The average student takes the Scholarly Aptitude Test, SAT, their junior year. According to sat.collegeboard.org, students should start preparing for the SATs their junior year. College board is the company that administers the SATs to high school students so you would assume that the average person would begin studying when the college board recommends that they do. Personally, I began to study for the SATs the summer going into freshman year. I brought my SAT study book with me to my sleepaway camp and every day during quiet hour I would go through the book and do sections. I, personally, really enjoyed doing the math questions. They forced me to think logically and because there was no calculus and very little geometry, I was able to understand how to do all the problems. Because I enjoyed the math so much, that summer math was all I worked on. Throughout freshman year and sophomore summer, I continued to only work on the math problems because my parents did not force me to do some of the English sections. I did not start studying for the english sections of the SATs until junior year. Consequently, my SAT scores in english were horrible while my math score was near perfect.
I really wish that my parents had forced me to work on the English portions of the SATs starting at the same age that I started working on the math. While math comes naturally to me, English does not so I really could have used the extra time to work on it and perfect it.
While the SAT website says that they recommend that you start studying junior year, I don't believe that they actually believe that. I think that they don't want to say the real age in which you should start studying because it will make their test seem like a bigger deal than it is and the SAT already has many critiques from people who don't like the test and don't think it is an accurate measure of anything.