The genuinely not-waffling answer is that every student is different. How long your child needs to spend preparing depends primarily on: What score do they want to achieve? What score do they have right now? How big is the gap between their goal and current scores? However, the overly simplified [...]

The shorter answer is that students who have the means and time to prepare and take the ACT or SAT should absolutely do so. Colleges like standardized tests because they're norm-referenced and their scores are comparable across the entire US population regardless of school and curriculum. However, the uncomfortable outcome [...]