Improve Your SAT and ACT Scores - Watch Out for Scams

If an ad promising to improve your SAT and ACT scores contains grammatical and typing errors, chances are you'll be better off doing your own studying. This should be obvious, but the ads come in the mail anyway. Companies offer seminars costing $75 or more, sometimes sending letters to students' parents to congratulate them on having kids whose marvelous grades were brought to the attention of the company bigwigs. They claim that registration for the seminars should not be delayed, or the precious offspring will lose their chances to get into the most prestigious colleges. Well, how's that for free admission to the next Parents' Guilt Trip?

There are plenty of reputable companies that offer tutoring and test preparation. The best way to find out about them is by asking. Word-of-mouth advertising from friends and relatives is good, or calling a company that interests you and asking for references. Check the references. High school counselors are usually familiar with some of the companies too. Newspapers, magazines, the internet and the yellow pages are all good sources of information.

Study guides are abundant in bookstores and libraries, as well as on the internet. They can't always match the classroom or one-on-one sessions offered by professionals, but they are readily available and might be enough to prepare for the tests. They are definitely a better bet than seminars run by people who can't tell the difference between singular and plural words.

These scams are in the same league as the ones peddling scholarship information which is free to anyone who asks for it, charging hefty fees and making empty promises. They use the same tactics, pressuring parents to pay now or watch their kids lose opportunities. They prey upon parents with names that look foreign, hoping to take advantage of people who are not familiar with the traditional ways to find information in the U.S. They go after consumers who seem like easy targets, the ones willing to do anything for their kids' success regardless of the cost. They find them in school districts in both high-income and low-income areas of the country.

Read the ads carefully. If they contain sentence fragments, run-on sentences, missing spaces between words, missing or misplaced apostrophes or any other errors that look like you would not have made them when you were in third grade, beware. The writers need your help more than you need theirs, and your time is too valuable to offer them.