Senior prom … being the oldest and most looked-up-to students on campus … senioritis … all these rites of passage may bring back fond memories of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Ideally, your senior student has already started the process for preparing for and taking the ACT or SAT — but best-laid plans sometimes mean that in addition to building a college list, high school seniors need to take these exams for the first time. Very commonly, seniors have taken one of these tests at least once, and are looking to increase their score for their target colleges.

Given that, here are some key points to consider if your student is entering their senior year:

Figure out your schedule and commitments

Seniors may be involved in leadership roles in clubs, varsity-level sports, and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. Gone are the days when a student can expect to blow off their last year and still maintain their place at a top university — your senior student should indeed plan to maintain their curricular and extracurricular commitments.

However, many students find that their ability to balance these commitments improves as they mature during their senior year, and they have a better sense of what the process of applying looks like in practice since it’s no longer theoretical. Working with an independent or school-based college counselor can help students handle the administrative side of filling out the Common App, FAFSA, and so forth — so one of the best things you can do for your student is to keep open lines of communication.

We recommend working at least once a week with a tutor for test preparation: the data show it’s a great return on their time investment, and with Mindspire offering Zoom-enabled sessions, it’s never been easier to slot in test prep tutoring.

Register for deadlines as soon as possible

If your college-bound student wants to take an SAT in October, November, or December, it’s important to get them registered by the deadline. College Board publishes their deadlines on their website (2024 information is here), and your student’s tutor will not be doing that step of the admin for them.

For the procrastinators and last-to-board-the-airplane types out there (this author chooses to optimize her time not spent in lines, so no judgment), the ACT has late registration for an extra fee, including August 25, 2024 for a September date. The other exams are in October and December.

December tests can be tricky, because many colleges’ regular deadlines are November 1. With coordination between your school and the test orgs, you should be able to submit a December SAT or ACT if needed for scholarship purposes, however. Definitely double check any hard deadlines for your child’s dream school on the website for each college! Of course, some colleges are on a rolling admission basis and accept applicants as late as spring of their senior year. Still, if you act now, you give yourself more choices.

Set realistic goals

Just like you wouldn’t try to run a marathon in a month if you had previously been a couch potato, any student who is starting the test prep process the same semester they’re taking it will have to be targeted in what they decide to focus on. However, what tutors like me at Mindspire have noticed is that there is a very real gain that comes from simply knowing (or refreshing) your knowledge of what’s on the exams — SAT’s embedded Desmos calculator, ACT’s science section, and other features specific to each exam.

Since the majority of our students have taken a previous real standardized admission exam as Juniors or even Sophomores, the final push is all about taking the foundation of what they know and building on it for those gains. You might not run a marathon, but you can certainly shave some minutes off your mile time.

That is all to say, we still very much recommend test prep for high school seniors, and in fact, this fall semester is typically when students their personal best scores.

Don’t delay — if your student is entering senior year and gets an SAT this Saturday that isn’t where they want it to be, or has never done any kind of prep before, reach out, and we will be happy to match them with a tutor who can work with them to get the results they want in time to submit to colleges this fall.