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<p>They don’t. The student decides, or the student and his or her family decide together. I can see how a person could be confused at the outset. Often the PSAT is administered in schools to all juniors (or sometimes to all sophomores and juniors). There is at least one state (NC, maybe?) where juniors are normally required to take ACT. But other than that, no high school I know of, private or public, is going to arrange for a college-intending student to take either SAT or ACT, nor to decide which test such a student should take.</p>
<p>Students arrange to take either SAT or ACT on their own. They can register online at <a href=“http://www.collegeboard.org%5B/url%5D”>www.collegeboard.org</a> for SAT or at <a href=“http://www.actstudent.org%5B/url%5D”>www.actstudent.org</a> for ACT. The tests are administered on Saturday mornings (also on Sundays for students who cannot test on Saturdays for religious reasons), and students are responsible for paying their own registration fees and for their own transportation to and from the test centers (which may or may not be a student’s own high school).</p>
<p>In my opinion, the best way to decide which test to take is to buy some test-prep books and see where a student seems to do better. (Many kids do better on one test than they do on the other.) For SAT, use the “blue book” published by the College Board, but you can buy it for less on Amazon than on the College Board’s web site. For ACT, use the “red book” published by ACT.</p>
<p>Some kids take both tests and then send the better set of test scores to colleges. My daughter took both, but according to the published SAT-ACT concordances (e.g., <a href=“http://www.act.org/aap/concordance/pdf/reference.pdf[/url]”>http://www.act.org/aap/concordance/pdf/reference.pdf</a>), her scores on the two tests were essentially identical.</p>
<p>Many kids do take one (or both) in the spring of 11th grade, and plan to take one (or both) again in the fall of 12th grade if they want to improve their scores.</p>