If your student took the SAT or ACT once and did not love the score, here is something worth knowing: the students who reached the highest scores in this cycle rarely did it in one attempt. Testing four, five, even six times was common among applicants to competitive schools this year, and not because those students were struggling. Because they were being smart about it.

The families who came into this cycle expecting testing to be a single event ran into a real problem. When a score comes back below target with only one or two attempts left before deadlines, there is no room to recover. The families who understood that high scores are built over time, through repeated attempts, careful review, and steady improvement, finished the process with testing profiles that helped them rather than limited them.