The 10-Week Prep Plan for Standardized Tests

Most test prep advice shares one problem: all of it is true and none of it is a plan. Start early, practice a lot, get enough sleep. Fine. But which thing comes first? What should week six look like? What do you cut when you’re running out of time? That part never gets written down.

So here it is: a ten-week plan, in order. Sunrise Pine doesn’t run SAT or ACT prep courses, and you don’t need a paid one. The test makers publish free practice materials that match the real exams, and everything below is built around those.

First question: do you actually need one of these tests?

Sunrise Pine students live all over the world, and a lot of you are in Europe. So before you sink ten weeks into prep, figure out whether the schools you’re aiming for want a score at all. The answer has changed a lot recently, in both directions.

In the US, testing requirements are coming back. Most of the Ivy League and other selective universities such as MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and Georgetown now require SAT or ACT scores again, along with the public university systems of Florida and Georgia. At the same time, the majority of American universities remain test-optional, and a few, like the University of California campuses, won’t look at scores at all. Policies keep shifting, so check the admissions page of every school on your list rather than trusting a rule of thumb.

If you’re staying in Europe, don’t assume these tests are irrelevant. A surprising number of European universities accept the SAT or ACT from international applicants, especially for English-taught programs, and some lean on it heavily. Bocconi in Milan, for example, bases undergraduate admission almost entirely on your grades plus a test score, and the SAT and ACT both count. IE University in Spain accepts the SAT as its entrance exam. Universities in the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany often accept it too, and UK universities typically want it combined with AP exams. One SAT score can travel across a whole application list, which is efficient if you’re applying to several countries at once.

If none of your target schools want a score, you can skip the test entirely and put those ten weeks into something that strengthens your applications more. If any of them do, keep reading.

Before you start

Pick a test date roughly ten weeks out and register as soon as you’ve chosen it. One thing to be clear on: neither exam can be taken from home. Both are sat in person at an approved test center wherever you live. For the SAT, find your nearest location through College Board’s test center search. For the ACT, there’s a test center locator covering the US and its territories; if you’re testing anywhere else, available centers and dates are shown by country when you register through ACT’s international site. Registering early matters double outside the US, where dates and seats can be more limited and popular centers fill up. Have a valid photo ID lined up when you register, and check the ID rules for your country, since a passport is often the expected document.

Then spend one evening getting familiar with the test itself, because both exams have changed and old assumptions will cost you. The SAT is fully digital now, and has been for international students since 2023, but digital means you take it on a computer through the Bluebook app at a test center, not remotely. It adapts to how you’re doing, runs about two hours and fourteen minutes, and a graphing calculator is built into the testing app and allowed on every math question. The ACT was redesigned in 2025 into what’s now called the enhanced ACT. The core test (English, math, reading) takes about two hours, your composite score comes from those three sections only, and science is now an optional add-on that’s scored separately. In the US, the ACT offers paper and digital options; outside the US, it’s taken on a computer at a test center.

One decision to make early if you choose the ACT: whether to add the science section. Most universities treat it as optional, but a handful still want it, especially for science-focused programs, so check your target schools before you register.

Finally, download the free official practice tests: the Bluebook app for the SAT, or the practice materials on ACT’s site. They’re the only practice material that reliably matches the real exam. Last bit of setup: open a fresh notebook or a doc and label it “error log.” More on that in a minute. It ends up being the most useful thing you make all ten weeks.

Week 1: take a full practice test before studying anything

This step feels backwards, which is why almost everyone skips it, and why almost everyone regrets that.

Sit for one complete practice test this week under honest conditions. Timed strictly, phone in another room, on a screen (which is how you’ll really test), breaks only where the actual exam gives them.

Your score will probably be lower than you’d like, and that’s expected when you go in cold. There’s a widely cited national study in Nature on what happens when students are taught to treat ability as something that grows with practice rather than something fixed at birth. Achievement went up, and the students who had been struggling improved the most. Read your diagnostic the same way. It’s not a measurement of how smart you are. It’s a map of where the next nine weeks should go.

When you finish, sort every missed question into content areas and circle your three or four weakest. Those are the targets.

Weeks 2 to 4: close the gaps

How you study during this stretch matters more than how many hours you put in. A big review of the research on study techniques compared everything from highlighting to self-quizzing and found two clear winners: testing yourself, and spreading study out across days instead of packing it into one sitting. The methods that feel the most like studying, rereading notes and highlighting, landed near the bottom of the list.

