Attention all high school musicians! As you’re preparing for your upcoming SAT or ACT, you may experience an accelerando of your heartbeat when you think of what lies in store. But take a deep breath and let yourself rest for a second:

Now that you’ve composed yourselves, today we’re going to discuss the similarities between prepping for standardized tests like the SAT and ACT and learning to play an instrument. There are more than you might think, and many of the skills needed to ace these tests are those that you as a musician already possess!

1) Both Take Time to Master

Unless you’re a child prodigy/virtuoso, you don’t just become first chair overnight — it takes blood, sweat, and tears to build those calluses or that lung capacity. Even if you already know how to play an instrument, it’s important to master each new song you’ll be performing. You’ve got to identify and iron out tricky sections of melody or syncopated rhythm, whereas the easier sections may not require much practice or repetition.

Identify your strengths and weaknesses, then work consistently to fill in any gaps in your knowledge and refine your overall testing procedure. You’ll be playing that sweet, sweet, high-scoring melody in no time.

2) You Have to Practice Your Scales

In both music and standardized testing, you must draw from your foundational skills to perform at an advanced level. Whether you’re breaking a complicated math problem into bite-sized pieces or rehearsing a new piece of music for the first time, the basics come into play at every step.

Brush up on important concepts you’ve learned over the past years. Revisit the parts of speech for English/Writing, important math formulas, and how to use the process of elimination. When you’ve got your core skills down, you’ll start to see everything fall into place just like the notes on a scale.

3) Timing Is Key

Unfortunately, there’s no standardized test conductor to keep you on track for each passage or problem. It’s important to rely on that internal metronome and practice your time management skills in order to ensure that you’re neither rushing (which can lead to careless mistakes) nor moving too slowly to complete the test.

Find your personal rhythm that hits the sweet spot between speed and accuracy!

4) Both Require Mental Multitasking

When playing an instrument, you’re juggling many tasks at once (whether you realize it or not). You’re reading the music on the page, making sure you stay in tune and on beat, keeping your fingers in the right positions, controlling your bow or your embouchure — the list goes on. Similar mental gymnastics are required for standardized tests. You must balance skills, strategies, and time management, and be able to quickly shift mental gears when starting a new passage or test section. Basically, you’ll need to be a one-man band.

5) You’ll Need to “Sight Read”

As a former teenage cellist, I remember sight reading in high school orchestra competitions. While it’s a little scary to encounter a piece of music for the first time and perform it within minutes, the key to sight reading success comes from preparation. Those weeks/months/years of practice allow you to quickly assess a sheet of music, mentally address any tricky spots, and have a game plan to tackle the composition.

These skills translate directly to standardized tests. Although you’ll be seeing every passage and question for the first time, being fluent in the subject matter and patterns of the respective tests will allow you to quickly find the known within the unknown and efficiently sidestep all the traps and obstacles within the test sections.

Finally, just remember that it will all be alright in the end — because Every Good Boy (and girl) Does Fine.

For more SAT or ACT tips (and maybe even some more music puns as well), start your prep journey today by scheduling a call with one of our Student Success Advisors!

Happy prepping!