SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (3 page)

Remember that the College Board isn’t necessarily following the grammar rules that you learned in school, or even the rules that native speakers follow when they speak. Instead, the College Board h
as its own set of grammar rules. While those rules largely overlap with the current grammar of American English, there are some points where they differ sharply. Remember that your goal on the Writing section isn’t to make them sound good to you, but to figure out which answer choice the College Board will reward based on the rules and patterns it follows. For more on this, see the parts of this book that deal with the SAT Writing Multiple Choice questions.

Remember that it’s okay to use personal examples, and that you’re not penalized for using examples that are factually inaccurate. In other words, you can make up any kind of example you feel like, and tailor it to the exact needs of your argument. For more on this, please see the section of this book that deals with the SAT Essay.

The shortest answer to an Improving Sentences question will be the correct answer if it’s grammatically acceptable to the College Board. If you’ve found a question where the shortest answer choice is not correct, then it must contain a grammatical flaw, at least in the eyes of the College Board—remember that “SAT grammar” isn’t always the same as American English grammar. For more on the rules of “SAT grammar,” see the part of this book that covers the SAT Writing Multiple Choice section, and the Appendix.

“The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.”
- Marcus Aurelius

At some point, most of my tutoring clients ask me what I think is the highest possible score they can hope
for on the SAT. Sometimes they frame it in terms of their previous scores—“If I already have a 1560, can I possibly bring that up to a 2100?”

The answer to this question is simple on the surface, but there are actually many other issues surrounding this question that you want to make sure you consider.

But let’s start with the simple stuff first.

If you
can read American English pretty well, and if you know the basic principles of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, then there’s no reason why you can’t
eventually
make a 2400, or any other score you want, because every question on the SAT relies on your ability to read and understand American English and/or to use basic math principles.

Please read that carefully, especially the word “eventually.” I’m absolutely not saying that a person whose highest score so far is a 1400 can just snap her fingers and make a 2400 overnight. What I’m saying is that the SAT is a test of basic skills, and if we have those basic skills then there’s no reason, in theory, why we shouldn’t be able to answer every question correctly.

Of course, raising an SAT score significantly is going to take some effort, in just about every case. Approaching the SAT in the right way isn’t necessarily
difficult
, but it is definitely
different
from the way you would approach tests in high school or college. If you want to raise your score a lot, then you’ll really have to try to and think like the test—which, again, is not a difficult thing to do, but will take some conscious effort on your part.

(By the way, if you don’t read American English very well, check out the section of this Black Book on advice for non-native speakers of American English. And if you don’t know the basic concepts of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, then review the Math Toolbox, and/or consider getting a math tutor.)

We
should think of the SAT as a test that asks us to do basically the same things over and over again.

And over again.

And over again, again.

For this reason, once you have a handle on the concepts spelled out in this book, getting better at the SAT isn’t a matter of
learning
anything further—it’s a matter of
improving your accuracy
in the application of principles you already know.

So
it’s a bit like improving your free-throws in basketball, or practicing for a piano recital, or even getting better at a video game. It’s more an exercise in improving your technical execution, and less an exercise in broadening your intellect.

(Of course, this metaphor doesn’t hold up completely. There are some parts of the SAT—most notably the Math section and the Sentence Completion questions—in which you’ll have to think a bit creatively. But the way we attack the test should always rely on the basic concepts and strategies described in this book. The simple fact remains that the difference between a 600 and an 800 on a given section always comes down to strategy, execution, and accuracy, and not to
knowledge or intelligence.)

The most popular way to set an SAT goal is usually to target a particular score. That can work fine, of course, but it’s not the way I like to do it.

Instead, I recommend that you target particular levels of accuracy in particular skillsets, and then let the scores rise on their own as a consequence of your improved abilities.

In other words, rather than say, “I want to try to get a 600 in Critical Reading on my next practice test,” say something like, “I want to go an entire section without missing a single question in which I know the meanings of all the words.” Then try to achieve that standard of execution (which, by the way, would lead to a score much higher than 600 for most test-takers). Or, in the Math section, set a goal like “I want to go an entire practice test without making a ‘careless’ mental error,” or “I want to make sure I understand at least one wrong answer choice with each question that I answer,” and so on.

If you set these kinds of task-based goals, rather than score-based goals, your improvement will generally be more meaningful and lasting, and it will come more quickly and easily.

Remember when I said that there were some complicating issues surrounding the idea of improving your score? A lot of that stuff has to do with the question of whether a higher score is even likely to help you significantly in your admissions campaign. (After all, we should never lose sight of the fact that the only reason
to care about the SAT is that it can help improve your chances at your target schools.)

I made you a video presentation to help explain some of the factors involved in your SAT goal-setting. You can fin
d it on the fan page for my company, Testing Is Easy:
http://bit.ly/college-planning
.

