Teenagers have busy and hectic lives.

So unless they have a plan to study for the SAT or ACT in place, they will forget. They will put it on the back burner. They will put it on the back burner at their friend’s house down the street.

Even incredibly motivated students - and I’ve tutored a lot of them - do not have test preparation as their #1 favorite thing on their to-do list.

So, if test preparation is going to happen - it won’t happen by chance. They need a plan.

Why your student needs a study plan for the SAT

Your student needs a study plan in order to be fully prepared for to take the SAT or ACT. These high stakes tests are complex tasks. A good plan should address the following components of their preparation. Let’s break them down to understand their importance.

1. Thoughts - High stakes test like the SAT and ACT are mentally challenging tests for most students. This is for two reasons - they are not academic tests and they are designed to be a mind game. The SAT and ACT are psychology tests pretending to be reading tests or math tests.
2. Emotions- Students (and parents) have a lot of emotions around high stakes tests like the SAT. Part of this is because they are high stakes; things we care about like money and purpose and our social standing can be tied to test performance. Also, students often have faulty beliefs about themselves and about the test that create obstacles to doing well.
3. Knowledge - A foundation of content knowledge is helpful for tests like the SAT and ACT because they are, you know, tests. By the time a student is a junior, they should have built up solid skills in reading, textual analysis, grammar and mathematics. It would be extra bonus if they had built a reading habit and had been exposed to wide variety of genres and ages of texts. Having strong skills allows students to focus on the first two things above. Poor skills adds another layer of challenge to an already complicated test preparation.

What does studying for the SAT or ACT mean?

Over the last 16 years and with over 8,000 hours of one-on-one tutoring experience, I have found that preparing for high stakes tests like the SAT and ACT is basically two parts - content skills and execution skills.

Content skills means mastering the core skills and facts your student has to know to do well on standardized tests. For example, they have to know how to read reasonably well. They should know standard grammar rules. They should be able to do math like how to write a linear equation or how to use the quadratic formula.

PRO-TIP The actual content on the SAT and ACT is quite limited. Many students are worried that there will be so much information they can be tested on that they get worried that they will never know it all. Once students start preparing they realize that the content is actually kind of repetitive, and they start to relax with the test.

Execution skills means the actual process of doing the test. For starters this often refers to classic test strategies like process of elimination and reading the question carefully. For some of my most advanced students, execution could mean helping them uncover that physically pointing to data in a table is what helps them answer 3 more questions and achieve an amazing final score.

So how can your student actually study for an SAT or ACT and begin to understand themselves better as a test taker?

How should they study for SAT or ACT?

Starting about 4-6 weeks ahead of a test date, students should set aside a regular time to tackle the following tasks, in order. Here’s my standard framework for SAT and ACT test preparation:

1. The best way I’ve found to prepare is to take a full PSAT or SAT practice test and then carefully review their missed questions.
2. For each question, they should identify and then write about what they missed about the question - 1) was there something they didn’t know? or 2) was there something they did (or didn’t do) that caused them to miss the question.
3. After figuring out any content they didn’t know, wait a few days and redo the same problems that they missed the first time.
4. They should repeat this process until they can confidently get every question correct.
5. Then repeat this process with a second practice test to measure their understanding and progress.

I hope this gives you a solid framework for helping your student develop an SAT study plan or ACT study plan with your student.

If you aren’t sure what areas of preparation your student needs to focus on, check out my Student Test Prep Readiness Quiz. You will get a report outlining which areas your student needs work so they can focus their time and energy on fixing problem spots.

And if you have a student taking the PSAT this October or an SAT test later this fall, check out my self-paced online course Digital SAT Foundations. This course guides students uses the above method to guide students through each of the sections of the SAT along with my most common tactics and content tips. Click here to find out more and to purchase Digital SAT Foundations.