Florida requires all students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 11 to demonstrate mastery of minimum performance standards using the Florida Student State Assessment Test (SSAT) forms for the appropriate grade level. The tests are administered in October and cover reading, writing, and mathematics. Current practices used to prepare students for the SSAT include giving students practice items for the skills to be tested. Students and teachers are given feedback on an item-by-item basis, but are seldom given summaries, item analyses, or class performance profiles. Organization of the practice items into a test format similar to that of the actual SSAT allows students and teachers to take advantage of all the statistics available through that approach. This article covers such an approach for diagnostic and prescriptive preparation for the SSAT as conducted at Lakeview Middle School in Sanford (Florida). The preparation test was administered to all eighth graders in September of 1987. Answer sheets were processed by the district Educational Data Processing department, and results were summarized and returned 3 weeks prior to the formal SSAT. This allowed teachers to cover the identified educational deficits. In general, the diagnostic/prescriptive approach was successful. Three tables, illustrating the percent of students mastering each skill, provide data for 274 eighth-graders on the preparation test and 285 eighth-graders on the SSAT in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics. (TJH)