’t matter in the end anyway She got accepted where she was meant to get accepted. (We are Californians and she was essentially a guaranteed admit to any of the less selective UC campus in any event – the world would not have come to an end if she had headed off to UCSB or UCSC the following fall)
Some kids are better at taking tests cold than others. My D is very smart - she was an early reader who was formally tested as gifted as a child, but she’s never done particularly well on standardized tests.
My son is a good test taker and scored right at the NM cutoff (so he was NM Finalist) when he took the PSAT cold (no prep, and first-time taker in 11th grade) He took the SAT cold, once, in March of his junior year, and scored mid 1400’s – and never bothered taking it again.
My daughter did much better in college than my son. My son is very smart and capable, its just that standardized tests don’t really measure the qualities needed to perform well at college very well. For example, there is no section which tests procrastination, but that is a huge difference between son and daughter — son would wait until the very last minute to begin an assignment, daughter would start work the day it was assigned.
I don’t think all the prep in the world would have gotten my daughter’s scores a whole lot higher, because of the math part --my son helped her prep for math GRE (he had a perfect math GRE score and worked for a test-prep company teaching GRE) - and I don’t think her score came up past about 80th percentile or so. She got into just about every grad program she applied to, including a couple of Ivies. At this point she has turned down spots at U. of Chicago 3 times, as she applied and was accepted to two different grad programs there, as she wasn’t quite sure the direction she wanted to go. In the end it always came down to money. She may not be able to score 99th percentile in math like her brother, but there’s never been any problem with the concept that $40 or $60 or $80 thousand dollars is a lot more than $10 or $20 thousand – a math concept which does seem elusive on CC every spring.
I think that’s because it only works if the applicant has something special that stands out to the ad com, that would lead them to want to look beyond the numbers. They don’t have time to dig through the weeds to figure out on their own what makes the applicant “special”, so the application has to really highlight those qualities – and it can be hit and miss.
My D applied EA to Chicago and was absolutely ecstatic the day she received the deferral – she had assumed she would be rejected. She had not targeted colleges and decided to come up with an angle - it was the other way around, she had a lopsided and unusual academic profile, could identify her two most “marketable” strengths, and on the more selective end, aimed for colleges that seemed like they would particularly value those strengths. And that can be somewhat counter-intuitive – if a college has a reputation for a particular strength in an area, that college may also have plenty of other applicants to fill that niche – so the key is not to aim for the “best” college for that strength, but instead aim for the college where that applicant may well be one of the “best” in the applicant pool for that particular niche ability or interests.
I think athletes understand this – they are able to figure out whether they are competitive for Div I or whether they are better off to aim for Div III schools, and they target their applications appropriately.