01There are a lot of test prep companies and private tutors out there.
It can make things hard for parents looking to answer one seemingly-simple question: which program will do the most for my kid? It seems like it should be simple, but it's harder than it looks. Everyone promises results. The numbers in the marketing materials look impressive. And the options seem endless.
Finding a prep program - and finding out if your student even really needs one - isn't a straightforward decision, and it's getting harder. Test prep is a multibillion-dollar industry, and the number of private tutoring centers in the United States more than tripled between 1997 and 2022, from about 3,000 to 10,000. The competition for families has shaped how prep companies market themselves, what they promise, and what they put in the contracts those promises are attached to. Some companies have responded by getting better at preparing students for standardized tests. Others have responded by getting better at marketing, or even worse, getting better at preying on parents.
The difference isn't easy to see from the outside. A program that does excellent work and a program that does very little can produce nearly identical brochures. Both will guarantee a score increase. Both will share testimonials. Both will quote percentile rankings of their tutors. The marketing for a great program and the marketing for a predatory one look more alike than they should.
This guide is for parents trying to tell the difference. It's a walk through the specific practices prep companies use to look better than they are, why those practices work on otherwise careful families, and what to watch for in your own conversations with companies. We'll point you at the published research and consumer complaints behind these claims, and give you the red flags to watch for when you're evaluating prep programs..
The throughline, though, is this: in test prep, what's in the marketing and what's actually getting done are often very different. This guide will help you spot the difference.
02Pressure marketing
If you've started looking at test prep, you've probably had some version of this experience:
You request information from a company. You get a call back the same day. The person on the phone is friendly, knowledgeable, and just a little bit alarmed for you. Spots are filling up. We might have to put you on a waitlist. Oh, your student hasn't done anything at all? Yikes - this is a prep emergency. Did you know that tests have gotten harder? Other parents at your kid's school enrolled their student months ago. There's a tuition discount available, but only if you commit by Friday - better sign this contract and put down a deposit.
This is pressure marketing, and it's the most reliable signal that a company is more interested in your wallet than your student's results. If they were actually "sold out" of tutoring, they'd hire more instructors. A program that gets results doesn't need to manufacture urgency. It doesn't need contracts to lock in families. Its tutors are booked because they're good, not because they're scarce. Its classes fill up because they work, not because parents are afraid of missing out.
Pressure marketing works in test prep because the anxiety it taps into is real. College admissions feels higher-stakes than it used to. Some elite universities have reinstated their SAT and ACT requirements in the last two years, which has driven up tutoring demand and shaped the marketing environment around it - Bloomberg reported in 2024 on parents in some markets booking SAT tutors at up to $500 an hour after the test-optional reversals. The fear is genuine. But a company that exploits that fear to push a faster signature is doing the opposite of what an advisor would do.
A good test: imagine the same conversation with a different professional. If a doctor told you that other patients had already started treatment and the cost goes up Friday, you'd find another doctor. The same standard should apply to a program that's going to spend dozens of hours with your child.
03Inflated score-gain claims
Every test prep company advertises score gains. Some even put an increase or a "guaranteed score" right in the name of the course. Marketing isn't reality, though, and whether the number is in a course name, in a guarantee, or in an average-gain claim, most of those numbers are inflated. There are two distinct ways companies do it.
The first is to establish a baseline score for a student early: sometimes as early as seventh or eighth grade, before the student has encountered most of the material the test covers. A seventh-grader who hasn't taken Algebra II is going to score poorly on an SAT math section or a company's "diagnostic" test. Three or four years later, after the student has actually taken the relevant coursework, their score goes up. The company points to the "giant" increase as evidence its program worked.
It didn't. The student would have improved without any prep at all, because three years of high school happened. Brookings's 2025 report on test prep noted that scores tend to increase between the first and second sitting of a test just from familiarity with its structure, and studies that don't account for that overstate the effect of prep. Even if that 7th grader had taken Algebra II, it's not accounting for everything else that happens during high school - harder classes, more reading, normal cognitive development. Add those together, and you have a recipe for impressive-looking gains that have nothing to do with prep. A program that takes credit for what happens to every student during high school is selling you something you'd have gotten anyway.
The second move is to rig the baseline test itself. Most prep programs start with a diagnostic to establish the "before" score they'll measure improvement against. The lower that score, the better the eventual improvement looks. So a diagnostic that is harder than the real test produces an inflated gain on paper - even if the student does no prep at all.
The clearest documented example is The Princeton Review's SAT Ultimate Classroom course, which the company advertised as producing an average score gain of 255 points. In 2010, the National Advertising Division of the BBB investigated the claim, along with similar Princeton Review claims about its GMAT and GRE courses, and the company agreed to discontinue them. The 255-point figure wasn't based on two real SAT scores. It was based on the difference between Princeton Review's own diagnostic test and students' self-reported scores on a later official SAT. Compare a company-administered practice test to a real exam taken later, and you can manufacture almost any gain you want to advertise. A 2009 report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling agrees that test prep gains are less than frequently advertised. Constructed "increases" aren't real gains.
