If you’re a junior who studied for and took the March 9 SAT and/or are currently prepping for the CT public school March 27 SAT, you might have been planning to take a hard pass on the April 13 ACT. It was/is bad enough having to carve out time in Feb and March of—gulp—second semester junior year, so the prospect of keeping the test prep pedal to the metal for the month (or 18 days) between the March SAT(s) and April ACT is not particularly appealing. Ok, let’s be honest, it’s downright torturous and odious.
So you have my sympathy if you were/are planning to wait until June, July, September, November, and/or Dec to re-tool your SAT skills for the ACT. Having said that, for students gunning for the most selective, highly selective, and selective colleges where high test scores tend to be of the essence, it’s not a good strategy. Moreover, and please mark my words carefully here because it’s going to sound counterintuitive, for students planning to take both college entrance exams to ensure they’ll be sending their very best scores to colleges and who like the idea of spending the LEAST AMOUNT OF TOTAL TIME PREPPING POSSIBLE, taking the April ACT is a very good plan.
How’s that, you say? How will I spend less time overall if I’m not even planning to take (or study for) the April 13 ACT? Good questions! So glad you asked. Assuming you prep for any given SAT (like the one or two in March), you can parlay much of your studying into success on an ACT taken two to four weeks later (like the ACT in April). And vice versa (for example the September ACT and the October SAT). While the two exams are very different in many ways and require different test-taking strategies and skills (see my three-part blog analysis of the prominent differences), there is a HUGE amount of overlap in content, that is, the specific knowledge you need to have to get high scores. If you studied grammar rules and/or took practice Writing and Language sections for the SAT, the benefits you accrued are 90% transferrable to the English section on the ACT—the two sections are remarkably similar. Likewise, if you reviewed algebra, geometry, and a wee bit of precalculus and took practice SAT math tests involving linear and simultaneous equations, functions, special right triangles, basic trigonometry (e.g., SOHCAHTOA), graphing and solving and analyzing quadratics, complex numbers, rationalizing denominators, yada yada yada, then guess what? You were also unwittingly studying for the ACT, too!
So given that much of your prep in Feb/March can serve double duty in April, consider again whether it’s smarter (even if less grueling in the short run) to wait until the summer or fall to gear up for the ACT. Will you remember all the information you studied and crammed over the last few weeks for the SAT(s)? If you’re like most human beings, you won’t. But if your short-term memory is half-way decent, you’ll remember a good chunk of it in April. So returning to my bold claim about this strategy SAVING you time in the long run, I would say three weeks’ studying for the ACT immediately following studying for the SAT is roughly equivalent to six weeks’ studying for the ACT following a multi-month hiatus following the SAT. MUCH LESS TIME OVERALL. You feel me?
If you prepared for the grammar and math content on the SAT, then you should spend most of your prep time leading up to the ACT next month studying STRATEGIES rather than content, stuff like time management for each of the four required sections and recognizing and knowing how to solve the most commonly asked questions in each section, how the ACT test writers try to trick you different ways than the College Board does on the SAT with seductive but wrong answer choices. For example, the ACT often offer its’ as an answer choice, along with its and it’s, when its’ doesn’t even exist in the English language (which, even though its, er, I mean it’s an obvious trick answer, it’s great news for the well-prepared student because now there are only three choices instead of four.) Likewise, they’ll dangle could of, would of, and should of as identical-sounding, but WRONG alternatives to could’ve, would’ve, and should’ve. Good to know.
I have found over the years that students new to the SAT or ACT typically need six two-hour classes to reach their scoring potential because they have to study both content and strategies (hence our most popular test prep classes, the 6-Session ACT and 6-Session SAT Prep); whereas students who study hard for one over six-ish weeks typically only need three two-hour classes for the other, again because the content overlap is significant.
And that brings me to my final point: CPE has a 3-Session ACT Crash Course for the 4-13 exam that meets 3/30 (I know, I know, three days after the CT SAT), 4/6, and 4/12. Details here. Registration here. By the way, if you haven’t registered for the 4/13 ACT, it’s NOT too late, but almost. Late registration closes midnight tonite. My bad for not getting the word out sooner. But then again, you still have nine and a half hours as of this writing to log in and and fill out the form (www.actstudent.org). Plenty of time!
We’re here to help 🙂