Determining your child's target SAT score is the first step

Choosing your Child’s Target SAT Score

It is best to determine the desired SAT score your child will aim for before he starts to prepare for the SAT.  This is the score that he needs to achieve to get into the colleges at the top of his list.

Many of my clients look at me like I am crazy when I ask them about their target score for the SAT. “The top score is 2400, right? My son is smart and gets good grades in school. So his target score should be 2400.”

I have many students who strive for a perfect score on this difficult test, but most of my students end up setting their sights lower when they realize that a 1900 or a 2250 will get them into the most competitive colleges on their list.

“But why not shoot for a perfect score? It can’t hurt, right?” a lot of my clients ask. This is true: achieving a higher score will never hurt a student.

But achieving a perfect or near-perfect score on the SAT takes an enormous amount of time and effort. And even more importantly, it takes an incredible amount of motivation.

Before I accept 2400 as a student’s target score, I need to find out if the student wants this score so badly that he will spend countless hours doing the toughest problems and practicing strategies to improve his timing on the test.

This motivation cannot come from the parent. It must come from the student. Because it is the student who will have to spend the long hours working through the difficult problems that show up on this test. It is the student who will have to have to dig deeper into seemingly unsolvable math problems and indecipherable critical reading passages to find his way to the correct answer. In the next post I will start you on the process to determining your child’s target score.

Amy Martin Rodriguez, PhD

Academic Coach and Owner

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