There’s just one reason why you have to take the SAT test: colleges make you. If you don’t take a college entrance examination like the SAT or the ACT, most colleges won’t even look at your application.

Why do colleges insist that students take the SAT or ACT in order to apply? It makes the college’s jobs easier. High schools around the country and the world have different courses and different grading systems, so it can be a challenge for a college to sort out how these different courses and grades compare. The SAT makes things easier by putting all students through the same test and providing the same kind of SAT score. In this way, the SAT gives colleges a simple "yardstick" on which they can measure and compare all applicants.

When the SAT exam was first developed in 1926, the letters SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test. At the time, the test developers believed that the test accurately measured a person’s aptitude, their innate intelligence. For that reason, the folks who wrote the test also thought that the test was "uncoachable," that no one could prepare for it.

Well, SAT test prep is now a 100 million dollar a year business, and it is well-documented that you can prepare and improve on your test scores. The College Board itself, the company that makes the SAT, now offers test prep materials. In 1994, the College Board ceased calling the SAT the "Scholastic Aptitude Test" in favor of the name "Scholastic Assessment Test." But apparently that name did not do the trick either.

The SAT has existed since 1926 (though it did not reach its current stature as a high-stakes, make-or-break college admissions test until the last three decades). Over its long life, the test has slowly grown and changed. For instance, in 1994 the SAT ceased to ask questions about Antonyms, and in 1995 the SAT scoring was "re-centered," ensuring that more students would get better scores on the test.

But in 2005 the SAT test is undergoing the most extensive change in its history: the Math content covered by the exam has been slightly expanded; the analogies have been dropped the Verbal section has been renamed Critical Reading; and an entire new Writing section has been added to the test. These changes are the reason why the SAT is at the moment being called the "new SAT."

If you ask College Board why they changed the SAT they will say "The changes we are making now will improve the alignment of the SAT to curriculum and instructional practices in high schools and colleges. We expect that the addition of a third measure, writing, to the test will strengthen its predictive validity and help colleges to make better admissions decisions. The addition of the writing section will reinforce the importance of writing skills throughout a student's education and support the improvement of the academic preparation of all students, bolstering their chances for academic success in college."

The real reason is that in 2001, Richard Atkinson, the President of the entire University of California system made a speech in which he argued that the SAT I was a poor test and either needed to be changed or dropped as a standard of admission to the University of California colleges.

Now, the UC system contains more students than any other college system in the world; if that system dropped the SAT, it would be a huge blow to the College Board. So they decided to remake the SAT test into the new SAT.

It’s important. The SAT is one of the five major aspects of your resume that a college will look at when deciding whether to admit you. The other four are: your high school grades, your extracurriculars (including jobs), your college essays, and the other standardized tests (such as SAT IIs) that you take.

Just how important the SAT is in the admissions decisions varies with the particular school. In general, the larger the school the more weight is placed on the SAT. Huge state schools receive so many applications that they are often forced to use the SAT to eliminate candidates without even dealing with the rest of the application.

Here’s the best way to think about the SAT and college admissions. If you have an SAT score below the average SAT of incoming freshman at a particular college, it will hurt your chances of admission.

Just how much your SAT score will help or hurt your chances of admissions depends on both how competitive the school is and on the rest of your application. Even so, your goal on the SAT should be to at least match the average SAT scores of incoming freshman to the school or schools you want to attend.

Official answer: It depends on the college. Some colleges promise to only consider your highest SAT score. Other schools promise to look at only your highest scores on the Math, Critical Reading, and Writing section, even if you got those scores on different tests. Some schools promise nothing, and will look at all your SAT scores.

Unofficial Truth: When you apply to a college, all of your SAT scores get sent to the college. So whether the college promises to consider only your highest scores or not, there’s no doubt that the college will see all your scores, highest and, well, not highest. And while the school may "officially" only consider your highest scores, it’s difficult to imagine an admissions officer being unaffected by the other scores on your SAT score report.

Each year, the SAT is given on one Saturday in each of the following months: October, November, December, January, March (or April), May, and June. If for religious reasons you are unable to take the SAT on Saturday, there are special Sunday administrations of the test that you can register for.

So which SAT should you take? You should absolutely take the SAT for the first time in either March or May of your junior year of high school. No sooner, no later. If you’re planning to apply to college in time for early decision, March is probably the better date because you’ll likely have to use the May and June dates to take SAT II tests.

If you are going to take the SAT for a second time, you should take it in either October or November of your senior year, to make sure you get your scores back before your college application deadlines roll around.

The only people who should ever take the SAT before March of their junior year of high school are middle school students who are taking the test to try to get admitted to summer academic programs.

The SAT is the most popular college entrance exam in the U.S., both in terms of the number of students who take the test and the number of schools that accept it. The ACT is a close second. In general, college in the midwest of the country prefer applicants to take the ACT, while those on the coasts prefer the SAT. Many colleges accept either the ACT or the SAT as the entrance exam portion of an application.

The ACT is actually quite different test from the SAT. While the SAT is a "reasoning test" designed to test critical thinking skills as well as knowledge, the ACT is an "assessment test" designed to test how much a student has learned in four years of high school. In practice, this often means that questions on the ACT are less "tricky" than those on the SAT.

When deciding whether you should take the ACT, the SAT, or both, here are the things to consider:

· What do the colleges you’re applying to ask for-This is the most important question. If the schools you’re interested in prefer the SAT, then that’s the test you should take. If the schools want the ACT, then take that.

· Which test are you better at?-Because of the differences in the tests, some students may be better at the ACT than the SAT, or vice versa. If you’re interested in schools that will accept either test, take the test you’re better at. To find out which test you are better at, take a practice test of each and see how you score.

· Scholarship Money-If you’re applying to a state school, some states offer scholarship money based on your performance on either the SAT or ACT, but seldom both. For instance, in Louisiana students who score above a certain score on the ACT can attend LSU for vey little money, or even for free. But students who score high on the SAT don’t get that same perk.