The Best ACT/SAT Test Prep Course

Kaplan is a powerhouse in the test prep industry, offering many review courses, including several for those taking the SAT or ACT.

Its options are on the pricier side: A basic, online self-paced program is $299; unlimited online and in-person classroom instruction through December of your senior year is $1,799. (It’s certainly possible to pay much more for SAT prep — the four-week residential summer intensive at Kent Prep is nearly $9,500, airport shuttle not included.)

Kaplan’s $299 course features video tutorials, more than 1,000 practice questions, and progress reports to help students track their performance. It also includes eight full practice tests for either the SAT or ACT — more than any other company we looked at. Khan Academy includes seven; ACT Online Prep offers two; and The Princeton Review has four each for the SAT and ACT.

Kaplan is a bit different from Khan Academy and ACT Online Prep. Kaplan emphasizes live and archived review sessions more than the others — upgrade to the $599 level or higher to participate in live review sessions and ask questions of the teachers in real time in a classroom format or via private Q&A.

The teachers are knowledgeable; all Kaplan teachers must themselves score at 90 percent or above on the test they are teaching. They discuss strategy for individual topics, and there are supplementary dives into test-taking strategy with videos such as “Creating Your Perfect Study Plan” and “SAT Mindset Training.” These videos are archived on the site, so if a student isn’t available when it’s broadcast, they can watch it at their convenience.

Kaplan’s format is also different from our other picks. When you purchase any Kaplan program, the company sends two books: Kaplan SAT Course Book (or ACT, if that’s the test you’re taking) and The Kaplan Big Book of SAT Practice Tests. Students reinforce their online work with the substantial, 756-page Course Book, and then read the practice tests in the book while filling in the answers online. The online courses integrate material from the books, and are designed to work together. There are additional assignments in the book that can be input online for instant feedback.

For students who want a mix of book assignments, online video assignments, live classes, and practice questions both online and in the books, this program is worth exploring. Sure, its videos are good, but the ability to interact with instructors is what sets Kaplan apart.

Like Kaplan, The Princeton Review is one of the behemoths in the industry. It offers far more than just SAT and ACT prep courses. Also like Kaplan, The Princeton Review prep courses start at $299; the SAT (or ACT) Ultimate course is $849 to get another 25 hours of live instruction, 140 more lessons, and three hours of private tutoring.

The Princeton Review program is not unlike Kaplan’s in terms of the scope of offerings: The primary learning vehicles are subject modules — each includes four sections: “Getting Started,” “Discover” (a video), “Explore” (a handful of practice questions with answers explained), and “Stepping Back,” where you rate your confidence in your abilities with the topic you’ve just reviewed. But there’s no place where you can see at a glance how you did overall on the practice questions in each module. A rather sparse dashboard serves as home base, recommending the next module to embark on.

What we liked about The Princeton Review is the included “Chat with a Teacher” feature — even the basic $299 course includes three hours of chat time. Click the ever-present blue “chat with a teacher” button in the upper-right-hand corner and assistance is yours. If you use your three hours, it’s easy to add more (at $50/hour). For the student who has a decent understanding of most concepts, but occasionally wants a little live assistance, this is an easy way to get one-on-one help.

The nonprofit Khan Academy has partnered directly with the College Board, which created the SAT, for its “Official” SAT prep course. In fact, all the practice tests on Khan’s website are designed by the College Board testing staff. And, it’s free.

Yes, you heard us right. The review and practice materials are free; the interactive quizzes are free; and so are the video lessons, reference articles, and all seven full-length practice tests written by the College Board.

After a couple of short diagnostic quizzes, Khan builds a customized program with suggested areas to review. (You can even link your past PSAT and SAT scores to your Khan Academy account, and it’ll use those to help create a study plan.) One thing we liked about the diagnostic quizzes is that they start giving SAT test-taking tips from the outset: “On this diagnostic, you should select ‘I would be guessing’ if you don’t know the answer. But on the real SAT, there’s no penalty for guessing and you should always choose an answer.” We felt more prepared for test day by minute two of our first practice session.