The independent research, when it exists, is consistent. ACT's own randomized controlled trial of its online prep program found no statistically significant score difference between students given free access and a control group. The College Board's initial claim that 20 hours of Khan Academy practice produced an average 115-point gain was revised down to 21 points in a 2020 follow-up that controlled for natural growth.
This doesn't mean prep doesn't work. Good prep produces real gains, often well above what the industry-wide research suggests. But it means most of the claims you'll see are inflated, and the question to ask isn't "how big is the gain?" It's "compared to what?" A program that can show you a real official test as its baseline, a real official test as its endpoint, and a methodology that controls for natural growth is showing you its work. A program that quotes a big number without explaining the math is hoping you don't ask.
04Fine print guarantees
A company that offers a guaranteed increase, or even a guaranteed score, would seem to be more trustworthy than one without. Unfortunately, it's all-too-common for test prep marketing to make a bold promise* - note the asterisk - and minimize the conditions that are attached, even if those conditions mean it's functionally impossible for most students to get a refund or to reach the target score that is advertised.
Truth in Advertising, an ad watchdog organization, found deceptive claims in test prep company ads in 2022 related to "guaranteed" scores. Even when programs make some of their conditions clear up front, there are less obvious ways that students can fail to qualify. You started the prep class before taking a diagnostic test? Ineligible. You didn't take the test on the recommended test date? Ineligible. You haven't taken at least two official tests to get a superscore? Ineligible. You didn't submit all of your documentation within 60 days of the test date? Ineligible. You actually did everything correctly? Your refund doesn't include the cost of course materials or shipping.
Some guarantee conditions make sense: students should have to actually attend class and do coursework to be eligible. But families should read fine print carefully, and make certain they're getting the guarantee they think they are.
05A too-early start
One of the most common pitches in test prep is that families should start as early as possible. Seventh grade. Eighth grade. Freshman year. It sounds like it's the responsible thing to do: after all, if some prep is good, more must be better, right? When it comes to test prep, though, more time invested doesn't always mean better results.
One reason an early start doesn't make sense is that the SAT and ACT test material that most students haven't fully encountered until tenth or eleventh grade. A seventh-grader prepping for the SAT is being asked to study content they haven't been taught yet. Even if a student is in advanced classes and has the background, the tests themselves also change format - the SAT has changed formats twice in the last decade, the ACT changed its format and scoring in 2025 - which means a student who began prep in seventh grade may end up preparing for a test that no longer exists by the time they sit for the real one. Even outside of major structural changes, content emphasis changes for each test frequently. If a student is looking to get ahead, they'd be better served by standard academic tutoring instead of test prep that won't matter or that they aren't prepared for.
Brookings' 2025 academic review of test prep notes that the evidence for prep is strongest when it is delivered close to the test. This makes sense: strategies and content are fresh in students' minds, and they've got the academic background to make full use of prep time. And more isn't more when it comes to that prep. Studies show that the relationship between prep hours and score gains is non-linear, with returns dropping sharply after about 45 hours of structured prep.
The natural counter-argument is that more prep can't hurt - even if some of it is inefficient, surely some practice is better than none. But hours don't come from nowhere, and there are no awards for doing the most test prep. Time spent grinding SAT material in eighth grade is time not spent on the things that actually move the needle on college admissions: the activities, leadership roles, projects, advanced coursework, and writing skills that admissions officers actually weigh. A student spending Saturdays in an SAT class as a thirteen-year-old isn't building anything else those Saturdays. Early prep buys parental peace of mind, not student advantage.
So why do so many programs encourage an early start? A program that signs a family in seventh grade and keeps them through senior year is six years of tuition rather than one. The pitch isn't about whether the student needs four extra years - it's about whether the company can charge for them. These long enrollments are usually anchored by multi-year contracts, sometimes with auto-renewal clauses and difficult cancellation terms. Families typically sign up convinced their student needs the head start, only to discover years later that they're committed to a program that hasn't actually accelerated the student's preparation - it's just delivered the same lessons over more semesters.
06Practice without instruction
Practice and instruction aren't the same thing. A test prep program can deliver lots of one without much of the other - and many do, because practice is cheap to deliver and real instruction is expensive. Practice questions, practice tests, and answer keys cost almost nothing once they exist. Teaching requires experienced instructors, curriculum work, and feedback. A company optimizing for margin will tilt the program toward the cheaper half.
The result is a model the industry calls "drill and kill" - a program built mostly on doing practice questions, reviewing what was missed, and doing more practice questions, with little actual instruction on how to approach the test. The student leaves each session with more questions completed, but not necessarily with new strategies for the next section. It feels like progress, but the process is more about consuming hours than increasing scores.
