Submitting is optional. Really there’s little reason not to take it. If you do well, submit. If not, don’t.
Re: prep…the SSAT website has some free, basic prep material; IIRC a handful of practice questions from each section of the test. It’s a great way to familiarize yourself with the test structure and doesn’t take long to go through.
I agree. The math section is fairly straight forward. As are the comprehension and essay sections. If you have a strong math student who also reads quickly and accurately, then you’re starting ahead.
I do think that understanding the pacing and time allocations is critical. So your kid doesn’t miss a bunch of questions because they ran out of time. And the negative grading (getting a question incorrect lowers your score) can throw off some kids, so kids shouldn’t just answer “A” or “C” to any remaining questions if the time is about to run out.
Also some of the analogy relationships are tenuous, my kid would occasionally bring a practice test to me and ask me to explain the analogy and I would struggle. So understanding some of those possible analogy relationships might be a good use of time.
There’s also an experimental section at the end where SSAT allocates 15 minutes (i think) for new questions which AREN’T part of the score but allows SSAT to test out some things. Make sure your kid knows not to stress over that part of the test.
And there’s no need to report the test if the score isn’t where you want it to be. My kid took the test three times over a 12 month window.
We ended up reporting two of the scores to all schools in the hope that they would superscore (one test was higher in verbal, one test was higher in quant but the overall score was the same for both tests that we sent).
We didn’t send any schools the first test taken (at the beginning of 7th grade) because it was the lowest and kid took it mostly to figure out a baseline score to see how much studying might be needed. Clearly we had time on our side, plus it was pre-covid so plenty of test sites available locally.
@Julez My daughters were definitely NOT in a well-known school at all. Very small public school district. Great school district, but small and not at all in the boarding school feeder space. I think both of my girls were the only kids who went on to BS.
I’ll add to the conversation that we actually had a very different experience from the suggestion someone made here that SSAT isn’t really about prepping – that you automatically are being prepared by your normal schoolwork. I was shocked by how horribly my daughter did back when she was in the admissions cycle given what a strong student she is. It was definitely a test of specific skills that would have required test prep at least for her to do very well. It think it depends a lot on the school curriculum. The vocab alone would have been a huge long list of memorization. Memorizing lists wasn’t something I felt was super value-added to my kid’s life, so we just muddled through, and she did her best and we moved on. (She did improve her score by taking the test more than once, but honestly she just wasn’t on the path to getting a 99 without crazy amounts of work and training.). But she got into all of her top choices (including “tippy tops”) without an issue even with softer (about 80?) scores.
Next daughter the following year – I was thrilled when it became test optional and we didn’t give it a second thought. Without a test score, of course, the rest of the application matters all the more. But that didn’t bother us one tiny bit. She felt like she presented a strong application, and she also ended up getting into all of her top schools. (Which were more “second tier” schools.)
I’ll add one other thing here: I really think schools are looking for curiosity in a 13-year-old more than any other thing, and evidence of that curiosity. More than accomplishment. (Yes, curiosity can be proven with accomplishment, but it’s, I believe, the curiosity more than the accomplishment that is appealing.)
I have decided we will send last Spring’s un-prepped PSAT and call it a day. My daughter applied to 3 HADES schools last year as a repeat Jr. using SAT/PSAT/ACT scores in 98-99th percentile. Got into one and not the other two, not even WL for them, so scores don’t mean everything.