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How much does prep move your score?

Less than the ads promise and more than nothing. 40 points, and the best practice material is the free kind.

Written by the Sidequest team. Reviewed 2026-09-05.

40 points
what SAT prep adds, out of 1600

Prep adds 40 points to a 1600 score, and 30 to any one section. You will meet a much bigger number, 115 points for 20 hours of free practice, and that one counts everything about the sort of person who sits down for 20 hours, not just the hours.

On the ACT it is starker. Prep makes no measurable difference to the score at all.

What does move a score is time in school. Take the ACT, keep going to class, take it again, and you gain about a point on average. The gain is bigger when there is no summer sitting in the middle of the gap.

So the plan is short, and the whole of it is free: take it in the spring, take it again in the fall, and work through the official practice in between.

What taking it again is worth

All three are ACT points, out of 36.

  1. What does taking it twice get you?

    +1.1

    That is the average rise in the overall score out of 36, from a first test to a last one about eight months apart.

  2. What about going five times?

    +2.4

    Every retake is worth less than the one before it: about a point for the second test, half of that for the third, less again after.

  3. What if the college takes your best parts?

    +1.7

    Some colleges build one score out of your best English, math, reading and science across every test day. Two test days average 1.7 above the score you got the first time.

The free practice is the real practice

Both testing companies give their own material away, and it is the only material written by the people who write the test.

For the SAT that is Official Digital SAT Prep on Khan Academy: free, built with College Board, and it reads your practice results and tells you what to work on next. For the ACT, act.org has full length official practice tests and a question a day inside a free account.

The test itself is $68 for the SAT and $70 for the ACT. If money is tight, ask your counselor about a fee waiver: it covers two SATs, sends your scores to as many colleges as you want, and gets the application fee dropped at a lot of colleges when you apply.

Work through all of that before you pay anybody anything. Most people never get to the end of it.

The plan, in three lines

Spring of junior year, again in the fall, official practice in between.

Sit it in the spring, when you have had the most school behind you. Sit it again in the fall of senior year, ahead of deadlines. Keep the gap inside the school year where you can, because a summer in the middle costs about half a point.

Two tries is where nearly all of the gain is. About a third of ACT takers test more than once, and the ones going four and five times are mostly building up that best-of score.

Try the work, not just the test

A score gets you considered somewhere. It cannot tell you what you would want to do once you are there. That part you find out by doing some of the work.

Find a career to try

Questions people ask

How many hours of practice is enough?
Twenty. Short sessions across a few months beat cramming it into two weekends, because what rises is how well you know the material.
Should I take the SAT or the ACT?
Take a free practice test of each and go with whichever one went better. Colleges take both and do not prefer either.
Do colleges see every score I ever got?
Only the ones you send. You pick which test days go to which college, and a college that builds a best-of score will use the best parts of whatever you sent it.
Can anyone jump 200 points?
Yes, and it is rare: about six in a hundred people gain 200 points or more.

Where these numbers come from

See the other guides