Full disclosure: We’re part of The Princeton Review, and we have some strong opinions about just how wonderful are their courses and tutoring. But it’s easy for students (and the parents who foot the bill) to get paralyzed by the options available to them to prepare for the SAT or ACT. You have books, online courses, weekend seminars, long classes and private tutoring, to name a few. And the price tags range from free to more than the cost of many teens’ used cars. It amounts to a lot of pressure. No matter what your testing goals, time or budget, here’s some advice about making your test prep choice.

1. Beware of prep peer pressure. Like most things in high school, the fact that everybody else is doing something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should, too.

About 25 percent of our Collegewise students don’t do any test preparation, and it’s not because they’re all great test takers. A ‘B’ student who applies to colleges loaded with kids just like him will find that his average test scores are good enough. You’re not going to Berkeley, USC, NYU, Duke or Boston College without high test scores; but if you’ve found colleges you like and your scores are already higher than those of their admitted students, what’s the sense in doing test prep? Before you decide to prepare for the SAT or ACT, research the colleges that you’re considering and find out what the average score is for students they accept. Take your list to your counselor and ask for her opinion about how your current scores (PSAT, PLAN or a practice test) stack up. If you and your counselor decide you’ve found some appropriate colleges and you would benefit from higher test scores, do some test prep. But don’t do it just because everybody else is doing it.

There’s one important caveat to this piece of advice.  If you’re going to be pursuing merit scholarships at colleges, you should see whether your top choice schools use test scores in awarding this money.  Sometimes your scores are good enough for admissions, but not high enough to earn scholarship money so you want to ensure that you know both pieces of information.

2. You get out what you put in. This is one of those times when a cliché is actually true— no matter how reputable and expensive the test preparation, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. That’s true for any kind of self?improvement you pay for. You could hire the best personal trainer in town who worked all your friends into Olympic shape, but if you don’t do the workouts (and eliminate regular servings of your beloved French fries), you’re not going to get the desired results. Like fitness, good test scores can’t just be purchased. The effort has to be there.

3. Spend wisely. There are many low?cost preparation options, from shorter courses to books, that have all the same information taught in an expensive class. The biggest difference is if your parents buy 25 hours of private tutoring, you’ll be using those 25 hours. Books and shorter courses are far more lenient on the reluctant prepper. Some kids will study for standardized tests even when they aren’t forced to, but a lot won’t. If you do decide to take a class or work with a tutor, ask for recommendations from friends who’ve already prepared.

One of our counselors referred to his last year working in admissions at a highly?selective college as the “year of the blood drive essay”. That year, an unusually high number of applicants told the same tale of how one on?campus blood drive changed their lives and made them appreciate the importance of serving humanity. Writing such grandiose statements into your essays won’t help you stand out. The statements sound cliché. So here are the five most overused clichés we—and every admissions officer we’ve spoken with—see most often, and which you should avoid.

1. The aforementioned “blood drive essay” or “How community service taught me the importance of helping others” Colleges appreciate students who are concerned about their communities. But one blood drive does not a humanitarian make. A claim to have learned how important it is to help people, needs to be substantiated with evidence of a sincere, long?term commitment to actually helping people. Otherwise, your message loses some oomph. If you had an experience during your community service that really meant a lot to you, say so. And be honest. Otherwise, consider doing a good deed for admissions officers and avoid the community service cliché.

2. “Hard work always pays off,” and other life lessons learned while playing sports The problem with many sports essays is they explain what life is like for every athlete. You go to practice. You work hard. You compete. Then the student makes it worse by saying sports taught him the importance of hard work and commitment, which is almost certainly not something he would say to his friends. Be original. Tell your sports story that nobody else can tell. If you can’t find a story you own, just write about something else.

3. “How my trip to another country broadened my horizons” This essay essentially says, “France is very difference from the United States—the food, the language, the customs. But I learned to appreciate the differences and to adapt to the ways of the French.” Visiting a country and noticing that it is different is not a story that you own. The admissions office doesn’t want to read your travel journals. Instead, make yourself, not the country, the focus of the essay. One of my students who had never previously ventured onto any sort of dance floor wrote that his trip to Spain was the first time he’d ever danced in front of other people. That wasn’t an essay about how Spain was different—it was an essay about how he was different in Spain.

4. “How I overcame a life challenge [that wasn’t really all that challenging]” Essays can help admissions officers understand more about a student who has overcome legitimate hardship. But far too many other students misguidedly manufacture hardship in a college essay to try to gain sympathy or make excuses (e.g., for low grades). This approach won’t work. If you’ve endured a hardship and you want to talk about it, you should. Otherwise, it’s probably better to choose a different topic. Note: The pet eulogy falls into this category. Lovely if you want to write one. Just don’t include it as part of your college essay.

5. Anything that doesn’t really sound like you Your essays are supposed to give the readers a sense of your personality. So give your essays a sincerity test. Do they sound like you, or do they sound like you’re trying to impress someone? Don’t use words you looked up in the thesaurus. There really is no place for “plethora” in a college essay. Don’t quote Shakespeare or Plato or the Dali Lama unless that is really you. If your best friend reads your college essay and says it sounds just like you, that’s probably a good sign.

I’m all for families giving careful consideration to the cost of college and the expected return on the investment.  The cost of college has gone up, the student loan crisis is officially out of control, and I encourage every student to carefully consider how their time at whatever college they choose to attend will help them prepare for a meaningful and rewarding career.

Still, every time I see an article (and I’m seeing them a lot these days) about the reported best or worst majors for college students, I become progressively more annoyed.

First, most of those lists focus on only one part of the return—the money.  What about whether or not the graduates enjoyed what they learned?  What about whether those majors helped them identify a talent to pursue after graduation?  What if they’re happy in their chosen careers and with their lives?  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but to label a major as reportedly better or worse based only on the average salary for graduates is an awfully narrow view to take when deciding what to spend four years studying.

Second, very few successful people can draw a straight line backwards from their successful career today to their choice of college major.  Yes, if you want to be an engineer, you need to major in engineering.  But many people who begin college don’t yet know what they want to do when they leave.  For them, the college years should be all about learning, growing, and preparing for life after college.

We should talk about education.  We should talk about the price of college, student loan realities and whether or not the more expensive schools are actually worth those costs.  And we should talk about how your intended career should or should not influence where you go to college.  If you want to be a kindergarten teacher, it probably doesn’t make sense for you to take out $150,000 in student loans to attend an expensive private school and major in education   But that doesn’t mean that education is a worthless academic pursuit.

Think about why you want to go to college, what you want to learn, and how you think that might prepare you for life as a college graduate.  Pick schools that fit you and your budget.  Then have a remarkable college career wherever you go.

Don’t let a magazine pick your college major for you.