High School


Shedding Light on the Dark Ages of Junior Year

Back when I was in high school, revisionist history notwithstanding, teachers sometimes referred to the Middle Ages the Dark Ages.  Perhaps a misnomer, the term Dark Ages was meant to suggest that during the Middle Ages—the period in Western History between Antiquity (Greeks and Romans) and the European Renaissance—nothing very interesting happened as far as historians were concerned. Hence, it was dark. (Sidebar: Readers of Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior know there’s something interesting happening every moment, but the term was coined long before the book was written ;-)). By analogy, the long period in the junior year sandwiched between […]


Dr. Yo’s 3 Tips for School Supplies

Quick word about school supplies. ‘Tis the season, fa la la la la. Here are Dr. Yo’s guidelines for purchasing school supplies: If your teachers recommend certain types of notebooks, paper, and other school supplies, always get what they want. It shows respect, willingness to learn their way, and who knows, they might actually have a good reason :-). If you haven’t done it their  way before, don’t prejudge – give it a shot. If you know what organizational scheme works best for your learning style (either because you’re an older high school student or a younger precocious student who uses words […]


Prepping for the Personal Essay: Who Are We and How Did We Get This Way? Aka, Two Apples a Day…

[Originally posted 6/16/20, but still all true in 2023, and you can’t say that about MANY things.] There are many ways to understand who we are. We are, for example, in a literal sense, what we EAT and drink and breathe. When we digest things, we literally take the external world and make it part of ourselves (hence the magic of the pig, who, as Jim Gaffigan has noted, can take an apple—basically garbage—and miraculously turn it into bacon!). Less literally, we are the sum total of our THOUGHTS and FEELINGS, in that what we think about all day and […]


Summer Strategies for High School Students

With standardized test preparation, application writing, and summer reading assignments ramping up as the fall looms on the distant horizon, summer is no time to go academically soft. Just as athletes lose ground without regular practice and training, students can forget math facts and vocabulary words, or begin to slip in writing skills and study habits, if they aren’t intellectually challenged through the summer months. There are three specific areas in which students can get substantially ahead during the school break: standardized test preparation, academic (math, English, and other study) skills, and summer reading. Prepping for Standardized Tests Junior year […]


Six Quality Summer Activities for Success in the College Admissions Game

Ah, summertime. The long awaited break from the rigors of academia during the seemingly interminable haul between September and June. Time to sleep in every day and finally get to new levels in all your favorite video games and indulge all your other couch potato fantasies.  Right? Um, wrong! The last thing you want to do in the college admissions game is be a complete couch potato over the whole summer. There are plenty of productive, meaningful, and FUN things to do between final exams and back-to-school BBQs that will give you a feeling of accomplishment AND impress college admissions […]


A1 Tip for High School Success and College Admissions

If you’ve done any reading at all about writing compelling applications to college, whether on this blog (see, for example, Passion Is No Ordinary Word) or elsewhere, you know that the number one buzz word is passion. People are passionate about millions of things, from ideas and principles to sports and other collaborative activities to music and other performing arts to computers and technology to volunteer work and community service and on and on), but all these varied manifestations of passion share one thing in common: a deep commitment, a visceral inclination, a kind of love. Admissions committees can tell […]


Catch the Back-to-School Wave

One of my favorite things to do is bodysurf.  I remember when my dad taught me how on a Florida vacation back in the early, gulp, 1970s.  He explained how good timing enables you to harness the full force of the swell just as the whitecaps begin to break at the crest of the wave.  If you jump too early or scramble to catch up, you’ll miss it: all the puny human exertion you can muster against the wave’s weighty power proves useless if you try to fight it.  The trick is to catch the wave just right and then LET […]


