SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (7 page)

“Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”
- Peter Drucker

Most test-takers have some idea of a target score that will make them competitive for their target schools, or for certain scholarship programs, and those target scores are usually somewhere in the range of 1500 to 2250, depending on the student’s goals and situation (of course, there are some people whose target scores might be higher or lower, as well).

Most people try to hit their target scores by improving in the areas where they’re weakest, and that’s certainly understandable. But I would recommend that you also consider working to improve the areas where you’re
strongest
first, for 3 reasons:

o
People usually feel more comfortable working on their strong areas, so there’s less stress.

o
The mistakes you’re making in your strong areas are more likely to be things related to “careless errors,” or things you can correct with minimal effort.

o
The closer you are to the top of the scoring scale, the bigger the impact of each new question that you answer correctly. In other words, if you’re scoring around a 710 in the Math section, then answering one or two more questions correctly might increase your math score by 30 points or more. But if you’re scoring around a 520, then answering another one or two questions correctly might only raise your score 10 points. This is the result of the norming process that the College Board uses to “curve” the test scores.

So if you find yourself short of your goal score, it might be a good idea to focus first on making your strong areas even stronger, rather than struggling to bring your weak areas up.

Some test-takers don’t just need to reach a certain overall score; sometimes schools are looking for scores on individual sections to meet particular cutoffs. But you can still use the strategy of improving on your strong areas even in these situations, because every section has different question types, and most students are naturally more inclined to some questions types than to others. I would recommend focusing on your preferred question types until you’re basically perfect at answering them before going on to question types that you don’t like as much.

As an example, if you need to raise your Reading score by 50 points, you could choose to start by focusing either on Sentence Completion questions or on Passage-Based Reading questions. If you dislike the Sentence Completion questions, then it’s probably going to be more productive for you to focus on perfecting the Passage questions. Even if you’re missing an average of 7 Sentence Completion questions on each practice test but only 4 Passage questions, it’s probably easier to address the 4 Passage questions before turning to the Sentence ones, because it’s easier to make progress on the parts of the section you enjoy more. This could reduce (or even eliminate) the need to make progress on other parts of the section. If you need to improve your Math score, on the other hand, then you should decide whether it’s easier for you to improve on the multiple-choice questions or the Student-Produced Response questions. If you need to raise your Writing score, then you should decide whether to focus on the Essay, or on a type of multiple-choice question. And so on.

“. . .
 
to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
- Bertrand Russell

To judge from my experience with new clients, time management is an issue that seems to affect the majority of untrained test-takers. There are a lot of factors that contribute to problems with time management, such as reading speed and anxiety, but the biggest and most common factor is a serious misunderstanding of the test in the first place.

Let me explain what I mean.

If you were to answer every single SAT question in the fastest possible way, even with average reading speed, you’d spend no more than 30 seconds on any given question. (If that sounds crazy, it will make a lot more sense after you’ve read the parts of this Black Book that deal with specific question types.) Even if we only answered
half
the questions on a section in less than 30 seconds each, we’d still have a lot more time than most test-takers end up with.

So the biggest problem facing most test-takers with time-management issues is that they’re doing the questions very inefficiently. There’s a reason that people who score in the 99th percentile often have tons of extra time on every section, and the reason is NOT that those high-scorers are super-geniuses who process everything ten times faster than the rest of us. The reason is that those people are doing less work to answer each question
because they know how to handle each question with minimal effort.

For example, they know that Passage-Based Reading questions never actually require us to read 80 lines of text to answer a single question. On Math questions, they know that applying formulas is usually unnecessary and slow. They know which types of phrases to avoid on the Writing section, and which ones to pick. And so on.

So if you feel like you’re doing a ton of work on most of the SAT questions you run into and running out of time as a result, then the first thing you should do is take a look at the processes you’re using to answer your questions and figure out how you can streamline it using the ideas in this book.

Of course, other factors can also affect time management. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Some test-takers are naturally slower at reading than others, but most people find they read fast enough for the SAT if they’re approaching questions in the most efficient way. As a general rule of thumb, if you don’t have problems with the speed of your reading in your classes in school, then you probably read fast enough to do very well on the SAT if you’re using the right strategies.

For what it’s worth, most of us can make some kind of improvement on our reading speed just by making a conscious effort to read faster. I know that might sound simplistic, but it’s true. If you constantly remind yourself to read faster, you’ll find yourself reading faster. It’s a bit like walking—most of us could walk noticeably faster if we tried.

If you have a serious issue with reading speed that can be diagnosed by a professional, then it might be a good idea to try to petition the College Board for extra time when you take the test.

A lot of people get nervous at the thought of taking the SAT, and some people freeze up when they’re nervous. If this kind of thing is affecting your time management, there are two different ways to attack it. First, you can work on consciously channeling your nervousness into productive energy. Let it make you read more carefully, or drive you to consider a new angle on a question that’s troubling you. Second, you can recognize that the root of your nervousness is probably a feeling of frustration or even powerlessness when it comes to the SAT—and the best way to beat that feeling is by learning how the test works so you can see that it’s actually not scary at all. It’s just weird, and detail-oriented.

Most people who run out of time on the SAT try to answer all the questions in a section in order. This is a huge mistake, since some questions will be easier for you than others, and since every question in a section counts for the same number of raw points as any other question in that section.

When you run into a question you can’t answer quickly, you should skip it and move on to other questions that are easier for you. You can always come back to the harder questions later. There’s no sense in staring at question 6 for a full three minutes when you haven’t even looked at question 7; in those three minutes, you might have been able to answer 7, 8, and 9 correctly.

