When Practice Tests Stop Helping: How High Scorers Reach the Next Level

The shift that high scorers need to make

In test prep, broad exposure and repetition is powerful in the beginning. There’s no better practice early on than timed, realistic practice tests. That said, for high scorers, practice tests face diminishing returns. In the later stages, for students trying to move beyond plateaus and reach the highest score levels, specific, customized, targeted practice becomes far more valuable.

Why practice tests are so valuable at the beginning

We love full-length practice tests, especially when they’re official tests (which we use exclusively) and taken in a realistic, proctored environment. It’s why we offer free proctored practice tests to all of our students every week.

Practice tests help students develop pacing, endurance, and confidence under realistic conditions. Exposure to the highest-quality official practice material helps students identify patterns and familiar question types. Careful review teaches them how to navigate those questions.

A student who gets into the routine of waking up early nearly every Saturday morning to go into a testing center and take a full-length official practice test will be in for no surprises when they wake up early on a Saturday morning to go take the real SAT or ACT (or any other standardized test). Learning how to perform under pressure is a critical component of test prep, and regularly practice testing is the best exposure.

When practice tests become “empty calories”

For some students, practice tests remain valuable throughout their entire prep process. For high scorers, that’s not always the case. Let’s say a student has already taken many practice tests and carefully reviewed them. The student has scores plateauing somewhere between the mid-1300s and low-1500s SAT (or 29-34 ACT) but is aiming for higher. For this student, sporadic practice tests still hold some value, but the main prep focus should shift elsewhere.

Making this pivot isn’t always easy. High scorers tend to enjoy taking practice tests (at least as much as anyone can actually enjoy taking any test), for a variety of reasons. Most (80+%) of the questions feel easy or manageable. There’s a positive reinforcement that comes from confidently answering questions correctly. Strong practice scores can provide further positive reinforcement and a nice dopamine hit. Unfortunately, it’s just practice, and these scores don’t count in the admissions process.

Scrimmaging is fun. Drills are hard

Most talented athletes love scrimmages: they’re competitive, familiar, and fun. If you’re one of the stronger basketball players on the team, it feels great to compete, succeed, and win in a scrimmage. However, a scrimmage alone won’t necessarily isolate a weak left hand, a slow release, or a defensive positioning problem. High-level improvement comes from drilling the exact skill that is limiting the player.

In test prep, it’s no different. At a certain point, specific, targeted skill drilling is the key to overcoming hurdles.

Many people are familiar with the concept of expertise achieved through 10,000 hours of practice, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. But most don’t realize that the number of hours is not sufficient. The type of practice matters as well. Progress depends on deliberate, targeted practice. That practice should be difficult, specific, and paired with feedback.

What targeted practice looks like for high scorers

Targeted practice should be carefully selected, ideally with a combination of data and human judgment. Work should be tailored to the student’s individual patterns: recurring mistakes, timing failures, content blind spots, or decision-making habits.

Questions chosen should include only the most difficult and the most relevant to what the student needs to improve on. Practice should expose students to the hardest reasonable versions of what the exam can ask.

Perhaps the most important aspect of all is careful review. Students should go through all missed and uncertain questions, identifying where the error occurred and what would need to be different next time in order to answer correctly.

The exact tools for this are always changing. We’re constantly improving our tools and methods for targeted practice, meaning every year we implement new and improved systems. When we look back at our systems years ago, they were slower and less efficient, but the principles were the same. I’m sure our systems several years from now will be even more powerful and efficient than our current ones. 

Revisiting low-return activities at the right time

Our test prep is built on efficiency. While some organizations recommend upwards of 30 or 40 hours of test prep, our most common tutoring recommendation is 12 hours. That’s not a lot of time to help students improve as much as possible on a test that includes nearly everything they might have ever learned in school (and perhaps some things they haven’t). So we have to be efficient, making sure every minute of every session–and every homework assignment–leads to maximum score improvement. This means there are certain skills and question types we spent a lof of time on, because they’re easy to improve or show up frequently. And there are certain skills and question types we don’t prioritize.

However, once a student has already grabbed all of the “low-hanging fruit”, we may need to move on to the rarer and more challenging concepts.

Vocabulary is a great example. Given our short prep timeframes, studying hundreds of vocabulary words in the hopes that a few of them may appear on the test is not efficient. But a student who has already picked up all of the “easier” points and continues to miss questions because of a limited vocabulary needs to implement vocab into their prep process.

Train for the score you do not yet have

If you’re already a high scorer, with aspirations of scoring higher, practice tests will only take you so far. Focus on the uncomfortable prep. Do the questions you hate doing. Carefully review everything, looking for specific, actionable changes.

Don’t “grind” through hundreds of questions with no specific plan. “Grind” through the hardest ones. It won’t be fun, but it will make all the difference.