3 SAT, ACT Considerations for Gap-Year Students

3 SAT, ACT Considerations for Gap-Year Students | College Admissions Playbook.

3 SAT, ACT Considerations for Gap-Year Students: A gap year can offer opportunities for enrichment and growth, poorly planned experiences can impede academic improvement – or even position you to miss deadlines and struggle to effectively apply at all. This is especially true if you haven’t yet taken your college entrance exams or hope to retake them during this break before college.

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.

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Timing and Logistics

Your lifestyle during a gap year will be dramatically different than your routine in high school – and isn’t that the point? You may be traveling frequently, or working a hectic job or internship, with little time to practice your standardized test skills.

On the other hand, you may have lots of downtime to read and study. Either way, you should plan early while looking at a calendar of SAT and ACT testing dates in the locations where you’ll be. When will you even have time to take a test, and which test administration dates line up best with the time you’ll have to properly prepare?

Note that although your ACT and SAT scores generally don’t expire, some schools may not view them as valid after five years. Nevertheless, you can absolutely test before your gap year adventures begin.

But if the gap year is exactly what you need to have time to focus, make sure you keep in mind all the logistics: Will you have reliable Wi-Fi to register for the test? Transportation to a test center?

It may be wise to leave yourself at least one or two test retake dates before your college applications are due so that any unforeseen circumstances, such as a missed train or visa issue, don’t completely ruin your application timeline.

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Availability of Test Locations and Dates

If you plan to travel internationally during the gap year, ensure that 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.

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.

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 college entrance exams. A statistics-heavy internship, for instance, may sharpen your SAT Math 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 practices for the writing portion  of the ACT.

Plan Before You Go

A gap year between high school and college is a wonderful way to broaden your horizons, recharge your batteries and get inspired to get the most out of your college experience.

But the freedom of a gap year can also make certain aspects of the college application process, namely SAT and ACT testing, more challenging. When you’re in high school, you’re surrounded by classmates studying for standardized tests, by teachers and school counselors who know the college application timeline well, and by the support of your home routine to keep you on track.

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