SAT versus ACT, A Side-by-Side Analysis, Part 2 of 3

[To commemorate the second anniversary of the “Redesigned SAT,” this is installment #2 of a three-part article. If you’d like to read the whole article in one shot, simply email your request to DrYo@CollegePrepExpress.com. Dr. Yo would like to express his gratitude to the following students for their valuable input: Yash Nair, Justin and Chritian Andreoli, and Nick and Chris Consoli. You guys rock! Originally posted March, 2018.] What I’ve discovered over the last several years, both from my own careful study of the eight sample tests in The Official SAT Study Guide in an effort to help students raise their scores […]


SAT versus ACT, A Side-by-Side Analysis, Part 3 of 3

SAT-vs-ACT-What's the Difference?[To commemorate the second anniversary of the “Redesigned SAT,” this is installment #3 of a three-part article. Here are Part 1 and Part 2. Dr. Yo would like to express his gratitude to the following students for their valuable input: Yash Nair, Justin and Chritian Andreoli, and Nick and Chris Consoli. You guys rock! Originally posted, March 2018.]

In this third and final installment, I offer a section-by-section analysis of the SAT and ACT, highlighting the main differences and demonstrating my overarching theme that the SAT is more of a reasoning exam and the ACT is more of a knowledge-based exam.

The biggest substantive difference—that is, the biggest difference in terms of actual content—is the ACT contains a Science Test, whereas the SAT does not. The redesigned SAT contains some items that are similar to the ACT Science Test’s questions—which are included in its first two tests, Evidence Based Reading & Writing and Writing & Language—in the form of “infographic” questions.

SAT Info Graphic Item

SAT Info Graphic Item

Here, as in the question at right, students are asked to interpret data, graphs, and charts, and specifically how they support or contradict information presented in the prose parts of the passage. There are only a few of them and they are generally easier than the ACT Science Test’s questions.

Items on the ACT Science Test are more in depth, more sophisticated, and, plain and simply, harder. The biggest challenge on the ACT Science Test for the vast majority of students is time management. Answering 40 items in 35 minutes distributed across six or seven completely different science passages is challenging and underscores the ACT has more questions per time than the SAT and a tester’s pace has to be faster on the ACT than on the SAT. Students must learn to identify quickly what I call the science “buzzwords” in each Science Test question, and then find where that information—those same buzzwords—is presented in the graphs, diagrams, charts, and/or prose text of the passage. Here’s an example:


The science “buzzwords” in this item are “temperature” and “distance.” Note that I need not know the first thing about HCL, what it stands for, or what it’s doing on a swab. All I need to do is identify that the question is asking about a relationship between temperature and distance. The tester might also note that each answer offers a graph showing “temperature” on the x-axis as a function of “distance” on the y-axis. Identifying these two key words, the tester must then scan the given information, looking specifically for where “temperature” and “distance”  appear. That would be in Table 1:

Once we find where the science buzzwords appear in the passage, finding the answer is simple: Scanning down the Temperature column, we notice the temperature is increasing at 10° intervals. Next, scanning the Distance column, we notices that distance pretty much stays the same: 4–>4.1–>4.1–>4.  In other words, as temperature increase the distance remains the same, or flatlines. This is neatly shown in the graph in answer choice D above.

My experience of the vast majority of students who end up taking or counting the ACT, is that there is a learning curve in the Science Test. That is, very few students score their best, or even near their best, on their first try. It absolutely takes some getting used to, so don’t make an SAT versus ACT decision based solely on a single practice ACT Science Test score. My advice is to take a few, timed, practice ACT Science Tests before you rule out the ACT based on Science alone.

The most similar sections on the SAT and ACT are the SAT’s second test, Language & Writing, and the ACT’s first test, English. Substantively, they are both essentially tests of grammar, punctuation, and diction, with only slight differences in emphases. The biggest difference in the two tests, which should come at no surprise at this point, is questions per time. The ACT’s English section is 10 minutes longer than the SAT’s Language & Writing section, but it contains 31 more questions. The SAT asks a tester to answer 44 questions in 35 min, or ~48 seconds per question. The ACT asks a tester to answer 75 questions in 45 min, or 36 seconds per question. Hence, you get 12 more seconds to answer every SAT grammar question than you do for every ACT question. Consequently, a premium on the ACT is placed on knowing the grammar rules tested on the exam so thoroughly that you can answer more questions more quickly.

