Let me also add that almost every kid in my son's school that planned on going to college (which thankfully, was around 99.9% - I think ONE kid went into the military), took SAT classes. My son always did GREAT in math, but horribly in verbal. I paid a tutor $45 or so an hour to help him increase his scores. Which it did. Otherwise he ran a VERY high chance of not getting into a decent college (yeah, looking back, getting into a "decent" - read: Expensive college might not have been such a good plan.....
)
In GA, the state colleges have what's called a Freshman index. They take your SAT scores and your GPA for HS core courses and come up with a number. If you fall below that number, you don't even get your application looked at. IIRC, if you had a B average, you needed at least an 1100 on your SATs.
I took my SATs once - and was so hungover I could barely see the paper. And still got over 1300 on them, lol!