Some colleges require 2 or 3 SAT II subject tests.  I understand that these tests are something that high school students learn in their classes as well.

With the ACT, students have the option of not reporting the test results to colleges, but all SAT I scores are reported to colleges.  So, if your student takes SAT I insted of ACT, make sure that your student is prepared for the test.  I have not looked into preparing for ACT, so I can not say much about it.  Preparing for SAT requires a lot of hard work.  The most basic item you student needs to have is the “Blue Book” published by the College Board, The Official Guide.  Have your student go through all the questions in the book.  Have them study again all the questions that they miss or do not understand.  If your student has hard time going through the book on his/her own, you should consider helping him yourself or consider hiring a tutor.  That Blue Book is that important.

Funny SATs answers Knick Knacks.

During his summer vacation, I started my son studying the Blue Book.  He hates it.  He really does.  It is monotonous.  I have him do reading comprehension, or the critical reading part.  He does one or two sections each week.  He still has a lot of time before the actual SAT so I am letting him go slowly. I do’nt want him to burn out before the actual SAT.  I will discuss on this topic more later, and let’s move on to the second option that we have.

Online prep courses can be very effective, especially the writing part.  I have not had my son enroll in any online courses, yet, so I am giving my ideas to you here without any experience.  If someone misses certain types of math problems, he needs to practice many similar problems in order to be comfortable.  For the reading and sentence completion parts, I think most people can do it alone.  My son is doing it alone.  He just needs to read a lot of passages and answer questions from those passages.  However, the writing part requires the help of teachers.  Writing essays with same mistakes over and over does not help anybody improve writing.  Someone needs to point out the mistakes and help correct them.  This can be done offline and that is probably more effective.  But what if you don’t have someone to help your children with writing in person?

Using an online prep course in writing seems very similar to what we do at school.  We get an essay topic, write about it, turn it in and the teacher hands the essay back to us, pointing out mistakes with suggestions on correcting them.  I have not tried any online prep courses, so I do not know exactly how they are run, but I think they do it quite similar to the way we do it offline, like in school.  You get a topic to write on, write an essay, turn it in and then get a response on the website or maybe in e-mail.  Check out this site to get an idea.  The only problem may be finding the right web site and the right tutor on that web site.  Please make suggestions if you have had experience with any online writing courses, or any type of online SAT prep courses.

Linked web site is only used as an example and I neither endorse nor disapprove it.