The SAT often seen as a grueling test is taken every year by almost two million high school students. The students are awarded scaled scores between 600 and 2400, and the overwhelming majority of colleges give that score significant consideration in the application process.
Why is the test so feared? For one thing, nobody likes to spend four hours on a Saturday in tense silence, filling in little bubbles on an answer sheet. For another, few people like the idea that those four hours can have such an impact on the lives of those high school studentsafter all, in some cases, where you go to college can shape a lot of your future.
Another reason the test is so feared is that it is misunderstood. Because the SAT uses math and reading skills, students generally prepare for it by studying math and reading. This is a big mistake.
It’s vital to understand that the test is just a tool created by the College Board that is useful to colleges. Good test prep will ignore all the common ideas about math, literature, writing, and reading, and instead focus on the things that the test does reliably, again and again.
Once you approach the test from this perspective, you’ll see that the standard approach to the test is no good at all. For example, a lot of students will study trigonometry, statistics, even calculus when preparing for the math portion of the SAT. However, a quick review of math sections from released tests shows that the College Board never uses any of these concepts. In fact, most of the math on the SAT comes from no later than middle school, and a lot of the concepts are actually covered in elementary school.
The problems are difficult not because they are so advanced, but because they combine simple concepts in unexpected ways. That, combined with the fact that almost all test-takers expect to find some extremely difficult problems on the test, accounts for the trouble high school students have with SAT math.
The SAT essay is also intimidating for many students. After all, they are normally given an hour or more to write an in-class essay, but on the SAT they only get 25 minuteson top of the fact that thy have to take a whole SAT right after and are already extremely stressed out.
But, again, the SAT essay is not at all like high school essays, just like SAT math is not at all like high school math. If we look at examples of high-scoring essays, we will see that the College Board regularly rewards essays which are highly formulaic and easily replicable. As long as you follow the five-paragraph format and write two full pagesand your essay makes sense at allyou’ll do well.
But what about the Reading Comprehension portion of the SAT? The conventional wisdom is that that part of the test is one of the most difficultafter all, how can you be expected to interpret what an author is saying? Isn’t the whole point of English class that there are many ways to interpret a given passage, and what an author says may mean more than one thing? Here we see that same problemdo not approach this test like a high school class; instead, take a look at actual copies of the test to see what they actually do.
If you do thisif you analyze real copies of the testyou’ll see that the Critical Reading portion requires no interpretation at all. In fact, the correct answer choice always directly restates the relevant portion of the passage. It uses different words, but it always says the exact same thing as the part of the passage that the question asks about.
The wrong answer choices still look so tempting because the College Board uses little bits of information that are from the passage, but always throws in some extra piece of information that wasn’t in the part of the passage relevant to the question. If you see that little bit of extra information that comes from nowhere, you’re looking at an incorrect answer. Remember: if even one word is wrong, the whole answer choice is wrong.
So don’t get caught up in the common SAT mistakes. It’s a much simpler test than most people think, and above all it is very, very repetitive. Always make sure you use real SAT practice questions from the College Board, because only those questions will follow the same patterns as the real SAT. Don’t get distracted by the all that bad advice out theremake sure any advice you take makes sense and holds up against real SATs. If you do that, and you develop a sense for the specific things that the SAT does again and again, you’ll get a great score.
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