Thanks MurphyBrown - I owe you and the others here a great debt of gratitude. You and the community here are a pretty incredible source of information, perspective, and advice to help me empower my daughter in this process rather than leaving her (and me) feeling lost. Hopefully I can pay this forward to others in the coming months and years once I feel more confident myself about being helpful to those also who will also be starting the process in the future.
As for the index, I think I did it right. She took the test in October 2015 and got a 35 on reading, a 34 on writing, and a 29 on math, so 35+34+29 = 98, times 2 = 196. Sound right? Her composite was 1270 (690 reading/writing + 580 math).
I guess for better or worse, she clearly could use math prep most (without neglecting reading/writing). She’ll need to make a rather size-able leap to get close to NMS. It looks like from the charts that our state’s cutoff range historically has been around 214-216, so a pretty big index number (while not as big as some). My guess is she makes some fairly basic computational mistakes - just needs to slow down and be more careful. She took IB Math SL year 1 as a sophomore, so I think that is kind of like precalc maybe. She is signed up for IB HL Math Year 1 for this fall. She did fine in math last year, so I think the difficulty level probably isn’t necessarily as much an issue as learning some test strategies and doing careful computations. She did not have a drill-heavy approach in her math education through grade school and junior high, and I think it shows on some of the computational stuff. Maybe that will cause her to prefer whichever of the SAT or ACT allows use of the calculator throughout (I think the ACT allows for all the test and SAT allows for only half the test, but have not read up enough of that yet).
As for test dates/sequencing, hoping to pull together all this great advice and give my daughter some pros/cons for her to consider and kick around. Figuring out which test she is most comfortable with if she is only going to take one seems like one threshold determination. Since she is going to likely take the PSAT no matter what, that would seem to be one mark in the SAT’s column so that prep is most transferable, but I guess we’ll see how she likes each test if she decides to do a timed practice exam of each as I hope she does. In any event, I am hoping she keeps the number of tests to a minimum, so two rather than three with no test taken just to see how she does would be awesome. She does play a spring sport, so being planful about that is super important advice - as you are correctly inferring, the everyday practices and games when no practices take a ton of time starting after spring break and almost to the end of the school year.
I’m really hoping she can skip SAT subject tests. If absolutely required by a school she feel she really wants to take a shot at, then I imagine she’ll study up and be prepared come what may. Hopefully not necessary!
Thanks so much MruphyBrown for sticking with me through all these posts. My hope is some of what you are sharing with me is helping another parent who may read this now or int he future, because it certainly has helped me and my family., Thank you.