When to take the ACT/SAT

RoonilWazlib99
Wed, 15 Nov 2017 21:48:48 +0000

Unless you took it multiple times and sent all the scores, I don’t think the colleges pay much attention to what year you took it. My son took the ACT in April of his sophomore year and did quite well, then again in December of his junior year and did better. Then he took the SAT in October of his senior year to “prove out” his PSAT score for National Merit and did the best. He didn’t study at all for the SAT and he said that after the time crunch of the ACT, it felt downright leisurely. He said he had at least 10-15 minutes left at the end of each section to go back and look through problems he had marked and to figure things out. This is an issue he had on the ACT, espcially the math. He would know that there was a simple way of solving a problem, but he couldn’t remember, so he left the problem for the end and would go back to try and solve it the long way around. On the SAT, he did the same, but had loads of time to do it. He sent all of his scores to all of his schools (some required it and some he did because on the ACT the math score was higher on one, but the reading and english scores were higher on the other. Then he went ahead and sent the SAT to everyone because it was awesome!

He definitely felt like he knew the most in his senior year, but I wouldn’t wait that long. Maybe fall/winter of junior year would be the best time to have a first go at it.