The first time I took a full practice SAT, I sat at our kitchen table on a Saturday morning with a timer, two pencils I didn’t need because the test is digital now, and a score at the end that made me want to close the laptop and never open it again. I took fourteen more practice tests after that one. I sat for the real thing multiple times. My score went up every time I put in the hours, and here is the part I want Nashville parents to know. I never paid for a class. Not once.
Some families do buy them. Princeton Review charges $1,200 for a class. Private tutors charge $100 an hour. Those kids are real, and they are sitting next to your kid. There is nothing wrong if your family can afford it, so don’t misconstrue my point. But here is the other true thing. The companies that make these tests give the important prep away for free. They just don’t advertise it very loudly.
Khan Academy Official SAT Practice is where I would tell any family to start. The College Board partnered with Khan Academy years ago to put official SAT practice online at no cost. The questions come from the same people who write the test. The site figures out what your kid is bad at and drills exactly that. This is where most of my fourteen practice tests came from.
Bluebook is the College Board’s free app that actually runs the digital SAT. Every kid who takes the SAT has to download it anyway. Almost nobody realizes there are six full-length official practice tests sitting inside it, free.
ACT.org has free official prep too, and this one matters more for you than it does for me. Tennessee juniors take the ACT as the state test. Kentucky just switched to the SAT. Your kid should not walk into their state-required ACT cold when the makers of the test hand out free practice on their own website.
The Nashville Public Library has the same Princeton Review, Kaplan, and Barron’s books that cost $30 each at the bookstore. SAT, ACT, AP, all of it. Free with a library card. The library card is also free. My library in Warren County works the same way, and I promise the books do not know whether you paid for them.
Khan Academy also has free AP exam prep, which is worth knowing because AP scores can turn into real college credit and real tuition money later.
I will be honest about the part that isn’t free. The hours. Nobody can donate those. I gave up a lot of Saturday mornings, and there were practice tests where my score went down and I had to decide whether to believe one bad morning or the trend. My advice to your kid is the advice I had to give myself: sometimes you take the test a few times. A bad score is information, not a verdict.
Standardized tests can feel like they were not built for families like mine. Maybe they weren’t. But the rigging has gaps, and the gaps are listed above. My whole website exists because I believe help should not be a secret, and this is the least secret secret I know.
Find the gaps. Use them. And tell a neighbor.
