When you’re in high school, a big chunk of your time will go towards activities and prep to get into college. If you’ve been reading this blog a while (or if you have a good college counselor at your school) you probably already know that what matters most in college admissions is taking rigorous courses, maintaining good grades, your commitments to extracurricular activities, your SAT or ACT scores, and your college application essays. That’s not a short list. And everything on it is hard and time-consuming.
All of these things can be overwhelming, to say the least. So often, people either avoid them entirely, figuring they’ll just take things as they come, OR they get super anxious and try to do them all at once. And while both of these are really understandable impulses, unfortunately, as far as actual strategy goes, take it from an expert in testing and admissions strategy: they both really suck.
If you try to do all of them at once, you’ll spread yourself too thin (and won’t get the scores/essays/grades you need to get into your dream school). If you do some of them too early, you run the risk that you won’t be ready: you won’t have the necessary skills, knowledge or experiences to do them well enough to get you into your dream school. (Like, imagine taking the ACT Math section after only taking freshman math!) But if you do some of them too late, even if you go at it 150%, you might not have the focus, energy or opportunities to get the scores/essays/grades you need to get into your dream school. (Like, imagine trying to become president of the chess club when you didn’t join it until the middle of junior year.)
Obviously, avoidance gets you nowhere—certainly not into that dream school! But beyond that, the ACT and SAT specifically reward methodical approaches, so even if you’re a GREAT student, winging it isn’t going to work. Waiting until the last minute and registering for the last two test dates before your college application deadlines pretty much GUARANTEES that you’re leaving points on the table. Even waiting until junior year to start planning usually means that you won’t be able to achieve what you COULD have.
Basically, if you mismanage your time, energy and focus in high school, you’ll not only be a woefully high-strung stress case, but you probably….won’t get the grades/scores/essays you need to (you guessed it!) get into your dream college.
Enter the testing timeline.
What’s an SAT or ACT testing timeline and why do you need one?
Ever heard the expression “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”? Your Testing Timeline is your road map to success. A Testing Timeline is a rough outline of when you plan to take the SAT or ACT, what your backup dates are, and when you’ll need to be making sure to plan for and prioritize your preparation work.
A Testing Timeline makes sure that you have the TIME you need to achieve the SAT or ACT SCORES you need.
Like I said earlier, there’s just no substitute for time in testing. So when you know what your test dates are, you can work backwards from them. Taking your own preparation needs and style into account, as well as the many competing claims on your time, gives you the chance to make the best possible decisions for your test prep needs. A Testing Timeline guarantees that you’re giving yourself the best possible opportunity to max out those scores—because it gives you the chance to actively make the decisions that put you on the road to success.
A Testing Timeline doesn’t JUST max out your ACT or SAT scores, though…it ALSO saves your sanity.
Remember where we started this post? It was with how STRESSFUL the college application and testing processes are. A Testing Timeline takes the stress of constant decision-making, planning and re-planning, and worrying out of the equation. It tells you WHEN you’ll spend your time and energy focused on prepping and taking the SAT or ACT. That means that you KNOW when you’re “on”…and when you’re “off” duty. This seems simple, but in my (copious) experience it’s incredibly impactful: it makes for more valuable preparation time AND more valuable recovery time, and it keeps stress at bay. Take it from an expert who’s been getting students the scores they need to get into their dream schools for a decade: when you’re calm and confident, you perform better all along the line, from preparation to test day itself.
A Testing Timeline also makes it possible to balance the needs of your test prep with the needs of all those OTHER things you need to be paying attention to in order to get into college. Without a definite idea of WHEN you plan to take the SAT or ACT so that you can get your highest possible score, you either might spend way too long prepping, which can suck your time and focus away from your grades and transcript…or you might not allot enough time to prepping, giving you a much lower score than you’re capable of—and impacting how many colleges send you acceptance letters!
Without this basic planning, there are many mistakes you might make that would have a negative impact on your final test scores…not to mention your stress levels sophomore, junior and senior years—so get going on making one! Even putting some basics in place now can pay off bigger than you might think! In future posts, I’ll be bringing you some tips on putting together a Testing Timeline of your own, including some basic scenarios and some common mistakes. And of course, you can always reach out to me for an Ace the Test: Game Plan™—my testing expertise and analysis of each student and family’s individual situation is a big reason that the Testing Timelines I design work for my students.
