How do you get a perfect SAT score?

In Shaan Patel's case, three years. He describes hundreds of hours in the library during his 10th, 11th and 12th grade years, finally scoring a perfect SAT in October of his senior year. He does not give an hour count beyond "hundreds." He does describe a much shorter intervention elsewhere in the conversation — a summer course of eighteen students that averaged a 376-point improvement — but that is a large gain, not a perfect score, and the two should not be confused.

Patel says no, and he uses himself as the example. He got straight A's in a Las Vegas public school system with a 37% dropout rate, but says he was not a very good standardized test taker and barely got above average on his first SAT. He notes that people assume perfect scorers are naturally gifted test takers, and that for him that was not the case.

Earlier than most students are told. Patel's counselor said not to worry about it until the spring of junior year, and he calls that horrible advice because it means missing the PSAT in October of junior year. His own preparation started in 10th grade. Nick adds that some counselors are responsible for 500 to 1,000 students, and Patel agrees his own school was one of the overloaded ones.

Both men say it does not. Patel says he will be the first to tell you he does not agree with the SAT or ACT as a test of intelligence, but argues that is the wrong premise — what the exam measures is how well you can prepare for an exam, which he thinks is genuinely useful. Nick says he is still not a fan of the tests themselves, and values them for a different reason: they are the only repeatable, difficulty-normed exams a student gets.

Patel's position is yes, and he wants to dispel the idea that test optional means the score does not matter. He cites a Compass Education Group study across roughly 30 to 40 universities showing a two to three times higher acceptance rate for students who submitted scores, and says 85% of students who win these scholarships have test scores. He qualifies it himself: not for every school, but almost every school. He also expects many of these schools to stop being test optional before long.

Patel's own perfect score produced half a million dollars in scholarship offers, and he took a quarter million of that to USC, where he attended debt-free with the financial aid office writing him a check each semester. Across ten years, he says Prep Expert has catalogued over a hundred million dollars in scholarships won by its students, and that figure only counts what families told them about. He has since set the company a goal of a billion dollars in student scholarships over the next decade.

Patel gives two reasons. The first is grade inflation — he puts the share of high school seniors graduating with an A average at around 47%, offered as an approximation. The second is AI: he describes an app he refers to as "cheat on everything," built to be undetectable, though he says he does not remember its exact name. His conclusion is that there is almost no other standardized measure of college readiness left. He names MIT as the first university to bring scores back, and points to the University of Texas and the University of Miami reinstating testing.

Patel thinks it does, and says this is the part people miss when they look down on test prep. He traces his own ability to focus as a business owner back to preparing for the SAT at 17 — time management, working on weaknesses, and sitting with something hard without opening Facebook or Instagram. He sums up the goal as going from test prep to life prep.