<p>What are the advantages or flaws of taking SAT or ACT. What are the differences and how do they effect college admission? For ex: At two scores of equal value in the two exams, which one would be preferred? The applicant with the SAT or ACT?</p>
<p>in reply to your last question...it all depends on the school your looking at...for most colleges nowadays...they dont care either way which one you have...wont help or hurt you one iota...but there are still a few schools out there who require the sat....</p>
<p>I haven't yet come across a school that didn't accept both, although I've heard claims that some schools (Ivies in particular) are biased towards the SAT.</p>
<p>I would suggest taking both just to see which one you score better in. If you do badly on one, you don't have to send that score in if you don't want to.</p>
<p>take both, if you do well on both, it looks good anyway ^_^. </p>
<p>ACT takes like no preparation in my opinion, whereas SAT needs some study time..</p>
<p>Go through the threads on this forum and the strictly ACT one. This gets talked about a LOT. Yes, there are those who say there is a bias at certain schools. But they can't come up with any evidence for it or any reason that all the adcoms at all those schools would decide to change what tests they SAY they will take but that they all actually decided to lie about it for some reason. Schools used to have a preference and said so, and there was no problem with this. Hence, if they change what they say, why not believe them?</p>
<p>People with good ACT scores can get into Ivies and a number have posted that they have done so.</p>
<p>If you google, you can find descriptions of the tests. Just make sure that what you get takes into account recent changes. I don't know if there is any way of knowing which test a particular person will do better in. You take practice tests and see.</p>
<p>One difference beyond how you actually score and whether SAT IIs are needed is that the ACT has score choice, while the SAT does not.</p>
<p>I don't understand why one test would require preparation and the other doesn't. If you study for the SAT, yes, you probably don't need ACT prep (well, maybe some experience in dealing with the science reasoning questions would be useful). But if you've studied for the ACT, you can turn around and take the SAT without prep too. The tests do look at the the same things after all (except for the science). This perhaps used to be different, but the SAT was changed to make it more like the ACT (dropping analogies and quantitative comparisons, going to a higher level of math, adding grammar).</p>
<p>My son took both tests and did equally well. My daughter liked the format of the ACT better (as compared to the old SAT) and performed much better on it in practice. She liked the score choice feature and also had some lackluster SAT II scores. It was a no-brainer for her to opt for the ACT. She is at an Ivy now.</p>