Personally, when I look at a new question I give myself about 10 seconds to figure out how to approach it. If I can’t work out an approach in that time, I move on to the next question without thinking twice. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying that I
solve
every question in less than 10 seconds; I’m saying that I give myself about 10 seconds to see if I can come up with an approach that will
eventually
solve it.)

If I’ve looked at a question for a full 10 seconds and I still have no idea how to attack it, then I’ve probably misunderstood some part of it, and I should move on to another question that makes sense to me. I can always come back to the harder question after I’ve gone through the section and answered everything I can figure out.

While every student is unique, most time-management issues come down to some combination of the ideas I’ve mentioned in this brief section. But I really want to stress that the most widespread cause of difficulty for most students is that they’re addressing the test in the wrong way, and doing far too much work to answer each question. The best thing you can do to improve your time management is to work on your
efficiency
, not your processing
speed
. If you focus on trying to understand and apply the ideas in this book, you’ll probably find that your time management issues largely disappear on their own.

“There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”
- Jean Racine

Before we get into all the strategies and advice for specific areas of the test, I want to start out by sharing something very important with you: the “secret” of the SAT.

Here it is: The SAT frustrates so many test-takers because it asks about very basic things in very strange (but repetitive) ways. The simple reason so many people struggle with the test is that they’re looking at it in completely the wrong way.

Let’s examine why this is.

Imagine that you’re the College Board, which is the company that makes and administers the SAT. Colleges use your test scores to help them figure out which applicants to admit, and they only trust your test because it consistently provides them with reliable measurements. So how do you go about making a test that can be given to millions of students a year and still compare them all in a meaningful way, despite the wide variations in their backgrounds and abilities?

You can’t just make a super-difficult test, because that won’t really provide useful information to the colleges who rely on you. For example, you can’t just focus the math test on advanced ideas from calculus and statistics, because most of the test-takers have never taken those subjects—and, even if they had, the results from your test wouldn’t really tell the colleges anything they couldn’t already learn from students’ transcripts. And you can’t make a test that relies on arbitrary interpretation or argumentation, because then the test results wouldn’t correlate to anything meaningful on a large scale, and colleges wouldn’t be able to rely on the data from your test.

So, if you’re the College Board, you need to design the SAT so that it avoids testing advanced concepts and so that it avoids arbitrary interpretation. Otherwise, your test will be useless for colleges, because colleges want to use a test that measures something meaningful about every applicant in the same way every time.

In other words, you have to come up with an objective test of basic ideas.

But then you have another problem: if you give a traditional objective test of basic ideas to millions of college-bound, motivated students, a lot of them are going to do really well on it—and then your results will be useless for a different reason, because there will be so many high scores that colleges won’t be able to use the results in their admissions decisions.

So how do you solve this problem?

The College Board solves this problem by combining basic ideas in weird, but repetitive, ways. The result is that doing well on the SAT involves the ability to look at a new test question and then figure out how it follows the rules that all SAT questions of that type must follow. And that’s what this book will teach you to do.

This is why there are so many people who do so well in advanced classes in high school but have a relatively hard time with the SAT: the SAT tests simpler stuff in a stranger way. It basically requires a totally different skill-set from high school or college. (You may be wondering why some students do well on both the SAT and school. These people are just good at both skill-sets. It’s a bit like being good at both football and wrestling: there’s enough of an overlap that some people are naturally good at both, but enough of a difference that many people struggle with one or the other. Or both.)

Now that you know the SAT’s big secret, the rest of this book—and the SAT itself—will probably make a lot more sense to you. This book is basically a road map to all the weird things the SAT does. It will teach you how to navigate the SAT’s bizarre design, and how to exploit the many weaknesses inherent in that design.

“Education . . . has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
- G. M. Trevelyan

Students often tell me that Passage-Based Reading questions are their least favorite questions on the SAT. A lot of people think these questions are too subjective to be part of a standardized test—they think that questions about an author’s intentions can be answered in more than one way, so it’s unfair to write multiple-choice tests about them.

Fortunately, this isn’t the case
. The answer to an SAT Passage-Based Reading question is every bit as clear and definite as the answer to an SAT Math question. In this section, I’ll show you how natural test-takers identify those answers.

But first, I want to say that again, because it’s really impor
tant. I’ll put it in caps, too. And center it, even:

THE ANSWER TO A READING QUESTION IS A
LWAYS AS CLEAR AND DEFINITE AND
OBJECTIVELY PREDICTABLE AS THE ANSWER TO A MATH QUESTION.

If the reading questions required arbitrary interpretation, the SAT and PSAT would produce meaningless results,
because there would be no objective basis for rewarding one answer choice and punishing the others. If the results from the SAT were meaningless, then colleges would stop using them. (For more on the role of standardized tests in the admissions process and the implications of that role for us test-takers, check out the article on the purpose of standardized testing at my blog,
www.TestingIsEasy.com
.)

You see, the main problem with SAT reading is that it requires you to look at a passage in a way that’s totally different from the approach you would use in an English class. In the typical English class, you’re rewarded for coming up with as many interpretations of a passage as you possibly can; every single interpretation that doesn’t directly contradict the reading is welcomed with open arms.

But that approach clearly won’t
work for a multiple-choice question with only one correct answer. So on the SAT, you have to read everything as literally as you possibly can, without adding any of your own interpretation at all. (We’ll get into this in a lot more detail below.)

After taking
my class, most of my students change their minds about Passage-Based Reading questions. Actually, they often end up thinking that the Passage-Based Reading questions are the easiest ones on the entire test, and I tend to agree with them.