Worry about college admission testing can stress out even the best students. Some take the SAT or ACT three, four or more times, trying to eke out every last point, and poring over concordance tables to discern which scores to submit with their applications. If you are one of those people dedicating three-plus hours on multiple Saturday mornings to filling in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, you owe it to yourself to take these two important steps to make sure each Saturday cou

More and more colleges are allowing students to complete their applications without submitting SAT or ACT scores. FairTest lists more than 850 institutions that do not use standardized tests to admit substantial numbers of their freshman classes. Why would an institution choose to downplay standardized tests -- and what does that mean for your application? Colleges often proclaim that reduced reliance on standardized tests makes sense, given that GPA is a better predictor of

In years past, a student could assess his chances of admission to a certain college by comparing his class rank and test scores against well-known benchmarks. There were tacitly acknowledged cut-off scores below which the applicant could not expect to be admitted. That was a reach school. But even more important, there were scores above which you were virtually certain to get in. This was how you knew you had a safety school. Many public colleges and universities still op

Over the years, messages about how – and whether! – to prepare for admissions tests like the SAT and the ACT have varied. The SAT developers originally insisted that their test measured innate “aptitude” and therefore was impervious to efforts to improve through any type of preparation. Stanley Kaplan changed that! The SAT doesn’t even try to call itself and “aptitude” test anymore; the “a” now stands for “achievement.” If it’s possible to improve a student’s score through