Those reviews include short videos of an instructor, Sal, working though test questions and answers. They’re educationally sound — and super useful — but they’re not very fancy.

In the math videos, Sal works through problems and shows his work (but never his face). He’s a lot like a gentle, jovial math teacher, but there’s no denying the video is still a math review. In the reading comprehension videos, Sal reads through the passages, gives tips, and shares his thought process along the way.

Who is this Sal guy? It’s Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, which he started as a YouTube channel where he made videos for his cousins. He posted tutoring videos on YouTube and millions of people started watching them. He doesn’t make all the videos anymore, but does make a lot of them.

After the video lesson, students can test themselves with timed mini-tests, and, when they feel ready, with a full SAT practice test — or seven. Those practice tests feel super real, too. Khan Academy recommended we block off four hours on a Saturday (ideally starting at 8:30 AM); print out an official practice SAT bubble sheet for our answers; and sit down with our scratch paper, no. 2 pencil, and an approved calculator. We took the test, snapped a photo using the College Board’s app (Daily Practice for the New SAT), and our scores were uploaded to our Khan Academy dashboard, which recommended new areas to practice.

Khan Academy also offers strategies and tips for taking the SAT — discussing format, time management, and how to interpret the sometimes tricky questions. We can’t stress how important this is: Not only is test strategy a subject unto itself, but also taking a practice test is one of the most effective ways to learn new information.

Unlike some of our other top picks, Khan Academy doesn’t have a dashboard where a student or parent could get a full picture of the work done to date. The simpler profile page lists recent activity, a personalized study schedule based on your test date, and your current skill level.

There’s also no way to connect with a live teacher for questions. But it’s robust, useful, and even energizing. And did we mention that it’s free? There’s no reason for anyone taking the SAT not to have a look.

ACT Online Prep is also affiliated with the agency that creates its test (which is also called the ACT), so it has a behind-the-scenes view. But that’s not the only reason we chose it as a top contender. Of all the programs we tested, this was one of the few that was — dare we say it? — FUN.

The eye-catching appeal of the layout, plus the ability to easily track yourself throughout the process, made using this program more of a game than a chore. It wasn’t exactly like playing Grand Theft Auto V, but ACT Online Prep is likely to engage even the most reluctant of scholars. More than any of our other finalists, this program gave us a feeling that we were making progress at a steady pace — and that we would be more than ready by test day.

The robust dashboard gives students an appealing at-a-glance sense of how they’re doing, assesses their strengths and weaknesses, and suggests what they should tackle next with progress bars that will fill up as they improve. It was a lot less stressful to see we were “beginners” in science and math once we saw ourselves progress into “basic” for both of them. Review lessons are text-based and comprehensive, with plenty of examples.

Once we’d reviewed lessons and taken several timed quizzes, the dashboard told us we could, at our current level of understanding, expect to score 30-35 in the English section, and that our average score on practice questions was 87 percent correct, which put us in the 55th percentile of those taking the tests. In math, we weren’t in such great shape: Our expected score was 12-15.

To improve our scores, we hit up the discussion area to connect with other students; played games in a game center; and practiced with the 450 e-flashcards to drill ourselves on vocabulary, science, and math concepts. Act Online Prep was the only one of our finalists to offer extras like this, and we found them to be welcome — and useful — review tools. The games were fairly simple, each of them a variation of matching a correct answer among a series of possible answers, but they were a nice change from the text-based drills. Knowing we had three full hearts of life and a leaderboard really did make it more fun to find the definition of a parallelogram.

Another unique aspect of ACT Online Prep is the ability to choose your learning plan: Students select either a structured plan, which goes through all the material covered in the test in order, or an adaptive plan, which suggests lessons based on student performance in practice quizzes and their confidence level in the material. We tried out both options (it’s easy to switch back and forth) and were pleased to see that the adaptive plan took our abysmal math results to heart and served up a math-heavy schedule for us.

Six months of access is $50. For an additional $134 upgrade, students can access live online classes sponsored by Kaplan. (ACT Online Prep helpfully pointed out that we might benefit from the 90-minute “Math and Science Short Test Review” that next Saturday.)