How Investing in Testing Can Put Money in Your Pocket for Years to Come

A perfect ACT score can mean a full ride. Discover how SAT and ACT prep pays for itself through merit aid, scholarships, and tuition savings.

I recently started working with an ACT student living across the country who wants to get a perfect score on the ACT. He’s taken the test five times already, scoring around a 33 each time, but he won’t quit trying until he gets that perfect score. 

Why is he so fixated on getting a perfect 36? Is it perfectionism, a relentless drive to be the best, an obsession with getting into a particular school that requires a perfect score?

Nope.

In fact, his target school is test optional. He doesn’t even need to take the ACT or SAT to get in.

His motivation is entirely practical: the college he wants to attend – which is just down the road from where he lives—offers a “perfect score” scholarship, where a 36 on the ACT results in a full ride. Not too shabby, and definitely worth aiming for, given that opportunity.

Because of that potential reward, he’s happily willing to work however hard he has to, do as much prep as necessary, and take the official test as many times as necessary. 

Your target schools may not have such a dramatic scholarship (though it never hurts to check), but there are plenty of other reasons that putting serious energy into your SAT or ACT amounts to an investment that can save and even earn you serious money in college and beyond. 

High Test Scores Can Dramatically Lower Tuition Through Merit Aid

While a decent score on the SAT or ACT can help get you into college, aiming for a higher score can qualify you for substantial financial aid packages. In some cases, certain scores guarantee financial aid. Often, the higher the score, the more aid you may qualify for. 

This is especially important to keep in mind for schools that are test optional. If you’re not looking, you may miss big opportunities to save substantial money on tuition. And those savings can more than justify the investment of time, effort, and money you may spend working toward that high score, especially with the help of a class or one-on-one tutoring. 

And that’s not just for the ACT and SAT: scoring high on the PSAT can qualify you for National Merit Scholarships, including full rides to some colleges. What most students see purely as practice for the SAT can have a major impact on your college experience and your bank account. 

Saving on Tuition with by Testing Out of Remedial Classes

The first year of college is often dedicated to taking required introductory courses designed to make sure you’re ready to succeed in higher education. But if your application (especially your test scores) indicate that you’re already ready, then guess what? You might not have to take all of them. 

A high English and Reading score on the ACT or Reading & Writing score on the SAT can allow you to test out of remedial freshman writing classes. A high Math score on either test can allow you to test out of remedial freshman math. You don’t even need the composite score to be at a certain level in these cases. Success on specific sections can potentially put you way ahead of the game in your freshman year of college.

That not only saves you from sitting through required classes that may feel easy and unnecessary for you; it also saves hundreds or even thousands of dollars on tuition for those classes. Beyond that, it frees you up to take more electives or explore a variety of potential majors, lightening the financial burden and giving you much more flexibility at the start of your college career, when that flexibility can have the most impact on finding the fields of study that inspire you. 

How High Scores on the SAT and ACT Can Impact Lifetime Earnings

Preparing for college applications can often feel like reaching into an unknown future and simply trusting that the work you put in now will benefit you later. As we’ve seen, high test scores can make that future benefit feel much more tangible and reliable. 

But even further into the future, beyond college and throughout your life, the work you put into your SAT or ACT scores will continue to pay off – literally. 

As your scores increase, so will the scope of the schools you can realistically attend. Purely aspirational dream schools can gradually enter the sphere of possibility, and you may find yourself being accepted into a college you initially thought was beyond your grasp. 

The work you do in college has a major impact on the kinds of jobs you can get and the earnings you can expect. But all that work happens in the context of what school you attend, how prestigious it is, and how strong their various departments are. Just by getting into a better school with the help of your test scores, you’re giving yourself a huge advantage in the job market and increasing your potential lifetime earnings, often dramatically. Something to consider especially if you’ll be paying down student loans and don’t want to do that for a lifetime.

Is Testing – and Testing Well – Really Optional? 

After Covid, a lot of colleges switched to either test free or test optional policies for their admissions. All across the country, students breathed a sigh of relief, realizing they didn’t need to take the SAT or ACT if they didn’t want to. 

But test optional doesn’t mean test free. 

You can choose to skip the tests, or just show up to an official test date without much prep, take whatever score you get, and call it good. But as we’ve seen, you’ll be missing out on major opportunities.

And that's the best way to think of test prep: as an opportunity, not an obligation – even an investment opportunity. Because whatever time, effort, and money you invest, you could earn back swift and significant financial returns. 

Of course, investing in testing is not just about financial impact. There’s a reason schools reward high test scores: they demonstrate your knowledge, your critical thinking skills, and your readiness for a higher level of education. By dedicating yourself to preparing for the tests, you’re building real skills that you’ll need to succeed in college and beyond. 

Your future self will thank you.

Ready to talk with a program advisor about working with an expert SAT or ACT tutor? Book a no-charge consultation today to get started.