Students may opt to take a gap year between high school and college for a variety of reasons, including to gain work experience before their undergraduate studies or to travel and expand their cultural horizons. No matter the reason, it is important to ensure your gap-year experience does not affect your long-term goals, like attending college.
While a gap year can offer opportunities for enrichment and growth, poorly planned experiences can impede academic improvement. This is especially true if you haven’t yet taken your college entrance exams or hope to retake them during this break before college.
Here are three considerations to keep in mind if you aim to prepare for and take the SAT or ACT during your gap year.
1. Availability of test locations and dates: If you plan to travel internationally during the gap year, ensure your destination will offer the standardized exam of choice while you are there.
International test dates are more limited than domestic dates, and identification and registration requirements may differ. For example, the ACT requires that students testing outside the U.S. register online.
[Consider the revised SAT or ACT for test success.]
2. Opportunities to build exam-related skills: Gap-year students who do not use the skills they learned in high school may see these abilities deteriorate during their time away. This can negatively affect their performance on the ACT or SAT, as well as incorrectly represent their academic abilities to colleges.
Fortunately, during your gap year, you can continue developing SAT and ACT skills in areas like critical thinking, math, problem-solving and reading comprehension. For instance, regardless of where you are, with an internet connection, you can take massive open online courses, commonly called MOOCs, in a variety of subjects.
In addition to taking English and math classes, consider courses that stress analytical reasoning, which can be tremendously valuable on both the SAT and ACT. Analytical reasoning skills are used on all portions of these exams, from math and science to reading and writing.
[Learn college students’ best SAT, ACT test strategies.]
If you aren’t sure where to begin looking for MOOCs, MOOC List is one resource that offers a compilation of class offerings across different sources.
For students who are pursuing an internship or job during the gap year, try to align your work interests with skills that will help you on the college entrance exam. A statistics-heavy internship, for instance, may sharpen your SAT problem-solving and data analysis skills or your ACT Preparing for Higher Math skills.
A copy-editing job may improve your ACT English or SAT writing and language skills. Any position that requires regular writing may help you develop stronger writing practices for the essay portion of the exams.
3. Timing and logistics: However you choose to spend your gap year, be sure to plan ahead and to set aside time to prepare for the SAT or ACT.
If you will be extremely busy, you may wish to delay your exam date until the latest month possible, to allow for ample review. For many students, this will be the December test.
However, if you plan a more-relaxed gap year, this is an ideal opportunity to incorporate test preparation into your weekly routine.
[Learn three reasons to register for the earliest SAT, ACT exams.]
One way to gauge how much time and preparation you will need to plan for is to first take a practice test and then research the schools you would like to attend. What score does the average accepted student earn? Once you have a target result in mind, set your review plan accordingly.
For example, if you initially earn a 20 on the ACT and hope to improve your score to a 30, acknowledge that this is an ambitious goal. You will likely need three to four months of deeply focused study, which may affect which gap-year activities you can reasonably participate in.
On the other hand, if your initial SAT score is only 10 or 20 points away from your target result, you may do well with a single month of preparation and can schedule your gap year differently.
Either way, advance planning can help you form clear goals and ensure there are no unexpected surprises during your gap year.
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3 SAT, ACT Considerations for Gap-Year Students originally appeared on usnews.com
