SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (6 page)

“You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.”
- Winston Churchill

As you go through the test-taking strategies in this Black Book, one thing will become very clear to you: at every turn, the SAT is obsessed with details in a way that high school and college courses typically are not.

The correct answer to an SAT Critical Reading question might rely on the subtle difference between the words “unique” and “rare.” A 10-word answer choice in an SAT Writing question might be right or wrong because of a single comma. An SAT Math question involving algebra and fractions might have the reciprocal and the complement of the correct answer as two of the incorrect answers. And so on.

This means that doing extremely well on the SAT isn’t just a question of knowing the proper strategies (though that’s a big part of it, of course!). It’s also a question of being almost fanatically obsessed with the tiniest details. In fact, I would say that in most cases the biggest difference between someone who scores a 650 on a section of the SAT and someone who scores an 800 is not that the 800-scorer is any smarter or any more knowledgeable, but that she is much more diligent about paying attention to details.

This strong orientation to detail is exactly the opposite of what most teachers in most high schools reward in their classes. Generally speaking, teachers are more interested in things like participation, an ability to defend your position, and a willingness to think of the big picture, especially in humanities classes. On the SAT, those things rarely come in handy. What matters on the SAT is your ability to execute relatively simple strategies over and over again on a variety of questions without missing small details that would normally go overlooked in a classroom discussion.

For this reason, the attitude that most test-takers typically have towards so-called “careless errors”—which is that they don’t matter as long as you basically understand what the question was about—is very destructive and needs to be corrected.

On the SAT, “careless errors” must be taken very seriously. In fact, I would even say that most test-takers could improve their scores by at least 50 to 100 points per section—usually more—if they would just eliminate these kinds of errors completely. But most people don’t take these small mistakes seriously, and they don’t know a reliable way to separate right answers from wrong answers anyway. So they usually end up focusing more on stuff they can memorize, which is of very little value on the test.

As always, when we try to figure out why the SAT is the way it is, we have to remember why it exists in the first place. The only reason for the SAT’s existence is that colleges and universities find the data from the test to be useful when they’re evaluating applicants. The SAT data is useful because it’s consistent, reliable, and capable of making exacting distinctions among millions of test-takers every year. This is only possible because the test questions are written according to specific rules and patterns that don’t change, and because the test uses the multiple-choice format, which limits student responses and allows the grading to be objective (at least in the sense that every answer to a multiple-choice question is graded without the inherent subjectivity of an essay-grading process).

Here’s the kicker: the multiple-choice format itself, and the SAT’s rules and patterns specifically, would be useless for the purpose of making fine, meaningful distinctions among millions of test-takers every year unless they were very, very, detailed. In other words, the College Board has to be obsessed with details because otherwise its data would be useless.

So the questions on the SAT are extremely nit-picky.

In the parts of this book that deal with specific strategies for the different types of SAT questions, you’ll notice that I always try to talk about each question as a system of ideas. Instead of just explaining how the right answer fits with the prompt, I also talk about the patterns we can see in the wrong answers, and about how the wrong answers relate to the right answer. I do this for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is that being aware of the interplay of the parts of a given question is one of the best ways to check that your answer makes sense within a larger context, which gives us a much higher level of confidence in our decisions and a greater degree of certainty that we haven’t made a mistake.

On the other hand, most of the time when people make a mistake on the test, it’s because they haven’t considered the question in its entirety. Instead, they catch a couple of phrases or concepts, make an unwarranted leap or a faulty calculation, see an answer choice that reflects their mistake, and move on without re-considering their decisions.

So please do us both a favor and take a lesson from the way I think carefully about parts of each question that most people might consider irrelevant. I do that for a reason: it’s silly to give points away for careless mistakes on such an important test.

“One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or No.”
- Thomas Carlyle

I
’ve spent more hours than I can count helping my students raise their SAT scores, and all of that time has made me realize that there is a serious problem blocking most SAT-takers from realizing their full potential.

It’s not a problem that has to do with strategy, memorization, timing, focus, or anything like that
. This problem is at the root of the very nature of the SAT itself. And if you don’t come to terms with it, your score can only be mediocre at best.

The problem is that the SAT only gives you one correct answer
choice for each question, and this correct answer choice is totally, definitively, incontrovertibly the correct answer—there are no arguments to be made against it (once we know the test’s rules).

But a
lot of students never realize this. In this book, I talk a lot about all the specific ways that the SAT is different from tests you take in high school. But I really want to pound this one difference into your head, because it will affect every single thing you do as you prepare for the test.

So
I’m saying it again—read closely:

SAT Multiple-Choice questions always have ONE, and only ONE, correct answer
. Furthermore, the issue of which answer choice is the correct one is absolutely beyond disagreement. As surely as 2 and 2 make 4, and not 5 or 3, every single SAT question can only be correctly answered in one way.

