Setting a Score Goal
One of the two most important keys to getting a great score is to know what SAT score you want and exactly why you want it.
If you’re going to work hard for a great SAT score, you need to want a great SAT score, and not in a vague “I’ve been told this is important” way. It’s easy to view the SAT as just an obstacle to hurdle before you get your college plans set. The SAT is a tool that you can put to work for you. You don’t take a Summer cashier job because you love to hand people change. You go out and earn money because there are things you want or need. You don’t learn to play an instrument because you’re fascinated with scales. You learn because you want to express yourself and impress your crush. You don’t do sprint drills before practice because sprinting is great and fun. You do sprint drills because they help you win, and winning feels great.
Improving on the SAT with only a fuzzy idea of what its going to get you is a recipe for anxiety, fatigue, and lackadaisical study. Your first task before you get started on serious practice is to turn “SAT is just something I have to do” into “SAT work is great because it gets me things I want.” What things does the SAT get you? The main two are college admission and scholarship money.
college admissions
For college admissions, SAT score is one of the easiest and most direct ways to make improve your application. Of course your value to a college can’t be summarized by a single number, but admissions officers are human, and a big number at the top of a page is naturally going to be used to make their decision easier. In particular, SAT scores are important early in the admissions process as a “filter” for the massive pool of applicants colleges get each year, and they are important late in the admissions process as a “tiebreaker” among many otherwise equally-qualified candidates. [1]
If you type “*your college* SAT scores” into a search engine, the top result will almost always be a 25-75 percentile split. This means that 1/4 of accepted students had a score lower than the first number listed, and 1/4 of accepted students had a score higher than the second number listed. If you already feel that you have a fantastic application (possibly from sports or extracurriculars) and just need to meet some sort of minimum qualifying score, then maybe you can get away with shooting for a 25th percentile or average score (if you’re coordinating with a coach or program scout, then just ask them for exactly what you need!). However, if you are concerned that you don’t have much to make you stand out on an application, aim for that higher 75th percentile number. Raising your SAT score will be about telling the college “Hey, look at me! I’m overqualified! You pretty much have to take me!” While there are never any admissions guarantees, particularly if your GPA or strength of schedule is weak, you should use the SAT to empower yourself and give yourself the highest possible chance of going to your dream school. Remember, no matter what percentile you aim for, you want a specific number to set as your goal, so you can get to work on beating it.
Scholarships
Scholarship qualification is usually more straightforward. The most common kinds of scholarships related to SAT score are state programs (such as Florida’s Bright Futures scholarship [2]) and college merit-based scholarships (such as Texas Tech’s Presidential Merit Scholarship [3]). To find out if your state has a scholarship program tied to SAT scores, ask your guidance counselor. To find out if a particular school has a merit award tied to SAT scores, you can always search online, but calling the college’s admissions department is your best bet of getting an accurate answer, with an added bonus of a “plus” in their “demonstrated interest” portion of your application [4]. There are many other “outside” merit-based scholarships, too. It can take some time to find one that fits you, but it will certainly be worth your time if you find something! You can search a database of over 1,000,000 outside merit-based scholarships here.
Once you figure out what score you need for you scholarship(s), get a clear idea of how much money the scholarship is worth and then a rough estimate of how many hours you will need to study to get the target SAT score (Rough estimates at the bottom of this post). Then divide the two numbers. Almost always, you will find that SAT work is $$$$$.
For example, lets say you have an 1150 baseline SAT score and you want to qualify for the highest tier of Florida’s Bright Futures program, which requires a 1290. For a score increase of 140 points, you plan to put about 4 hours per week in over the course of 3 months. This works out to about 50 hours of SAT study. Bright Futures’ FAS program pays out about $25,000 over the course of a bachelor’s degree. This means that for every hour of SAT study, you are making about 500 dollars. That’s some motivation right there.
To sum this all up, one of the most important keys to improve your SAT score is deciding how your SAT score is going to work for you. Figure out what you want, get a specific score target, and go get that score. Once your goals are set and you’re using the SAT as a tool to benefit you, putting in the work will feel like time well spent.