SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (60 page)

“
As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.”
- Benjamin Disraeli

If you’re taking the SAT, you’re going to get a lot of advice from other people about the best way to approach the test. It might surprise you to know that the vast majority of SAT information that most people have access to
is very, very incorrect. In my years of teaching people about the SAT, I’ve heard all sorts of myths, rumors, and lies about the test. Believe it or not, some of this misinformation comes from the College Board itself. Some of it comes from colleges, guidance counselors, and teachers. And still more comes from your friends and peers, and from popular web sites. Most—but not all—of the people who spread this misinformation are well-intentioned, but that doesn’t change the fact that bad information leads to lower test scores for you, and that’s bad.

With that in mind,
I’ve set out a few common SAT myths, misconceptions, and lies about the SAT. But first, I’ll tell you how to verify any SAT rumor you might hear in the future.

One of the strangest things about all the SAT myths and rumors that are out there is that it’s so easy to disprove them with a little research, but nobody takes the time. This is a huge mistake.

Make a commitment to yourself that you won’t accept a single new piece of SAT advice from anyone, no matter the source, without checking it out for yourself to see if it’s true
. (Yes, I’m including the Black Book in this statement—I’m sure it stands up to the test, unlike most of the other SAT advice you’ll encounter.)

How do you check it out?  If the advice is related to the SAT itself, you can usually check to see if it’s true by looking at some sample tests WRITTEN BY THE COLLEGE BOARD
. Of course, you can get these by consulting your copy of the Blue Book,
The Official SAT Study Guide
. Do NOT, under any circumstances, attempt to learn anything meaningful about the SAT by consulting a fake SAT test written by a test prep company or a web site. Many simply don’t know how to write them correctly, and those fake tests are totally useless.

(Note that
I’m not suggesting you take the College Board’s advice about the SAT—I’m suggesting that you try out all SAT advice against the actual sample SATs written by the College Board. The College Board is often wrong about its own test, as strange as that might sound. You can prove this by comparing the essay-scoring chart on page 105 of the Blue Book to the actual high- and low-scoring essays that also appear in that book. What the College Board says it rewards is not what actually appears in those essays.)

If the advice is related to the way a particular college or university uses the SAT in its admissions process, one way to check it is to call up the school yourself and get the real answer, or visit the school’s web site
. The admissions people typically won’t lie to you (notice I didn’t say they’ll NEVER lie to you). Unfortunately, admissions departments are not a perfect source of information. They may not always give you a straight answer about the role the SAT plays in their schools’ selection processes. Fortunately, though, schools don’t usually lie about their raw data—you can usually do an online search for a school’s median SAT scores and grade point averages for the previous year’s admissions pool, and that information is typically trustworthy.

So that’s it—the only two places you should look to when you want to confirm something about the SAT are (1)
the actual SAT, and (2) the schools you’re interested in attending. That’s it.

Notice who’s not on that list: guidance counselors, friends, students and alumni of your target schools, even your parents
. I’m not saying that all of these sources will be wrong all the time—I’m simply pointing out that these sources are never the final authority on the SAT. They might give you good information, but you’ll never know for sure if it’s good until you verify it with the actual test or with the schools you want to attend.

Now that we’ve established how to test all SAT-related advice, let’s talk about some of the bad information that’s out there.

We’ve already talked about how to use the College Board’s resources
. As you’ll see if you look at that section of the manual, much of the College Board’s advice about taking the SAT is based on what can only be called a set of illusions about what the SAT really is and what it really does. (What’s the rest of it based on?  I can’t tell, but most of it still isn’t any good.)  Let’s take a look.

This is the major gimmick of the College Board
. I explain what’s wrong with this idea in almost every section of this manual: basically, there’s no way that a standardized test can possibly measure a student’s ability to perform in college, because college is a non-standardized environment.

This particular idea—the idea that the SAT actually measures something besides how well you do on the SAT—is very dangerous to SAT-takers
. Since you’re an SAT-taker, I want you to know the truth.

I can’t tell you how many times a
well-meaning student has told me that he wants to turn the SAT into a real intellectual challenge. He’s going to take advanced calculus as a junior so he’ll know enough math; he’s going to read Cicero over the summer in the original Latin to learn how to craft a sentence; he’s going to volunteer twenty hours a week tutoring young children to sharpen his mind and purify his soul.

Now, all of those things are great
. They’ll make you a more intelligent person and a more attractive candidate in the admissions process. But they absolutely will NOT help you on the SAT, because the SAT is NOT an indication of how intelligent or well-rounded you are. The SAT is basically an indication of how well you can read one sheet of paper and fill in the right bubbles on another sheet of paper that gets fed into a machine.

So, then, what’s the best way to get ready for the SAT? 
By attacking it on a technical level. By pulling it apart and finding all the hidden rules and patterns that dictate how the questions are written. Establish processes that let you attack every single question like a machine. Master the small list of skills that are tested over and over again. In other words, do the stuff I teach you to do in this Black Book.