So build these weeks out of short, frequent sessions. Four or five a week, somewhere between thirty and forty-five minutes each, and every one of them built around doing problems rather than reviewing notes. One advantage of learning at an online school: you already manage your own schedule, so slot these sessions in wherever your day has room and guard them like a class.

After every session, feed the error log. For each question you missed, jot down three things: the question type, the reason you missed it (didn’t know the material, careless slip, or ran out of time), and the rule or concept it was actually testing. Two minutes per question, tops.

A note for students whose schooling hasn’t followed the American system: the content will mostly feel familiar, but the format might not. These tests have a style of their own, with tight time limits, a steady multiple-choice rhythm, and question types that no national curriculum teaches directly. If you know the material but your pacing is off, that’s normal, and it’s fixable. It’s a familiarity problem, not an ability problem.

Week 5: test again and adjust

Halfway there. Take your second full practice test, same honest conditions as week one, then put the two score reports side by side and compare section by section.

Expect lopsided results. Maybe reading jumped while math barely twitched. That’s normal, and it’s useful. Rewrite your target list for the second half: keep drilling whatever stayed flat, and let the areas that improved drop back to light maintenance.

Weeks 6 to 8: train your pacing

With the content gaps shrinking, the job shifts to execution. Trade some of your study sessions for timed single sections. One math module against the clock. One set of reading passages. Pacing is a skill you can train, and it’s where well-prepared students bleed the most points.

Once a week, sit down with the error log and hunt for patterns. Students are always surprised by what turns up. The misses usually aren’t random at all. It’s the same three grammar rules, or geometry only when the clock runs low, or answering the question you expected instead of the one on the page. Fixing one pattern is worth a dozen fixed questions.

Start building a calm-down routine now, while nothing is on the line. Before every timed section, do one round of box breathing: in for four counts, hold four, out for four, hold four. Repeat it enough times over these weeks and the routine runs on autopilot, which is exactly what you want when your heart starts hammering on test morning. And about that hammering heart: that’s adrenaline doing its job, not a sign that something’s wrong.

Week 9: dress rehearsal

Two full practice tests this week, staged as close to the real event as you can manage. Same start time as your actual exam, same device format, timed breaks, no phone anywhere nearby.

There’s a reason to do this beyond checking your progress. Research in Psychological Science found that taking practice tests produced better long-term retention and higher scores than spending the same amount of time studying the material (source). The rehearsal is the studying, in other words. Hold up your end of it, though: budget as much time to review each test as you spent taking it, error log open the whole while.

Week 10: ease off

Runners don’t do a twenty-mile training run the day before a marathon. Same idea here. This week stays light on purpose. Skim the most frequent misses in your error log, do a handful of problems a day to stay warm, and learn nothing new. New material this late adds nerves without adding points.

What actually raises your score this week is dull: sleep, and a bit of movement. Your brain consolidates memory while you sleep, so an all-nighter before the exam literally undoes studying you already did. Aim for eight or nine hours every night this week, not just the last one. Keep moving too. Regular aerobic exercise is linked to better memory and thinking (source), and a daily walk between review sessions clears that bar just fine.

Sort your logistics early this week, not the night before. If you’re testing internationally, double-check your test center’s address and your ID requirements now, while there’s still time to fix a problem. Then pack the night before: admission ticket, photo ID, a fully charged device or approved calculator, pencils, snacks, water. In the morning, eat something light with protein in it, dress in layers, and leave home early. During the test, read the directions twice, and when a question has you stuck, flag it and keep moving. Momentum beats any single answer.

What if you only have five weeks?

Compress, don’t panic. Diagnostic in week one, no exceptions, since everything downstream depends on it. Weeks two and three go to your weakest areas. Week four is one full test plus timed section drills. Week five is a final rehearsal early on, then two easy days before the exam. Whatever else you trim, don’t cut the diagnostic or the taper. Those are the two steps students sacrifice first, and the two that protect all the rest.

One last thing

There’s no trick hiding in any of this. Confirm you need the test, find the gaps, close them with real practice, rehearse the actual event, then rest. Each step on its own is ordinary. Doing them in order is the whole advantage.

Week one is a single practice test. Pick the day.