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By Brian W. Stewart
Creator of FreeTestPrep.com
Owner of BWS Education Consulting
Author of Barron’s SAT, Barron’s ACT, and Barron’s PSAT
During the Covid years, many colleges went test optional, mostly because students couldn’t reliably travel to an open SAT or ACT center. That made sense. There’s no point requiring a test that a student has no way to take.
We are past that now. The SAT and ACT are widely available again, and several selective colleges have gone back to requiring scores–Harvard, Dartmouth, and MIT among them. Even where a school is still test optional, that has never meant the score doesn’t count. If it helps you, you send it. If it doesn’t, you usually don’t have to.
That decision matters more for homeschoolers than most families realize. A homeschool transcript can tell a strong story when it’s backed up by course descriptions, outside classes, dual enrollment, AP exams, and good letters of recommendation. But an admissions officer reading a homeschool transcript is often looking at grades they can’t easily calibrate. Who assigned them? Against what standard? An SAT or ACT score gives them a number they already know how to read, one that says this student can hold their own against applicants from more conventional schools.
Scores can matter for money, too. The PSAT/NMSQT is the qualifying test for National Merit, and plenty of colleges use SAT or ACT scores for merit aid, honors programs, or course placement. A school’s admissions policy tells you nothing about its scholarship requirements. Those are usually decided separately, so check them separately.
So, what is a homeschool family to do?
Start by getting an honest baseline. I’ve worked with enough families to know that most are guessing at this stage. “She’s good at math.” “He’s a strong reader.” Maybe. But that doesn’t tell you whether the SAT or the ACT fits better, and it definitely doesn’t tell you how much work is needed.
If your student has a recent SAT, ACT, or PSAT score and took it seriously, use that. If not, have them sit for one full official practice SAT and one full official practice ACT under something close to real conditions: sections timed, phone in another room, no wandering into the kitchen after every passage. What you want is one honest number. Without it, you can’t tell later whether any of your prep is working.
Some students can run this themselves. They take practice tests, review what they missed, build a schedule, and stick to it. If that’s your student, you may not need to spend much at all. Khan Academy is free. The official practice tests run through Bluebook. The ACT posts free material. And FreeTestPrep.com, which I built for exactly this, has free SAT, ACT, and AP drills with explanations.
What moves a score isn’t grinding through more questions. It’s understanding the ones that went wrong. Did the student misread the passage, rush the math, forget a grammar rule, answer a different question than the one asked, or run out of time? Those are five different problems, and each has a different fix. Another fifty questions won’t tell you which one you’re dealing with.
For many homeschool families, the most cost-effective tutor is a parent, and not because the parent knows the test. It’s the parent who keeps the calendar, schedules the practice tests, makes sure the work happens, and sits down afterward to talk through the misses. That job runs on consistency, not expertise.
Paid tutoring can still be worth it, but it earns its keep when there’s a real problem to solve: test anxiety, a learning difference, an ambitious goal, a short timeline, or a score that just won’t move.
I once worked with a student who’d been coached to speed up, finish early, and leave time to check her work. Sensible-sounding advice, and exactly wrong for her. Speed wasn’t the problem. She was misreading questions because she was racing the clock. Once she slowed down and made herself work out what each question was actually asking, the test got much easier. That’s what good tutoring does. It finds the real problem instead of running the standard playbook.
I’m also wary of “tricks.” The SAT and ACT are written too carefully for shortcuts to carry a student far. Real gains come from the unglamorous stuff nobody puts on a flyer: closer reading, stronger grammar, improved math fundamentals, better pacing, and fewer careless mistakes.
My rule is simple. Start with the cheapest thing that solves the problem. If free drills and official tests do it, wonderful–stop there. If your student needs structure, a class or a general tutor might help. If your student needs someone to pinpoint what’s going wrong, one-on-one tutoring may be worth it. Work up from the bottom, not down from the top.
Which brings up the SAT-versus-ACT question. Take both once before committing. Colleges that accept scores will take either test, so the right test is just the one on which your student excels. The SAT has two sections, Reading & Writing and Math, with math worth half the score, so a strong math student may lean SAT. The ACT requires English, Math, and Reading, with Science and Writing now optional for most students. Since English and Reading are two of those three, a student who’s quick and confident with grammar and reading may do better on the ACT. Still, don’t decide on a hunch. Take a practice test of each and compare percentiles or run them through an official concordance. Whichever gives the stronger result is where to put the effort.
The bigger point is that none of this is really about college. A student who learns to prepare steadily, manage time, work under pressure, and study their own mistakes is building habits that outlast the test by decades.
And homeschoolers have one real edge here–one I think we tend to undervalue: flexibility. You don’t have to cram everything into a Saturday class or one panicked month. You can build reading strength over a year, catch a math weakness before it hardens into a gap, and spread practice out in whatever way is most suitable.
A strong score won’t guarantee admission anywhere. Nothing does. But it can strengthen an application, open scholarship doors, and give a student some hard-earned confidence heading into the next test, because there’s always a next one.
Brian W. Stewart, M.Ed., is the creator of FreeTestPrep.com, owner of BWS Education Consulting, and author of Barron’s SAT, Barron’s ACT, and Barron’s PSAT