The reason this model fails has nothing to do with practice being bad. Practice is essential. But just working a test section doesn't teach - it measures. A student who keeps missing the same kind of reading question doesn't get better at it by doing thirty more of them; they get better when someone explains the structure of the question, walks them through the approach, and gives them a strategy to apply. Practice without instruction asks the student to teach themselves the strategy through trial and error, which is the slowest and least reliable way to learn anything.
The data supports this. The ACT's own randomized controlled trial of its online prep program found no statistically significant score difference between students given free access and a control group. A program that leaves practice up to the student fails at a high rate even when it's free, because they have no scaffold to make it effective.
A few signs that you're looking at a drill-and-kill program: The schedule is dominated by practice tests and "review sessions" rather than instruction blocks. The "review" consists of going through wrong answers without teaching a new approach. The pitch leans on practice volume rather than what gets taught in those hours.
If a program's marketing is built around how many hours, how many practice tests, or how many problems your student will do, you're being sold volume - not instruction.
07Pushing a single test and accommodations a student doesn't need
Some students legitimately need accommodations to demonstrate what they actually know on a standardized test. Students with documented learning disabilities, ADHD, processing disorders, or other conditions can qualify for extended time, breaks, or other adjustments under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. When the system works as intended, it lets students with real needs take the test on the same footing as everyone else.
This system has a specific weak point that some test prep companies have learned to exploit, and the dynamic almost always starts the same way: with a strong push toward the ACT. The student is told the ACT is a better fit, and the conversation moves toward ACT prep without much discussion of whether the SAT would actually be the better test for the student. In fact, some programs even discourage their students from taking a PSAT or SAT that is offered. Afterwards, the program tells families that they need to get extended-time accommodations on the ACT, no matter what.
This specific practice shows up frequently because time management is a much more central part of the ACT than the SAT. The ACT's new format has adjusted this timing somewhat, but students still frequently don't finish sections under standard timing. Extended time accommodations on the ACT tends to provide students with a larger score boost than an equivalent accommodation on the SAT. This doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the program's prep - it's just an attempt to game the system.
If the student has a documented history of needing accommodations - school evaluations, a 504 plan in place for years, a learning difference recognized by their teachers - this is a legitimate conversation. If they don't, the program is suggesting something with real downside. The accommodations process is more scrutinized than it was a decade ago, in part because of the 2019 Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, which exposed parents who had paid psychologists to produce fraudulent diagnoses for extended time on the SAT and ACT. Casual or recent diagnoses produced shortly before a test date are flagged. Borderline applications increasingly get rejected, and the families involved in Varsity Blues are a reminder that questionable claims can become problems of their own.
If a program suggests pursuing accommodations - or suggests the ACT and then accommodations - the right question is whether the student has a documented history of needing them at school. If they don't, the program is gaming the system to inflate its own results, not selling something the student needs.
08Does my student even need test prep?
Before any decision-making about which program to choose, there's a more basic question worth asking: does the student need test prep at all?
For some students, the answer is no. A student already scoring at or above the target score required for their schools of interest isn't gaining anything from another round of prep; they're just spending time and money to confirm a result they already have. A student who tests naturally well, reads quickly and analytically, and works comfortably with the math the test covers may also fall into this category. If the student's PSAT or first practice test puts them where they need to be, have them take the real test. If the results aren't what you expect, you can revisit the idea of prep, but if they are, that money would be better spent elsewhere.
For students who do need to prep, the next question is whether they need to pay for it. Khan Academy offers a free SAT prep program built in partnership with the College Board, with diagnostic questions, full-length practice tests, and adaptive practice based on results. The College Board's Bluebook app provides official digital SAT practice under the same conditions and scoring as the real exam. ACT.org publishes released previous ACTs as official practice material. Used prep books are widely available for a few dollars at thrift stores and libraries.
The catch is motivation. Most high school students aren't going to spend their Saturday mornings working through official practice tests on their own. Free resources are excellent, but they require the student to put in consistent hours without external structure, deadlines, or accountability. A student who can do that - sit down with a practice test, work through it carefully, review wrong answers, and come back next week - can get a lot from free prep alone. Most students aren't that student. That's not a moral failing; it's how teenagers work.
Part of the value of a structured program is the schedule, the deadlines, the instructor who notices when the student isn't doing the homework, and the feedback loop that turns missed questions into learned strategies. A student who would do nothing on their own may do a lot in a structured program. That's worth paying for, when the program is good.
But the order of operations matters. Figure out whether the student needs prep. Then figure out whether they can self-direct. After that, you can look into prep.
09A final thought
If there's a common thread to everything in this guide, it's that the test prep industry has gotten very good at building a marketing surface that doesn't match what's underneath the waves. None of this means good test prep doesn't exist. It does, and for many students it's the difference between an SAT or ACT score that opens doors and one that doesn't. The parents most prepared to make this decision well aren't the ones who've found the right answer in advance. Trust your college counselors, ask questions, listen closely, read the fine print, and remember that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.