COllege Admissions News and ACT / SAT Strategy

If you’ve spent any time preparing for the digital SAT, you’ve noticed that there is a calculator right in the interface for the math sections. It’s tempting to use, especially if you don’t fully trust your mental math skills or you’re not completely comfortable with harder algebra and coordinate geometry questions. But should you use it? And if so, when? While calculators can sometimes be useful on the SAT and can sometimes shave a few seconds off a problem, they can also lead test takers astray. Rounding the values for 𝝅 or √2 may lead to incorrect responses, and typing numbers and operations too quickly can hide key concepts and result in careless mistakes. For tests like the SAT, where there’s no partial credit and you can’t show your work, the calculator can be both a blessing and a curse.

Two years ago, when College Board announced that the new Digital SAT would abandon dreaded long-passage reading comprehension questions in favor of a shorter, quicker, mixed verbal section, thousands of high school sophomores and juniors breathed a collective sigh of relief. Six paragraph science passages, plot-free fictional excerpts, and paired historical texts with flowery opaque language would all be retired with few lamenting their absence from the new exam. After all, these new passages were going to be easy! One and done! How could it possibly be difficult to guess the main idea of a five-line passage?

Earlier this spring, we at MyGuru declared that test optional college admission policies were coming to an end for high school students applying to top American universities. As part of the upcoming 2024-25 application cycle beginning this fall, most of the Ivy League and a notable number of elite universities across the United States are once again requiring an ACT or SAT score. Now, Stanford has quietly announced (in a classic Friday news dump) that it too will be reinstating a standardized testing requirement for undergraduate applicants, but beginning in 2025, making this the final test optional application cycle for the Cardinal. This particular decision is important for two reasons:

1. It pushes the timeframe for application policy changes back a year
2. It puts Stanford in direct opposition to its California public university rivals

This year, College Board—the organization responsible for designing and administering the SAT—has made several massive changes to the format of the test. While the SAT has always improved and refined the exam, this year’s changes are going to change the ways high school students all over the world prep for the standardized exam. If you’re planning to apply to college in the near future, then you’ll want to make sure you’re fully prepared for the new SAT.

With Harvard and Caltech joining the ranks of selective colleges and universities requiring a standardized test once again as part of the 2024-25 application cycle, MyGuru is more than comfortable asserting that all high schoolers planning to attend college should once again plan to take either the ACT or SAT. While many applicants will see this as a negative (who wants to take a test on a weekend, right!?), this return to standardized testing requirements has been supported by each of the institutions reinstating the exams with data illustrating that test optional policies have actually harmed the at-risk and lower income students that they purportedly were intended to help.

If you really want to get a high SAT score, perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that “talent” or “IQ” matters far less than you think. There are not really “math people” or “natural readers.” What matters is the amount and quality of your SAT prep, which of course is influenced in large part by how passionate and genuinely interested you are in doing well on the SAT or ACT. So if you want to get a 99^th percentile SAT score or a 34 on the ACT, it’s possible that you can do it.