ACT Prep: “How Many ACT or SAT Practice Tests Should I Take?”

As a Junior in high school, taking the ACT or SAT is top of mind most of the time. The reasoning is pretty simple – when every single student in the same class is going through the same experience, of course, standardized tests will be a consistent topic of conversation.

It’s inevitable to wonder how many practice tests a student should take before taking the ACT or SAT, and that’s why we’re here to break it down for you.

Many parents believe that the best way to improve scores on the ACT or SAT is by taking as many practice tests as possible. The thought process is the more exposure students get to it, the better of they’ll be.

While that’s partly right, we don’t agree with students taking a massive quantity of practice tests without the right help and guidance while sacrificing the quality of learning from those practice tests.

When students just take practice tests to say they’ve taken a practice test, they’re just going through the motions but not putting in the effort to dig deeper into the different types of question formats and passages.

If students don’t understand their weaknesses and can’t learn from their mistakes, reinforcing bad habits can be detrimental to score results.

Look at it this way – when someone is learning to throw a football and can’t master a tight spiral, they can throw the ball a hundred times and maybe get slightly better, but they won’t know what they’re supposed to do and how to correct it without someone helping them.

If they have someone with experience throwing a football helping and guiding them throughout the process, they’ll probably learn a lot faster and be able to correct any mistakes.

The same can be applied to tutoring (if you haven’t picked up on why we threw a random football analogy in here yet).

It’s essential to have the right guidance along the way when preparing for the ACT or SAT, which is why using big books that you can buy on Amazon or at a bookstore can be so problematic.

The main reason these books pose such an issue is that they don’t provide students with actual ACTs and SATs to take for practice. They’re questions similar to those on the ACT and SAT, and reinforcing bad habits from those tests can do more harm than good.

Trends on the actual tests are constantly changing and students need to know what to expect on the real thing by taking real and recent tests instead of fake ones.

If you or your student is about to go heads down and prepare for the ACT or SAT, give one of our tutoring consultants a call to see if they can provide you with some advice. We want your student to succeed just as much as you do and promise to be helpful and transparent.