Why is this such a big deal, you ask?

Imagine this common high school situation, which you’ve probably been through yourself
. Your history teacher is going over the answers to a multiple-choice test with you. It’s a test he wrote himself, and he wrote it just for your class. And as he’s going through the test, he tells you that the answer to number 9 is choice (D). Half the class groans—they all marked (B). One of the students who marked (B) raises her hand and makes a convincing argument as to why she should get credit for marking (B). She explains that if you read the question a certain way, (B) and (D) are equally good answers. The teacher, who wants to be open-minded and fair, reconsiders the question, and decides that it’s poorly written. In light of the student’s argument, he can understand why (B) might have looked like the right answer. And, because he’s fair, he announces that he’ll give equal credit for both (B) and (D).

That sort of thing happens every day in high schools all across the country
. It’s the natural result of a system in which teachers have to write their own classes’ exams, and don’t have enough time to proof-read them or even test them out on sample classes in advance. Inevitably, some poorly written questions get past the teacher. The teacher corrects the problem later by giving credit as necessary, throwing questions out, or whatever.

What message does this send to students?  Unfortunately, students come to believe that the answers to
all
tests are open for discussion and debate, that
all
questions are written by stressed-out teachers who work with specific students in mind, that
any
question is potentially flawed and open to interpretation.

Then, when these students take the SAT, things get crazy
. They can never settle on anything, because they’ve been taught that the proper approach to a multiple-choice test is to look for any way at all to bend every answer until it’s correct. They mark wrong answers left and right—usually they manage to eliminate one or two choices, and then the rest all seem equally correct, so they take a stab at each question and move on to the next.

As we know from our discussion on guessing, most of these students are wrong way more often than they think, and they lose a lot of points.

And the thing of it is, they never even realize what’s holding them back.

If you’re going to do well on the SAT, you have to realize two things. First, you have to know that the SAT is a totally objective test, and that every single question has only one right answer. This is not like a test you take in high school. Those tests are written by one or two people, usually with very little review. The SAT, on the other hand, is written by teams of people. Before a question appears on the SAT, it’s been reviewed by experts and tested on real test-takers. SAT questions are basically bullet-proof. No matter how much it might seem otherwise, every question on the SAT has only one good answer. You can’t approach it like you approach a high school multiple-choice test, where anything goes and you’ll get a chance to argue your point later on.

Once you come to accept that, the second thing you have to realize is that you—specifically YOU, the person reading this right now—can find the answer to every SAT question if you learn what to look for
. You can. And with the right practice, you will.

So let’s wrap this whole thing up nice and simple:

1. The only way to do really well on the SAT is to mark the correct answer to most of the questions on the test.

2.
The only reliable way to mark the correct answer consistently is to be able to identify it consistently.

3.
Before you can identify the correct answer consistently, you have to know and believe that there will always be one correct answer for every question—if you’re open to the possibility that more than one answer will be correct, you won’t be strict about eliminating answers by using the rules and patterns of the test.

4.
Most students never realize this, and as a result they never maximize their performance. Instead, they treat the SAT like a regular high school test, which is a huge mistake for the reasons we just discussed.

Now that we’ve established this very important concept, we have to talk about something that comes up often in testing situations . . .

Even though you know there can only be one answer to every SAT question, there will be times on the test when you think more than one answer might be correct
. It happens to everybody. It happens to me, and it will happen to you. When it does happen, you must immediately recognize that you’ve done something wrong—you missed a key word in the question, you left off a minus sign, something like that.

There are two ways to fix this situation
. One way is to cut your losses and go on to the next question, planning to return to the difficult question later on, when your head has cleared. This is what I usually do.

The second way is to keep working on the difficult question
. Try and figure out what might be causing the confusion while the question is still fresh in your mind, and resolve the issue right then and there. I’m not such a big fan of this one because I tend to find that things are clearer to me when I return to a question after skipping it. But some people find that moving on without answering a question just means they have to familiarize themselves with it all over again when they come back, and they prefer to stay focused on a particular question until they either find the right answer or decide to give up on it for good.

To see which type of person you are, just do what comes naturally, and experiment a little bit with both approaches.

The main thing to remember, for every question, is that there is only one correct answer
. If we read a question and we think we see more than one possible answer to a question, we’re wrong. That’s it—no discussion.

To become successful on the SAT, you MUST realize that every multiple-choice question on the SAT has exactly one correct answer, and you must train yourself to find the correct answer every time
. This isn’t a regular high school test. Don’t treat it like one.

(I realize, of course, that every once in a while an SAT question is successfully protested
. This happens with such rarity that it’s best to proceed as though it never happened at all. The odds are overwhelmingly in favor every SAT question you ever see being totally objective and valid.)