Dear Mr. Bradshaw,
I am a high school junior and my question is how many times can I take the SAT or the ACT? I plan to apply to several top colleges and there seems to be no agreement on which test or how many times you should take them. I would also like some tips about how to study for these tests.
High school Junior
Dear Student,
I am asked this question quite often and the short answer is simple: take either test as many times as you can if you feel that each time you can improve your score. Admissions officers at top colleges tell me (privately) that it doesn’t matter how many times you take the tests because they will use your highest scores on any test in their application evaluation.
Second- and third-tier colleges tend to be more flexible in their admission requirements and place more emphasis on grades, which in some cases is a more accurate representation of student abilities. For students not planning to apply to top colleges, several four-year colleges do not even require test scores. Student have only to submit grades and recommendations.
Quite the opposite from what you may have heard, colleges are really looking for the best in you, not the worst. It is true that when discussing test scores in the news, colleges tend to publicly downplay their role in admissions. They love to talk about admissions in “holistic” terms. The dirty little secret is that as we work our way up the college pecking order we live in a test-obsessed world. Top colleges are ranked largely by the test scores of their entering freshmen class.
As a college consultant I am a tough test coach. My Bradshaw College Consulting Boot Camp (BBC) is geared to assist students in improving their test scores. For SAT or the ACT preparation we guide students through a punishing four hours a day, seven days a week, five-week boot camp. If our clients do not cheat (by overinflating the number of hours they spend studying) a typical student can reasonably expect to raise a first time score of 1850 to 2250 or higher. The BCC Boot Camp means a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but there is a reward for hard work.
BBC requires that students keep an error log which they send us each week for review. In our program, students must spend at least as much time analyzing their answers after the test as they do taking it. For a 24-question Critical Reading test, that means spending about an hour going over the right and wrong answers and writing it up in the error log. Did you miss the question because of carelessness, lack of subject matter knowledge, or you knew the content but didn’t understand the quirky logic of the test? These are important questions. Keeping track of these errors is the only way to improve you scores.
You have to put in the time studying for the SAT and ACT if you want to improve your scores. It is useless to take these tests multiple times if you do not work to correct areas of weakness each time.
Gerald Bradshaw is an international college admissions consultant with Bradshaw College Consulting in Crown Point.
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