<p>I’m 16 and a senior- I’m actually an early graduate, a year early. I’m not a “normal” teenager, though, as I live across the country from my family in a ballet residency school situation. (Basically this includes about 5 hours of intense dance classes a day, lots of performances and rehearsals, and I live with a host family and am pretty much on my own.) I do my schooling online through Keystone National High School. Next year I want to start taking some basic college courses part-time, but still continue with my ballet training. </p>
<p>My SAT scores really disappointed me. 
I have always been a smart student, but for some reason, I can’t seem to improve much on the SAT even since taking it a second time. I have:
M: 620
CR: 640
W: 680
Total: 1940</p>
<p>QUESTIONS:
- Should I retake the SAT, or should I just start fresh and try the ACT? I’ve never done the ACT before, and I heard that some people are just better at one than the other. Advice? </p>
<li>My mom says not to worry about my SAT scores because, since I won’t be a full-time student, colleges won’t scrutinize those scores as much and they won’t really matter. Is that true? Are my scores REALLY as bad as I think they are?</li>
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<ol>
<li><p>Take the ACT, I scored 1980 on my only SAT, 34 on the ACT.</p></li>
<li><p>No they aren't that bad.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Have you studied for the SAT? People have their scores improve the second time they take the SAT because they're more acclimated to the test- not because they actually studied time management, specific topics and basic strategies for test taking.</p>
<p>Truthfully, I think you'd better off in a community college, as they're cheap and normally flexible. In that instance, your SAT scores wouldn't matter for anything but placement (specifically, placing out of courses).</p>
<p>I like the ACT better as a test, but I'm better at the SAT. I think the ACT is a better standard for assessing generalized skills, while I believe the SAT is a little hyper-focused on minutia and is actually easier to game.</p>
<p>I'd recommend you pick up the Official Study Guide for the 7 (or whatever) pretests, and a Barron's book for strategy. Take a pretest to get a baseline, read the Barron's book for a few chapters, another practice test, read the Barron's book, so on and so forth. There's really no reason to not have a CR score above 650 if you prepare yourself well.</p>
<p>I went from a 740R/590M/600W to a 800R/680M/700W (with an 8 essay because of dysgraphia, so you can imagine that my raw writing score was high) in a month just from pounding the test into my head, and if I had bothered to take it again this month I probably would have had 780-800R/700-740M/740+W. You reach a point where you've gone through so many questions that you start to intuitively understand the structure, and you know what they're looking for. You can't get that just by taking the test twice, you've really got to take the time to study the structure of the test.</p>
<p>Your scores really aren't that bad, no. If you want to take part-time courses though, I really think you should ignore the rest of my post on preparing for the SAT and just enroll in a community college.</p>