<p>Have you taken, or do you plan to take, a paid SAT or ACT test prep course? Parent members - feel free to answer for your kid(s) if they are not posting here on their own.</p>
<p>Nah, I wish. I’m doing self-prep. I can’t afford any prep courses.</p>
<p>@above; Ditto, though I already took my SAT. Couldn’t afford any books either, so I did the Question of the Day and whatever free prep the College Board offered. Got a 1920, so I think I did okay.</p>
<p>All you need to do well on the SAT is motivation to self-study. All this requires is some of the study guides and/or workbooks. A SAT tutor is just an unneeded luxury.</p>
<p>I did self prep out of the blue book and got a 2360.</p>
<p>There is absolutely no reason to take a prep course unless you feel like you can’t score a 1700. If you have a strong enough base to score 200-300 above the national average, you have the intelligence and knowledge base to be able to get your score up to ~2300 solely on self prep. The test isn’t that demanding, and some of the prep books are absolutely excellent. There is no reason to take prep courses unless you feel like your character/determination about doing well on these tests is suspect.</p>
<p>^Everyone learns different. Some people learn with human interaction. There is nothing wrong with that.</p>
<p>For most people, the best test prep courses will only raise their scores 200-300 points, tops. And some simply do well on standardized tests. I bought 3 SAT books. I’ve only done one test out of the BB, read the math refresher in Gruber’s SAT, and din’t even open my Barron’s SAT 2400. And I scored 2280 on my first try.</p>
<p>So no, none of these options really apply to me all that well.</p>
<p>I don’t think prep courses are necessary. I looked at Collegeboard’s, and it costs around 80 dollars… I’m prepping using the big blue book and a couple of others, and I think that’s going to be sufficient.</p>
<p>Prep courses are way too expensive
self study ftw</p>
<p>DD14 is using the BB and began using the SAT online course a few months back… she is also using another free website which she says is great.</p>
<p>I’m going into 11th grade, taken the SAT 3 times, and my highest score has been a 1790 combined. I’m still taking SAT Prep though, mostly for the sake of doing well on the NMSQT… Anyway, I’m trying to get into UVa OOS, so 1790 probably won’t cut it. I need a solid score in the 2000-2400s, so SAT prep may be particularly useful, even though its taking up a semester of my elective classes. Don’t criticize me for it, please…</p>
<p>I lined up a private SAT/ACT tutor for my son the week of Spring Break. He wasn’t thrilled to spend his Spring Break preparing for the SAT and ACT but did the work. He scored much better than either of us expected actually raising his SAT scores by 400 points. For us it was well worth the investment in time and money. That said, he would not have prepared much all on his own which I’m sure some students do and it works very well for them.</p>
<p>Took the ACT for the first time with no prep, scored a 30. Did self-prep with ACT 36 and a book of practice exams, about 10 hrs prep total, scored a 34.</p>
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<p>First, it’s everyone learns differently because you need an adverb to modify a verb. </p>
<p>Second, the only thing I wish to learn through human interaction is the human anatomy.</p>
<p>My son was tutored after taking the ACT. He retook two more times, and raised his score by 4 points. He found out that he was not taught geometry that well in 10th grade, and that was dragging his score down.</p>
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Congrats, you caught a typo! With skills like that you will definitely learn the “human anatomy” when your 30! Good job! </p>
<p>Anyway, okay why do I care about your opinion. Last time I checked you don’t represent the whole international student body. My point still stands, everyone learns differently. So to you maybe SAT prep classes may be pointless because you learned better by yourself., but you can’t say that their entire existence is pointless. Some people like human interaction to learn SAT things.</p>
<p>I took a CR SAT course for $250. It helped teach me how the SAT works and how to scope out the answer. No class is going to magically raise your score though. My opinion is also to not focus so much on memorizing 500 vocabulary words, but rather how to interpret the short passages and what the question is asking for.</p>
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<p>I didn’t say the existence of SAT prep courses was pointless. </p>
<p>You can apologize to me at any time.</p>
<p>If you have the motivation and time, self-study methods are definitely much cheaper and arguably more effective than any SAT/ACT class.</p>
<p>This coming from someone whose parents don’t have all the means, but who care enough about my education that they were willing to pay $1000+ on an SAT prep class. I refused because I knew they didn’t have the money. They were unhappy, but it’s not like they could force me to go to a class if I didn’t want to.</p>
<p>They were considerably more pleased when I got a 2270 after several months of serious prep. I bought my prep books online, and the total cost was less than $60.</p>
<p>If I can do it, anyone can. :)</p>