Give up the idea that the SAT tests college-related skills
. We’d all like it to do that, but that isn’t what it does. Read Cicero if you want to, but it won’t help on the SAT much more than watching Sesame Street every morning.

Fact:
The SAT is NOT a test of the skills you’ll need in college. The best way to approach the SAT is to attack it on a technical level and turn yourself into an SAT machine.

I
’ve already covered this one in some depth. In case you missed it, though, check out the section on guessing.

Fact:  Guessing on the SAT is NOT a good idea
.

On page 14 of
The Official SAT Study Guide
, this sentence appears:

Within a group of questions, . . . the easier ones come first and the questions become more difficult as you move along.

This is another one of those things everybody knows about the SAT that isn’t actually true. The College Board tells you it’s true. So do most major test-prep companies. But it isn’t—at least, it’s not always true, and it’s not true for every test-taker.

There are two ways I
can prove that you won’t necessarily find the tenth question in a group more difficult than the first question. First, turn to any answer key page in the
Official SAT Study Guide
(the Blue Book) to see the difficulty levels that the College Board has assigned to all the questions for that sample test. You’ll see that it’s absolutely not true that every question is at least as difficult as the one before it. So that’s one way to disprove this misconception.

But there’s another, much
better reason to ignore the idea of an order of difficulty on the SAT. The College Board assigns difficulty levels to questions based on how well other students do against the questions—for example, if most other people get a question right, the College Board decides it’s an easy question. That means that the difficulty ranking assigned by the College Board has nothing to do with the specific concepts in the question, and assumes that you’re exactly like the average test-taker, which you aren’t. Most test-takers don’t know how the test works, and don’t know how important it is to read everything carefully. But you do know that. Most won’t read this Black Book. But you will. So you’re better prepared for the test than the people who are used to determine the difficulty ranking, which means you’re likely to find that the difficulty ranking becomes increasingly meaningless to you.

So there are two major flaws with th
e idea of the difficulty ranking. First, the College Board doesn’t present questions in a strict rank order. Second, and, more importantly, the ranking system it uses is meaningless to a well-trained test-taker anyway.

Fact: Any given SAT question might be easy or hard for you, regardless of whether it appears early or late in a group of questions.

Believe it or not, colleges don’t know that much about the SAT, even though they are the driving force that keeps it a popular test
. After all, the latest changes to the SAT, which have made it more beatable than it ever was, were made largely at the request of the California University System—who thought they were turning the test into a better tool for measuring college-readiness, a tool that would be almost impossible to game. So be careful about what colleges say when it comes to the SAT.

I was actually takin
g a tour of Princeton years ago when someone asked the admissions rep giving the tour what Princeton thought of the SAT. He said that Princeton didn’t care at all about a student’s SAT score.

We asked him to repeat himself, and he said again that a student’s SAT score didn’t matter to Princeton at all.

Now, I’m not ready to say this guy was lying. He knows more about Princeton’s admissions process than I do. But let’s look at some facts from Princeton’s own data.

Princeton’s
own fact sheet for a recent entering class shows that the middle 50% of those admitted for that year were in the top 1 percentile of all SAT-takers. That’s awfully coincidental for a school that doesn’t care about SAT scores, isn’t it?

In addition, Princeton (like almost every other reputable school in America) takes the trouble of requiring students to submit SAT scores in the first place
. Given that roughly 15,000 students apply to Princeton in a given year, let’s assume that it takes an average of one minute for someone to receive a score report in an application, process it for review, and pass it along to a decision-maker for final consideration in conjunction with the rest of an application (probably a low estimate, but go with me here). That would mean that Princeton spends approximately 250 hours every admissions cycle—basically a month and a half of 40-hour work weeks for one employee—gathering data that it doesn’t care about. Does that make any sense to you?

I’m only using Princeton as one example here
. Lots of colleges tell their applicants they don’t care about the SAT—but if that’s true, why do the scores of their admitted applicants fall into such a narrow range every year? And why do they require you to submit scores from the SAT in the first place?

Fa
ct: Colleges sure seem to spend a lot of time gathering SAT data from their students for it not to matter to them—and it’s very coincidental that every college’s pool of admitted students falls into a narrow SAT scoring band. The data suggest that most schools care about the SAT, even if they occasionally say otherwise.

Now we’re getting into a sore area. Most students are willing to accept that the information they get from the outside world might not be that reliable. But now I’m going to start talking about bad information you might be getting from the people closest to you, and that can hit home.

So let
me repeat something one more time: I’m not suggesting that your friends and family are lying to you on purpose, or that they’re out to make you score low on the SAT. I’m just saying that they might be misinformed, and when they try to pass their advice on to you it might not actually be any good. As always, take the time to verify any advice by going to the source—real sample tests from the College Board.

The advice you tend to get from friends and family is a hodge-podge of strategies, study tips, and who knows what else, so this section might seem a little scattered
. Also, it’s just about impossible to cover all the rumors floating around out there, so I’m only going to point out some of the major ones.