​If you're a high school student, you probably spend a good amount of time working at home. With the COVID-19 virus outbreak, schools are closing their doors, and you will likely spend even more time working from home, so it's worth thinking about how to do so effectively. Here are some tips.

Start With a Plan

Before you dive into the work, take 5-10 minutes to plan out what you need to do and in what order you will do it.
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You should be intentional in how you use your SAT and ACT prep materials (and prep time)​. But knowing what to do and when to do it can be confusing. In this blog, I’ll break down the four main ways you might use prep materials—individual test questions, single passages, entire test sections, and full practice tests— and when to use each one.

Test Questions: Individual questions are good to review once you’ve already completed a practice section. Take a photo of questions you found challenging, add them to an album on your phone, and look through the album when you have down time.

In the shortened days of winter, many people deal with feeling more tired. Add to this the stress of finals (and test prep), studying late into the night, and the fact that teens, at their baseline, need more sleep than adults, and it's understandable that you might experience lethargy at the beginning of the day. 

However, knowing the importance of the SAT and ACT, you don't want to feel like you haven't hit your mental stride until ninety minutes into the test. You want to feel alert and engaged from the start.

​Today's blog shares some habits that you can easily add to your routine to feel and perform your best on test day morning. ​​Many of the techniques will also help you calm down if you are feeling anxious, stressed, or jittery. Really, these are techniques for feeling centered, regardless of whether you start out lethargic or wound up.

On the whole, winter break should be an opportunity to take a break: rest, relax, restore, reflect. Taking the time to consider what has gone well over the past semester, what you want to improve upon in the coming months, and how you will make that improvement is a valuable exercise, for which I lay out a framework here.

Winter break is also a great time to get a head start on your SAT or ACT prep, if you haven't already begun working with the tests. 

Earlier this month, ACT announced three big changes to their policies around administering the ACT and reporting students’ scores.

This post is intended to bring you clarity on the new policies and their implications, but please go into this post with the awareness that this is a developing story. This post is relatively long. It’s intended to be thorough. But it can’t be complete while some aspects of the policy changes (and colleges’ policies around the policy changes) are in flux.
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First, I’m going to summarize the changes; then, I will talk about some of their possible implications.

​​My sources are ACT’s website and a webinar for educators held by ACT last week.

This is a big time for test preppers. The June test date is your last opportunity to take the SAT or SAT Subject Tests before August and your last opportunity to take the ACT before September if you live in New York state and don’t have a way of taking the July test in a neighboring state. 

In many ways, this is the perfect time to amp up test prep: AP tests are done, and classes are likely winding down. But you might be feeling tired and more tempted by the good weather than the official practice test sitting on your desk. So what to do?

​“Stupid” mistakes are a part of almost every test taker’s process. I’m using the word “stupid” because that’s how it often feels when you ultimately catch the error upon reviewing your wrong answers. “Wow, that was stupid,” you think to yourself. 

“Stupid” mistakes are the kind that happen when you feel—in hindsight—that you know the content being tested and understand the logic underlying the correct answer, but nonetheless recognize that you answered it incorrectly during the test. This may have happened because of an oversight, a misunderstanding, or a moment of distraction or confusion.
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It’s not often that my line of work is in the news to the extent that it has been this past week. There’s the occasional high school senior success story, think piece on whether the SAT and ACT are still reasonable data points for the college admissions process, or list of five test prep tips. But celebrity, FBI, bribery, indictment… those are not words that are often paired with “SAT,” "ACT," or “College Admissions.” 
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The day the news of the college admissions scandal broke, I shared the following on Twitter: