Why is the SAT such a difficult test for so many people? Well, most people learn all kinds of bad information when they go to almost any source for SAT prep information. The SAT is so misunderstood that even teachers and guidance counselors who really mean well end up giving advice that just won’t work on test day – because they trust those big SAT prep companies too.
The classic piece of bad SAT advice is also probably the most widespread, and that is the advice about guessing on the SAT. This whole angle is based on the fact that the College Board tries to punish guessing with a wrong answer penalty. You lose a quarter of a raw point for each correct answerthat way, if you guess randomly on the test, you’ll lose four quarters of a raw point on your four wrong answers for every 1 raw point you gain on your correct answer. As a result, you’re score doesn’t get any better or worse as a result of your guessing.
Here’s where this guessing advice comes in “eliminate one or more wrong answers, and then guess.” That way, you get fewer wrong answers and more right answers and you end up ahead. It sounds great, but it doesn’t work. First of all, if you don’t understand the question well enough to get it right, you’re probably not in a position to eliminate any incorrect answers. Second, the whole idea behind the mathematical advantage you create in eliminating these answers depends on you picking randomly from the remaining answers no one does that. Instead, everyone eliminates a “wrong” answer or two, and then goes with the choice they liked in the first place.
Finally, great pains are taken to make the incorrect answer choices look just like the right answer to a person who doesn’t understand the question. So if you feel the need to guess, you are probably going to get tricked.
Another area where people get a lot of bad advice is the SAT essay. Most people will tell you to read up on literature or history for your examples, and to use a lot big words, varied sentences, insightful ideas, and so on. However, if you actually look at the essays in the Official SAT Study Guide that score high, you’ll see that the most important factor in your SAT essay score is the length and structure of your essay. Examples can be made up, words can be spelled wrong, grammar can be bad, but if you write a standard five-paragraph essay that’s two pages long, you’ll be in very good shape.
What about critical reading? So many students complain that they’ll never learn to analyze the passages on the SAT the right way. This is understandable, because in a typical high school English class students are taught to read and understand passages as though they could mean anything, and each person who reads the passage could come away with a different message. How can the College Board possibly make a test that would allow for all the possible different interpretations?
The answer is actually very simple. Critical reading on the SAT requires no interpretation at all. That’s right the correct answer always comes 100% directly from the passage itself, with no reading between the lines whatsoever. Think about it. The College Board can’t have thousands of kids coming to them after every test, saying that their answer choice is just as valid as the College Board’s, so there can be no room for interpretation. That way the College Board can always point to the relevant portion of the passage and show exactly which phrase make the correct answer correct.
Something else “everyone knows” about studying for the SAT that is dead wrong is that students should memorize a lot of vocabulary going in to the test. Then, they will hopefully be ready for the unusual words that appear on the test. In reality, an SAT usually contains between 5 and 20 unknown words, depending on your level of vocabulary. Even if you study a list 5,000 words, the odds are very bad that you’ll run into more than a couple of the words you studied for. That means you end up studying 5,000 words which takes hours and hours and hours to get two raw points. This a terrible return on your time, and if you spent a fraction of that effort learning words roots, prefixes, and suffixes, and then the rest of it tackling other parts of the test intelligently, you could raise your score by hundreds of points. So don’t memorize vocabulary for the SAT.
And the calculator? Test-takers are relieved to find out that they can bring any kind of calculator they want, and that they will receive a list of all the necessary formulas. On any typical math test this would mean an automatic high score but this is not the case on the SAT! SAT math is completely different from what you would normally see on a high school test. This is why having that graphing calculator and those formula sheets isn’t going to be of much help. The questions will be a lot more like brainteasers than like the kinds of problems you are used to seeing, and when you finally get down to the “math,” a lot of times you’re adding 2 to 7, or dividing 10 by 5, or something along those lines. So don’t think in terms of math for this section instead, think in terms of reading comprehension and creativity to come up with a solution.
The SAT is only a difficult test because most people rely on SAT prep that is just no good. Don’t get caught up in these common mistakes. The best way to approach the SAT test is to use simple, intuitive, reliable methods that take advantage of the test’s design and get right answers as quickly as possible. Good luck!
Tags: SAT prep best free high perfect score essay math critical reading comprehension guessing calculator test practice College Board | SAT prep best free high perfect score essay math critical reading comprehension guessing calculator test practice College Board
June 16th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Hi, there… i think that i MOST cases that SAT tutoring hurts the student more than it helps. Most of the tutors working for those “famous” companies really have no clue what they are talking about and therefore the students end up paying $100s to a limited score improvement.
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