“
Under duress, we do not rise to our expectations—we fall to the level of our training.”
- Bruce Lee

After questions about the structure of the test itself, the
most common question I get has to do with the right way to “study” for the SAT. People want to know what order they should tackle the different parts of the test in, what kind of schedule they should follow, whether they should take a practice test on the last day before the real test—all kinds of stuff.

The short answer to all of these questions is that there really is no single best way to tackle the material in this book, because no two students will have the same exact needs when it comes to prepping. Different people will have different strengths and weaknesses, different schedules, different target scores, different starting points, different attention spans, and so on. So I’m not going to tell you exactly
how to manage your preparation schedule. Instead, I’m going to give you guidelines to follow and things to make sure you consider, and then it’s going to be up to you to figure out how you piece those things together in a way that works best for you.

So we’ll
handle it in this order:

o
general concepts to govern your preparation

o
guidelines for the order in which you tackle different parts of the test

o
ideas for drills and exercises

o
general notes on scheduling

Let’s get started.

Most people measure their progress
by the scores they make on practice tests, but I don’t advise that, at least not in the beginning. I’d rather see you measure your progress in terms of your overall understanding of the test. This is a subjective measurement, to be sure, but it’s actually a lot more reliable than practice test results, because those can be heavily influenced by luck and other external factors.

So your first goal is to get a general grasp of the mechanics of each part of the test. You do this by reading the relevant portion of this
Black Book, following along with some or all of the sample solutions, and checking out the free videos at
www.SATprepVideos.com
until you feel like you can understand the reasoning behind most or all of the test.

After you have a grasp of the foundation of the test, your next goal is to understand the mistakes you make when you look at questions on your own (whether we’re talking about practice tests, practice sections, or just individual test items—more on that below). In other words, at this stage your main goal isn’t really to keep from making mistakes; it’s simply to
understand
your mistakes
after you make them
. You want to figure out what the mistake was, of course, but you also want to figure out why it happened, and what you should have noticed in the question that would have kept you from making the mistake in the first place, or would have allowed you to catch it and correct it after it was made. This is why I spend so much time in this Black Book talking about each question as a system of concepts and relationships, and explaining the ways that right answers differ from wrong answers, and the relationships that typically exist among them. Those are the things you want to get in the habit of noticing when you look at an SAT question, because if those things seem to be in order then you’ve probably understood the question correctly.

Once you have a solid grasp of the reasons you’re making mistakes and the things you could do to avoid them, your next goal is to actually eliminate those mistakes, either by avoiding them in the first place or by noticing them after they happen and then correcting them. This is where it really helps to be aware of the test’s rules and patterns, particularly when it comes to answer choices. At this stage, your goal is to make sure that you never miss a question as a result of a mistake on your part—you want to get to a point where the only reason you ever miss a question is that it might involve a word, grammar principle, or math concept that you were unfamiliar with, and that you can’t work around. In other words, your goal is to eliminate so-called “careless mistakes.”

When you have essentially eliminated careless mistakes, you’ll probably be at a point where your scores on practice tests are more than satisfactory. If not, you need to think carefully about what’s causing you to miss the remaining questions, and how to fix those issues. But be careful here—too many people jump to the incorrect conclusion that a weakness in vocabulary is the reason they miss a reading question, or that an unknown math formula is the reason they miss a math question. Remember the lessons of this book: the SAT really isn’t an advanced test when it comes to subject matter. Of course, there are definitely questions in which vocabulary plays a very large part, and it can sometimes be difficult or impossible to work around an unknown word, but there are many, many more questions in which vocabulary only seems to be an issue, and you could actually find a work-around if you thought about it. Similarly, there are many SAT Math questions that seem specialized and advanced to most students, but none of them actually are.

You may also have to think about timing issues at this stage in your progression, though most people who get to
a point where they’ve eliminated “careless errors” find that timing is no longer a concern. If timing is still an issue, review the portion of this Black Book on time management, and remember that it isn’t a matter of doing a lot of work very quickly—it’s a matter of streamlining and reducing the amount of work that goes into answering each question in the first place.

I pretty much always recommend that students start with the Critical Reading section, because it’s typically the part of the test where it’s easiest to start noticing how the SAT uses rules and patterns to make questions predictable and objective even when they might seem not to be. It’s also a good introduction to the extreme importance of reading carefully and paying attention to details.

There are only two reasons I might recommend not starting with the Critical Reading section, really. One would be if you already had a perfect 800 on that section. The other reason would be if you really wanted to work on your Math score AND just didn’t have enough time before your test date to start with Critical Reading. In all other situations, though, I’d start with the Critical Reading, even if that isn’t the part of the test that bothers you most.
It’s the foundation for the rest of the test.

Once you feel like the Critical Reading section is s
tarting to make sense, I would turn my attention to the Math section. As I will mention many times in this book, the Math section is all about basic concepts being combined and presented in strange ways, and our goal is to learn how to look at a Math question that seems impossible at first and figure out which basic concepts are involved, and then use them to answer the question. Because there’s more variation in the surface appearance of Math questions than there is in the appearance of the questions from other sections, learning how to think about them properly often takes more time than it might take for other question types. So be aware of that when you’re planning your approach to the test.

