As a founder and manager of Veritas Tutors, I have seen over the last four years countless students and parents come in to our office confused about the SAT. Some want to prep too early, others come in way too late and expect miracles. Some don’t take the test seriously enough, and others foolishly make it their entire life for their junior and senior years. Some have tried countless other test-prep companies (thousands of $$$) and come to us to pick up the pieces, and others plan poorly and mis-time the many tests that they have to take junior and senior year.

While I don’t claim to know ALL of the answers in the test-prep game, I do know most of them and am happy to share them with you in this multi-part blog post. Here I will cover all aspects of the SAT, from planning when to take it to deciding which scores to report, and everything in between (including an unbelievably effective method of preparing yourself and which materials to use).

Why am I giving away all of our secrets? Well, some people require tutoring for the SAT and others don’t. By understanding you the ins and outs of the SAT process, you’ll not only be able to do better, but you’ll also be able to make a more educated decision about whether or not you require our (or anyone else’s for that matter) tutoring services. After reading this article, you’ll be more prepared to pursue tutoring with a proactive attitude, and you’ll be able to determine for yourself if the test-prep company you’re using is the real deal or pulling the wool over your eyes. The better you do on the SAT, no matter if you use our services or not, the closer we are to achieving our goal of making high-quality instruction available to all students.

Now, without further ado…

Some planning: which test to take, when, and how much prep you’ll require

Let me start with a little story. One of our dearest clients, James, a high-school senior from Braintree, MA, came to us in October of 2008 for some SAT prep help. He had performed well in all of his classes and was a math and grammar whiz to boot, had done well on his PSAT, and now just wanted a bit of help to prepare for the SAT before he had to submit his score with his college applications due in December. He planned to apply to several first and second tier schools and was expecting a score that would support his application.

Sounds reasonable, right? Well, unfortunately it didn’t end so well. James did not improve nearly as much in the first few weeks as he expected, and with so much pressure and so little time, he was not able to pull it together before his applications. A sure-fire acceptance turned into a nightmare in just a few short weeks, and James unfortunately had to settle on one of his second-choice schools, in part because he did not get the scores he needed to bolster what was already a border-line application.

In the next posts, I’ll tell you when James really should have started to prepare and why he would have been better off taking the ACT.