Here’s a column I contributed a few years back to a community magazine in central New Jersey. The SAT was a different test then, based on the 2400 scale with a mandatory essay, but the overall message still applies: if you’re a month away from an SAT and not sure where to start practicing to boost your scores, don’t make the mistake of trying to learn everything at once. Follow a structured four-week plan to improve in specific, focused areas and take control of your biggest areas for improvement.
Did the summer slip away too fast? It usually does. If your high school junior or senior is looking at the SAT around the corner on October 11, here’s an easy-to-follow four-week plan to boost your scores in time for the first test date of the Fall.
Week One: Build your plan. Take a practice test, preferably one from the official CollegeBoard study guide. Pay attention to your overall scores, but look more closely at the types of questions you’re getting wrong or omitting. This will show you where your biggest opportunities for points are.
Get specific – don’t just look at your Critical Reading score as your weakest section, for example. What questions did you miss most often? Sentence Completions, or Reading Comprehension? Inference, Detail, or Big Picture? What you’re doing is assembling a strategy of how to study most effectively for the next three weeks by concentrating on the areas where you stand to earn the most points.
Once you’ve done that, choose your two biggest opportunities for points: one overall section – Math, Critical Reading, or Writing Skills – and from another section, one “finer points” question type you seemed to have the most trouble with. Algebra, for example, or Parallelism, or even the essay.
Week Two: ‘Big Picture’ Section. If you’ve identified Math as your primary opportunity for growth, learn to apply the main strategies of Picking Numbers and Backsolving to those questions you can’t immediately solve. Familiarize yourself with the scoring differences between multiple choice questions and Grid-Ins. And understand how the ordering of the questions – from easiest to hardest in each Math section – can work either for you or against you if you’re not careful.
If you’ve selected Critical Reading, don’t make the mistake of just memorizing vocabulary words. Instead, look for word roots, prefixes and suffixes, as well as positive/negative word charge. Study the wording of passage questions so you can more easily identify Inference, Detail, Function and Big Picture questions. Practice skimming with “What do I know so far?” to work more efficiently rather than spending too much time reading everything up front.
Writing Skills scores can be easily raised by watching your essay structure – are you using enough specific examples? Do you have a solid 3-5 paragraph essay that starts with a clear, assertive introduction and ends with a well-thought out conclusion? In the multiple choice questions, are you familiar with the 10 most commonly tested grammatical errors?
Week Three: Finer Points. Unless your score is low enough in one area that you need to concentrate only there, identify one or two “finer points” from the remaining sections. For example, Geometry in Math; Identifying Sentence Errors in Writing Skills.
Any of the particular areas of opportunity from your original analysis will work; look for areas where you can earn at least 60 points. Practice problems from these specific question types as you continue working on the “Big Picture” from Week Two.
Week Four: Final Review. The weekend of October 4th, take another test and review the areas where you concentrated for the last three weeks. Identify what worked and what didn’t, and do some additional light review to fine-tune what you’ve already learned.
This isn’t the time to immerse yourself in heavy preparation; the key for this week is to relax and take a realistic look at how your October performance might be. And feel confident that in just a few weeks, you’ve taken serious steps to improve your scores without being counterproductive and stressed out!
If you need help analyzing your scores, e-mail me at jpmwriters@yahoo.com, or visit jpmtestprep.com. It’s free, and will save you some time as you put together your plan of attack!
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