The other two sections on the ACT and SAT (Reading and Math) neatly correspond and reveal their exam’s fundamental difference, knowledge-based versus reasoning. Both exams test reading comprehension, that is, reading a substantial passage (usually approximately two columns long) and answering 10-ish questions about it (on the ACT it’s always exactly 10 question per passage, while on the SAT is around 10 questions per passage): Section 1 on the SAT is called Evidence Based Reading & Writing, and Section 3 on the ACT is called “Reading.” The SAT’s section is almost twice as long as the ACT’s, 65 min versus 35 min, and it asks questions about five passages (one based on literature, two on history or historical documents, and two on science) versus the ACT’s four passages (one based on literature, one based on social studies—i.e., history—one on humanities, and one on natural science), but again, you get significantly more time per question. Students rarely struggle to complete the entire SAT reading section in time, but they often struggle to complete the ACT reading section: on the SAT’s 52 questions in 65 min, you get 1 min 15 seconds per question; on the ACT’s 40 question in 35 min, you get under a minute each, or 52 seconds per item. Once again, when it comes to Reading, time management is at a premium on the ACT versus the SAT.


The second biggest difference after time between the two Reading tests is whereas the ACT Reading questions focus on factual details, the answers to which can almost always be found somewhere explicitly stated in the passage, the 23 seconds more per question on the SAT account for the fact that their questions often go beyond factual details to focus on which evidence in the passage best supports a given claim, and to ask testers to make inferences about the passage. Typical ACT Reading questions ask, for example, “Which of the following events in the passage occurred first chronologically?” and “According to the passage, which of the following is true of Argentine ants?” Conversely, the SAT questions tends to go beyond what’s printed on the page and ask students to reason, or THINK. For example, “Which choice best describes a major theme of the passage?” A tester will not be able to find the answer to that item printed in the passage, but rather will have to think about the passage as a whole, perhaps having to look back carefully at the intro and conclusion, to infer a major theme.

Here are examples of where the SAT asks testers to go beyond the printed word and to use their reasoning. By far, the most common question TYPE appearing on the SAT Reading Test is the PAIR of questions where the first question is typical of reading comprehension tests in general and the second asks which answer choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the preceding question. For instance,

Students will not find any of the eight adjectives in the four answer choices to question #38 in the relevant part of the passage, here:

However, students do know the best evidence for the answer to question #38 is presented in one of the four excerpts given in question #39. Examining choice B), “And they are very important question and we have very little time in which to answer them,” testers find definitions of “momentous” (very important) and “pressing” (very little time), and therefore can use choice B) in question #39 to find the answer to question #38, which is C). It takes a little longer than typical ACT questions, but these are no more difficult and extra time is built into every passage as indicated above.

Finally, we come to MATH. The most glaring difference is that while the SAT does not allow the use of a calculator for 25 minutes of the 80 total minutes of Math, the ACT allows calculators on all 60 minutes of its Math Test. Aside from this difference in the use of calculators, by far the biggest difference is students must reason, or THINK, a lot more on the SAT than on the ACT. This does NOT mean the SAT Math is harder—in many cases it is MUCH easier—it means the two exams must be approached differently. Again looking at the allotted time per question is revealing: on the ACT testers must answer 60 questions is 60 minutes, or 1 question a minute. on the SAT tests must an answer a total of 58 questions in 80 min, 1 min 23 sec per question, or 23 more seconds for every SAT Math question than every ACT Math question. That time is generally to be spent thinking about the information presented and looking for insights. Here is a classic example of an SAT Math problem that, at first blush, looks mighty scary to even the geekiest of math nerds.