I would advise most test-takers to focus on improving the Writing Multiple Choice questions and the SAT Essay last (in either order). Of course, this assumes that your target schools will
even care about those scores. If they don’t, then there’s probably no point in devoting your energy to them. You can find out if your target schools consider the Writing score by looking at their websites or contacting their admissions departments and asking directly.

Most people get ready for the SAT or PSAT the same way they would get ready for a school test: they try to memorize stuff (vocabulary, formulas, essay examples, whatever), and then they do a lot of practice questions. After you’ve read the sections of this book that deal with the way SAT questions work, you’ll understand why the memorization/repetition approach won’t help you. The SAT isn’t a test of advanced knowledge, so memorizing obscure definitions and math formulas won’t do much. And it doesn’t repeat test items exactly, so taking tons of practice tests with the idea that you’ll see the exact same questions on test day is also a bad idea.

(
This, by the way, is why you probably know so many people who work so hard on the SAT or PSAT and have so little to show for it. They’re getting ready for the test as though it were a final exam in a Geometry class, and that’s not what it is.)

Of course, that raises an important question: if you’re not supposed to get ready for the SAT by memorizing stuff and doing a million practice questions, then what are you supposed to do instead?

You’re supposed to try to
understand
the test instead. When you understand how the SAT works—really, truly understand it—you’ll find that it’s a very basic test, and that you really don’t need to spend a hundred hours getting ready for it. (If you’re going for a perfect 2400, you may need to spend a bit more time than the average person, but we’ll talk about that later).

You come to understand the SAT by thinking about how the test is designed and why it’s designed that way, so that you can eventually see it the same way the College Board sees it. And you get to that point by thinking about the things that we talk about in this book, and by making a conscious and intentional effort to apply them to a sufficient sample of real test questions.

This process may incidentally involve a little memorization—you’ll want to remember what kinds of patterns and things to look for, for example. And it will also involve a certain amount of practice as you learn to apply these ideas against real test questions. But our ultimate goal is to see the SAT as a coherent, predictable system of rules and patterns that we understand, instead of having to say, “I’ve memorized thousands of words and done 30 practice tests, but my score just isn’t improving.”

Ultimately, you want to realize that the SAT tests the same underlying principles according to the same rules and patterns on every test, but that each individual SAT question will appear unique to people who don’t know how the test works. And you want to be able to identify the ways that an individual question follows those rules and patterns, so that you can “decode” each question and mark the answer that the College Board will reward.

Now let’s talk about some different options for getting to that point. Here are three of my favorite exercises. I’ve given them ridiculous names to help them stick in your head, and to emphasize that they’re different from just mindlessly repeating practice questions over and over again.

The Semi-Structured Stare-And-Ponder is a great way to begin to appreciate how the SAT is actually designed. You start out by learning the general idea of how a certain question type works by reading the relevant portions of this Black Book and looking at a good number of the sample solutions in here. Then you find a question of the same general type (Passage-Based Reading, Improving Sentences, whatever) in the Blue Book or some other College Board source.

And then you stare at the question.

And you ponder it.

You try to figure out how that question is doing the kinds of things that I talk about in this book. You think carefully about the wording, the answer choices, all that stuff. Ultimately, your goal is to understand the College Board’s motivation for writing the question in that way—why the right answer is right, why the wrong answers are wrong, and why the College Board thinks the wrong answers would be appealing to different types of test-takers who might make different types of mistakes.

When you feel you’ve stared at a particular question and pondered it long enough, you move on to another one, and stare at it (and ponder it, too). You look for the same types of design elements and relationships, with the same ultimate goal of seeing the question through the College Board’s eyes, and being able to explain every aspect of the question’s design.

Then you move on to the next question. Or you eat a sandwich, or go for a walk or something—when staring and pondering in a semi-structured way gets boring, you stop. You come back to it later, when you’re interested to see how much more of the SAT you can figure out. Ideally, the process is relaxed, with no real consideration of time. You’re just letting the ideas rattle around in your head, and letting your brain get used to looking for them in real SAT questions. You don’t get frustrated if you can’t see how something works. You’re just getting used to a new way of looking at test questions in a low-pressure setting.

Of course, when you actually take the test, you won’t want to approach it in this way. That goes without saying. But that shouldn’t stop you from pondering all the different aspects of the test in this kind of relaxed way as a part of your preparation, because the more you do this kind of thing, the more quickly you’ll be able to analyze and diagnose real test questions in the future. Let things percolate a bit and you may be surprised what you start to notice in the future.

The word “postie” here is short for the phrase “post mortem,” which in this case refers to the idea of analyzing a test or a practice session after the fact. I included the word “postie” in the name of this exercise because I really, really want to emphasize that if you don’t make a serious analysis of your practice work after you finish it, then you’re really wasting the time you spend practicing.