Standardized Tests for College Admissions

The SAT and the ACT are the two typical tests taken by high school students to fulfill colleges’ required submission of standardized test scores

(Note: Not all colleges currently require the reporting of scores from the SAT or ACT. It is worth checking whether the schools you are interested in attending require a standardized test or consider it optional. If the test is optional for a school, a good score can still help your admissions case at that school, so it may be worth taking the test nonetheless.)

The SAT and ACT differ in that the SAT involves less content knowledge, as the test-makers (Collegeboard) aim more to test general skills involved in mathematical and verbal reasoning. Testing skills requires some content knowledge to provide the context for the test, but not nearly so much. For example, the SAT uses passages relating to both science and history in the Reading and Writing section, and knowledge of science, history, or other topics can help you to more quickly grasp the issues in these passages. But you are never asked for your knowledge of particular scientific facts, as you are sometimes in the ACT Science section.

But of course knowledge comes into the SAT as well, for example: knowledge of grammar, which they label as Standard English Conventions; knowledge of vocabulary, for the Words in Context questions; and knowledge about specific types of functions and statistical ideas, throughout the Math section.

I offer tutoring for both the SAT and ACT. For a tip on each type of question in the SAT, check out this blog post!