One of the beauties of home schooling is that I get to personalize our education for each child’s strengths and weaknesses. Concurrent with that is that our two goals for our homeschool are as follows:
1. Love the Lord, know Jesus and follow him.
2. Be educationally and skillfully prepared for life, including being prepared to enter the workforce or college upon graduation.
This means that each child will begin preparing for college, including taking the tests required for college admittance. I am not a fan of “teaching to the test” which seems prevalent in some schools these days (certainly not all schools do this) but when scholarships are hanging on the line, there is a time and place to carefully consider the steps to maximizing test scores.
For us, it starts with registering for the tests. This takes about 35 minutes the first time, and your student will have to answer a lengthy interest survey. After that, I look at the dates, and choose one where the students can spend about a month preparing. Depending on your child’s schedule, you may need to schedule more time than this.
We have the students start by taking a practice exam, timed and in an isolated situation. This may result in your child not actually finishing the exam the first time. Much about this test relates to time management. That’s ok. Score it just like it is, and use the conversion charts in the book to determine their actual scores.
Each week up until the test we have the student read through about 30 pages of the general information in the book, and get help with any missed questions from the practice test. They can start with the detailed answers given in the test book, but if that is not enough, they are to ask whichever parent is the “expert” in the area. For Math, it’s Duncan. For the remaining subjects, it’s me. If we can’t help them, we will likely call another homeschool parent or student we know and get help.
At the beginning of the next week, they retake all of the test again, once again it’s timed and taken as close to the real test as possible. They only get breaks when they really would if they were taking the test. They also use the plain number 2 pencils that are permitted on the actual test. This helps if your child usually uses mechanical pencils, so that on the day of the test, they are not distracted by the pencil. Also, teach your child to use the calculator. If they don’t usually use one, this could actually hurt them on the test.
We do this unless they have a very high score in a particular area- then after the first two or three tests we will stop having them practice that test, saving the time to go over areas where they can improve.
If your child is continually running out of time on a particular section, sit with them and see if there are things you can do to speed up performance on the test.
Using this method, both our homeschool daughters have seen SIGNIFICANT score increases from their original practice tests, and have both scored well enough to qualify for college scholarships.
This is the method we used for the ACT, and we don’t anticipate them taking the SATs this year, since they are not required for their colleges of choice. However, you could easily use a similar method to prepare for that test.
Thank you for the post, my oldest son is going to need to do this either this year or next and I was curious about a good process. Thank you.
You are very welcome! It’s very similar to how we attack most homeschool subjects, but we do it at a much faster pace, trying to cover it in a month is an aggressive schedule, but doable for a motivated student! Good luck to your son.