When we were getting ready for college a couple decades ago, taking the ACT or SAT was required. With the disrupting influence of COVID-19, today many colleges have gone “test optional“, which means they do not require taking and reporting the ACT or SAT to consider you for acceptance at their school.

However, it may still be to your student’s advantage to take and report their scores on one of these tests, in terms of earning merit scholarships. For many colleges, a certain threshold of ACT or SAT score may be worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in automatic college merit aid.

If you have a specific college in mind, you can do a web search for college name and act or sat. Or search for college name scholarship . For example, for the college I went to for undergrad, there’s a general scholarship page. From there, or directly by search, you can find the automatic merit scholarships for non-Michigan residents ($10k-$17k) based on their test scores, and the analogous scholarships for Michigan residents ($1k-$5.5k). For a non-Michigan student who would have otherwise scored a 28 on their ACT, to work their way up to scoring a 29 could be worth an automatic $3k/year for 4 years, or $12k! That’s quite a reward for a little bit of extra effort in test preparation, what could be the equivalent of earning $1000/hour tax-free for 12 hours in test prep.

Another, far less tedious, option is to work with a financial advisor who has professional software packages that are regularly updated with all of that information. Then you can easily find out what is the impact at colleges A, B, and C, for if your high school student improves their ACT or SAT score by X or Y points.

Look up the upcoming test dates and registration deadlines for the ACT and SAT. For the ACT, register by early January 2024 for the mid-February exam. For the SAT, register by mid-February for the early March exam.