Your prep should include deep analysis of what types of questions you’re missing and then practice of those, particularly in your “lower” sections. I find the ACT Black Book to be very helpful in this kind of analysis. It’s a companion to the Red Book, so you need to have them both.

That said, I have a question for you: why do you want to raise your 34? If you’re thinking a 36 will make you more competitive for college admissions, as others have mentioned, it won’t. Even those top 20 name brand colleges don’t make a distinction between 34, 35 and 36. You will not be more of an automatic admit anywhere, simply because you have a 36 instead of a 34.

However, spending several months prepping unnecessarily can give the colleges a bad impression, particularly at those name brand schools. A student who only cares about his numbers—grades and test scores—and not his development as a whole person is not going to impress an Ivy-type school. As listed on Big Future.o...more

This is less a matter of “currently” than of type of college. Some colleges, particularly state flagship public universities like the University of Minnesota, don’t care at all about recommendation letters or essays. There’s no place in the application to include those things.
Other schools practice “holistic” admissions, which means they take all of these things into consideration. Lets look at what admissions officers gain from each of these application pieces:

• Transcript: Your grades in individual classes show your level of mastery of the material in those classes. Some students just do better in STEM classes than they do in English/history, or vice versa. Your cumulative GPA gives a feeling for how you do overall in the context of your school. Your transcript also shows the amount of rigor of your high school program. Have you taken the hardest classes available to you?
  
  
• Standardized test scores: Your SAT and ACT (and, in some cases, SAT subject tes

This interview was originally published on the Varsity Tutors website.

Varsity Tutors brings you insider tips and advice straight from nationally recognized admissions experts. Evelyn Alexander provides college admissions counseling services to a number of students and their families through Magellan College Counseling. She is an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University where she also served as a volunteer admissions recruiter for 15 years.

VT: How far ahead of time should a student begin working on his or her college application?

Evelyn: College applications are generally available the summer before the student’s senior year. The Common Application, for example, should open in August for the Class of 2015. While I would advise students to start their applications as early as possible, I would also encourage them to start exploring colleges long before the summer before senior year. I start working with students at the beginning of junior year, digging into possible majors and car...more