Wah-hoo-wah! My brother and I have the "good with tests" gene, but Anoreth didn't inherit it. She's going to have to put a major effort into test prep, if she wants to get scholarships.
Steubenville's average SAT is in the 1100's, so it's not a big hurdle, but to get financial aid she'll need major SAT scores and lots of community activities!
And for Oklahoma's meteorology programs as an out-of-state student, she'll need stellar ACT scores, and I don' know nothin' about ACTs. But we have a computer program for it!
There are gimmicks and shortcuts and patterns -- just like in any other business. My daughter said the most important thing she learned from the tutor was shortcuts that gave her extra time to think about the problems.
If you can find a test preparation book or sample tests that talk about shortcuts and "thinking about the problem the way the SAT preparers thought about it", that would be worth its weight in gold.
Jo is not a natural test-taker, but her high school concentrates heavily on preparing them for SATs and APs. When they go in to take it in the fall of their junior year, it's not exactly old hat but it's not screamingly new either. The school's been doing this for years, they did it when I was there back in the Late Pleistocene. I must have taken the darned things a dozen times. . . .