4. IMO, test scores are useful to assess your own kid's likelihood of admission somewhere and to help target reach/match/safety schools. I would never want my kid to be the last one admitted somewhere and wind up outmatched and overwhelmed -- or, like one kid I heard of, was a fairly typical rich suburban white kid with no particular distinguishing factors, had a c.1250 SAT, and somehow thought UVa was a "safety" school.
Okay, this one made me laugh because my son's college roommate at UVa actually had ranked UVa as his "safety" school . . . but at least they did actually admit him. None of roommate's other applications were successful. My son had UVa as one of his aspirational applications and so he found this contrast hilarious.
On the other hand, I know of one young man who boasted to me he had UNC Chapel Hill as his "safety" school and then he didn't get in anywhere at all during that application cycle. I don't know what he ended up doing . . . probably a fashionable "gap year experience," although it's possible he put in later applications to what I'm sure he considered a "lesser" school in the spring. That kid was such an arrogant twat that it was hard not to cackle with schadenfreude, but I restrained myself.
My advice is that your children take one of either the SAT or ACT seriously the first time. Don't send it to ANY colleges, though, until you see the score. Just in case they bomb it. You can then decide if/where you want to send it anywhere. And if it is a catastrophe (yes, UVa son, looking at you), then your child can then switch to the other test and it will be in some sense like the first test never happened except as a reality check. In my case, son absolutely bombed the verbal section ACT they gave him at high school after straight up refusing to prepare for it because it "didn't matter" in his words. The biggest problem was that his lack of even a single practice round meant he was unaware of the needed pacing, so he ran out of time and had to answer C for like the last 20 items on the actual test day. His score reflected that. I even asked him "you CAN actually read, RIGHT?"
That was right before the pandemic and many schools became test optional during the pandemic. However, one place he really thought he wanted to go said they would not be test optional for athletes, so he had to get his act together. Since his ACT score was a train wreck, over the next couple of months he gradually took several practice sections of the SAT at home. He's extremely extroverted, so sitting down to take each section was torture with some whining and gnashing of teeth, but he did seem to enjoy going through the answers with me. Basically we came to a compromise where he'd do one-two timed section and then when the timer went off he'd have a snack and some undivided parent time at the kitchen table to go over the answers. Eventually he found a strategy for reading comprehension passage order (3-4-2-1 in his case since he always had most trouble with the abstract nature of the first passage.) And he also learned some basic English rules from me. This last part was gratifying, but also annoying, because I literally only had to explain each grammar, punctuation, or homonym rule he missed on a practice section to him once. And then he never missed it again, which leads me to believe he never had a teacher who did that or at least it didn't happen often enough for it to sink through his thick skull. Looking back I had exactly two teachers who hammered those rules into me as a kid, and all the other years of English my teacher was basically rubbish, so I can see how it happens.
So his ACT score indicated illiteracy but his SAT score was quite good in the end. Not quite good enough for the crazy selective ivy he was doing it all for, but good enough for UVa. Despite the fact that it was "test optional" at least at that time, he submitted the SAT scores anyway. I'm confident that he would not have gotten into UVa without submitting that because his grades were borderline at best. Looking back, he learned a lot in the process and I'm sure he's glad he kept at it and eventually took the SAT with success, but it sure felt like pulling teeth at the time.
We are personally only able to stomach / afford / assist with private schools that give aid to the point where its comparable to in state public schools. Has that been your experience so far that the aid provided to your kid has made private schools competitive to that point? If so I might heavily mooch off your list!
Yes, one of my children received the "Presidential Scholarship" to a private school and absolutely nothing in the way of scholarships from our in-state schools. Child's grades weren't spectacular but the other aspects of the application were strong, and private schools seem to weight these more. The in-state schools did offer some loans, but I have a life philosophy against that. The private school ended up much, much cheaper than the in-state options. In fact the private school is basically free (not quite, but our out-of-pocket is remarkably small.) Same is true for my UVa son: private schools offered better "packages" from a dollars and cents perspective especially once you realize the ridiculous and escalating list of required fees every semester for Virginia public schools. It's their way of getting around state legislature restrictions on increases in tuition, I guess, having thousands of dollars of fees every semester in addition.
You really won't know until your offspring send in those applications and the FAFSA process is completed. So, don't have pre-conceived notions about which schools will cost more.