Again, while this is an intimidating-looking problem, a well-coached student will know that since it’s only problem #7 on a 20-question tests, it’s very likely not as hard as it looks. And it’s not. Essentially, while ugly and frightening, the given information presents an equation solved for m in terms of a fraction of P. To find the equation solved for P in terms of m, which is what the question asks, one need only multiply m by the reciprocal (or “refliprocal”) of the fraction being multiplied by P. The answer is, without even putting pencil to paper, (B), which simply presents P equal to the product of the reciprocal of the original ugly fraction and m.

Is that harder or easier than ACT math? Good question, glad you asked. The answer is, as indicated in all three installments of this blog post, it depends on the kind of student, learner, and test taker you are. If, after reading these three posts you remain unsure of which test you’ll get a better score on, I strongly encourage you to invest less than $10 to take our 30-min SAT versus ACT Questionnaire, designed for the express purpose of determining which test is better for which students. We’re here to help! 🙂

~Dr. Yo

See also:

The Redesigned SAT versus the ACT, Two Years Later, Part 1 of 3

The Redesigned SAT versus the ACT, Two Years Later, Part 2 of 3

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Be Mindful of When You Choose Not to Be

Be Mindful, But Give Yourself a Break In his beautiful compendium of teachings, Peace Is Every Step, Vietnamese Mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh gives us the secret to finding happiness every instant of every day. “Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.” The whole book, as well as Thich Nhat Hanh’s other Mindfulness teachings, is all about what it means to be awake, alive in the present moment. Through meditation and focused awareness of what’s going on in our bodies, starting with […]


What’s Next After the PSAT for Juniors: SAT or ACT?

For many CPE students, the answer is….YES! Please allow me to explain. You know how you can tell a really bad college advisor? S/he gives the same generic advice to every student regardless of college dreams/goals and level of academic and extracurricular achievement. AT CPE, we don’t do that. So to help begin answering the question of the moment—What’s Next After the PSAT for Juniors?—use the broad-strokes categories below. But also feel free to schedule a one-hour consultation with Dr. Yo to discuss specifics about your or your kid’s standardized testing strategies, overall academic program, and athletic/extracurricular/community service/school spirit goals. […]


Clipboard with check mark

Don’t Make This Classic Mistake! Time-Management Tips for Fall Seniors

Year after year we see senior after senior making the same time management mistake as they play their last quarter in the college admissions game. It’s a mistake that has two negative consequences: first, it prevents them from doing their best work, and second, it inevitably leads to greater stress for them and their families. And their #1 accomplice in this crime? Their well-intentioned parents who simply want them to get their applications done… NOW! Most of the seniors with whom we work at CollegePrepExpress are busy during the fall getting the best grades they can, preparing for their last […]


Why the PSAT is More Important than Ever

As most of us know, applying to college back in the day—and by “the day” I mean right through the turn of the twenty-first century—was MUCH less complicated than it is today. We were instructed simply to be “smart, well-rounded kids.” Do your best in school, play a couple of sports, and get involved in some extracurricular activities. Community service wasn’t a big college admissions deal yet. And standardized tests were in the dark ages: those of us on the East and West coasts took the SAT and those in the Midwest and South took the ACT– ONE OR THE […]


Leaving Soon for College? Dr. Yo’s 7 Simple Tips for Guaranteed Success (What are YOURS?)

If you’re lucky enough to have a college open to attend this fall, this one’s for you! I wouldn’t take much of the advice I have to offer. If you know me as a friend, or if you’ve been working with me a while, you know I’m full of all kinds of advice (cut it out, not just full of it). If I start telling you where to invest your money, or what car you should buy next, politely nod and walk away. Quickly, if you know what’s good for you. But when it comes to getting the most out […]


How and Why the PSAT “Counts”

As most of us know, applying to college back in the day—and by “the day” I mean right through the turn of the twenty-first century—was MUCH less complicated than it is today. We were instructed to aspire to become the “smart, well-rounded kids.” Do your best in school, play a couple of sports, and get involved in some extracurricular activities. Community service wasn’t a big college admissions deal yet. And standardized tests were in the dark ages: those of us on the East and West coasts took the SAT and those in the Midwest and South took the ACT—ONE OR […]