by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 12, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
If you’re a junior or the parent of a junior and are just starting to think seriously about SAT/ACT prep, you might be pondering the various options available to you. Here are some thoughts:
Classes I think that there are really only two situations in which it can be worth taking a class: the first is if you’re really anxious about the test and want an introduction to it in a formal setting. Confronting the SAT or the ACT can initially feel overwhelming, and if it helps to have someone else break it down and tell you what to expect, I see nothing wrong with that.
The second is if you’re totally solid on all of the fundamentals going in and just need to learn some basic strategies to help you apply your knowledge to the test. I wouldn’t suggest it as a blanket solution since most classes are geared toward people scoring around 550-600, but it can help in some cases.
I confess that taking a Kaplan class the summer before my senior year helped me jump from a 710 to an 800 on Critical Reading because I learned to slow down and actually analyze the questions rather than just going with my gut feeling. (Admittedly, though, that’s about all it taught me.) I had a French SAT II student a couple of years ago who’d done Princeton Review and scored a 2300, and she certainly thought the class had helped. But again, she was a straight-A student at a very competitive private school and had no problem with any of the actual material.
If you do take a class, though, you need to approach the strategies you learn critically. If something isn’t working for you, don’t stick with it. I’ve had plenty of students who came to me after taking Kaplan/PR classes and having their scores go down, and I the first thing I had to do was get them to stop doing everything that wasn’t working. If at all possible, try not to go with a big chain; find a smaller local company or a tutor willing to put together a group.
Tutoring If you need to do serious work on fundamental English or Math skills OR you really only need help in one area, finding a tutor can be a far better choice than taking a class.
People often discard tutoring as a option because they believe that it’s prohibitively expensive but then don’t hesitate to pay Kaplan $500-$1,000 — an amount that could get you 10-20 hours with an excellent tutor. Never assume that price = quality, however, and many tutoring companies offer financial aid and/or do pro bono work. If you live relatively close to a college or university, try to find a student who scored well and has some tutoring experience; they probably won’t charge you a fortune.
Contrary to what some tutoring companies would lead their clients to believe, tutors do not need to hold advanced degrees or be former Rhodes scholars to tutor the SAT effectively; they must simply understand how the test works and be capable of effectively conveying the necessary material in a way that is easy to grasp. Do make sure, however, that a tutor’s background matches your needs. Even if many tutors can obtain top scores in all sections of a given test, most are somewhat stronger teaching-wise in one area. If Reading is your weakest section and a tutor has a degree in Chemistry, chances are that may not be a good match.
Yes, the SAT is a “reasoning” test (you can interpret that as you wish), but it is also a reading and math test, and if your underlying skills in one of those areas are weak, you need to work with someone who really understands the subject — not just someone who will teach you tricks and strategies. A tutor, however, is usually only helpful insofar as a student is motivated and willing to be an active participant in the tutoring process. Otherwise, hiring one can be a big waste of money.
Self-Study Self-study works best when you’re either already really solid on the fundamentals or willing to put in large amounts of time to solidify them. In order to significantly raise your score on your own, you have to be seriously self-motivated.
While there are plenty of online programs such as Grockit and Prep Me, you do need to be careful. Much of their material, like that of the major test-prep companies, bears little resemblance to what’s on the actual tests, and you risk getting the wrong idea about what you need to study. For a comprehensive review of Grockit, see Mike from PWN the SAT’s analysis. The Official Guides to the SAT/ACT are absolutely indispensable. As much as possible, you need to be working with real material; otherwise you may end up wasting huge amounts of your time.
If you can afford to do so, sign up for the College Board’s online program, and if you really don’t understand why a particular type of question, ask a friend or a parent or a teacher for help. There’s always College Confidential, but you need to be careful with some of the advice. Just because a particular strategy (e.g. jumping right to the questions without reading the passage first) worked for someone doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. You need to be willing to experiment with different techniques and see what makes sense to you. You also need to be willing to go over your work very, very carefully and analyze what you do and don’t know, not just crash through lots of material and expect your score to automatically rise. Familiarity does not equal mastery. Self-study can work, but it’s definitely not the road for everyone.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 31, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
For some reason, every time I offer this little pearl of wisdom to a student, I’m inevitably greeted with looks that range from dubious to downright offended.
I can almost hear the person think, “But that’s what I did in first grade. Putting your finger on the page is for little kids. Doesn’t Erica get that I’m taking this test to get into college? I thought she was smarter than that. Besides, everyone will think that I look stupid!”
Guess what: not a single other test-taker in the room with you cares in the least whether you put your finger on the page or not. