<p>I'm in the 10th grade and my mother has registered me for the May 1st SAT. I have not studied for it at all. I may do a little before hand, but I will primarily use these next few weeks to do well in school. My mother says that's ok, it will be good practice to take it now, and just concentrate on studying for it when I take it as a junior.<br>
Is it a good idea to take it now without much preparation or should I just wait until my junior year after I've had time to study? I took the PSAT at the beginning of my sophmore year. I had a total score of 152.</p>
<p>I would recommend that you wait (or since you’re already signed up, cancel the score, especially if you think that you didn’t do too well). Especially if the university you apply to requires all SAT scores to be sent in, a bad score received your sophomore year will not look good at all.</p>
<p>definitely wait, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to take it junior and senior year, let sophomore year be for psats</p>
<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I agree with your mother, you should take the test. The high school my kids will attend pays for each student to take the SAT in grades 9-11, in fact my kids will the test this year as 8th graders. Each time you take the test you can order a report which explain every question you answered and shows you the correct answer.</p>
<p>I have family members who also took the test each year and their score improved every year they took the test. I have relatives who got into Harvard and Duke; taking the test multiple times didn’t hurt either of them.</p>
<p>I took it as a freshman (with no preparation) and have no regrets; it can provide a nice fall-back score. Be cautious, though, if your top-choice schools discourage the use of Score Choice.</p>
<p>Take it for sure. There is no better test prep than taking the real SAT under pressure.</p>
<p>It’s definitely a “no” if one of the schools you want go to doesn’t allow score choice.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t see anything to gain from it. You’re not missing out on an experience. You’ll probably score pretty similarly on the SAT as you did on the PSAT, and you should try to raise your score up a few hundred points. I would use this summer to prep for it and take it next year.</p>
<p>Instead of taking the real SAT, you should probably try more practice or diagnostic SAT’s. A lot of SAT prep books have tons of practice tests in them, or, if you don’t trust yourself to time correctly or want to mock the pressure of an SAT setting, search around your community; some places might offer mock SAT sittings. Personally, I’m a sophomore and took a diagnostic SAT about a month ago; it was basically the real SAT test from January 2007. So yeah. There are ways to “take” the SAT without having to send anything to colleges or use Score Choice or anything. 
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<p>If you can’t find any services that offer diagnostic SAT’s, your best bet is probably an SAT prep book w/ practice tests. But seriously, I don’t think you have to take the real SAT in May. :)</p>
<p>Instead of taking the real SAT, you should probably try more practice or diagnostic SAT’s. A lot of SAT prep books have tons of practice tests in them, or, if you don’t trust yourself to time correctly or want to mock the pressure of an SAT setting, search around your community; some places might offer mock SAT sittings. Personally, I’m a sophomore and took a diagnostic SAT about a month ago; it was basically the real SAT test from January 2007. So yeah. There are ways to “take” the SAT without having to send anything to colleges or use Score Choice or anything. </p>
<p>If you can’t find any services that offer diagnostic SAT’s, your best bet is probably an SAT prep book w/ practice tests. But seriously, I don’t think you have to take the real SAT in May. :)</p>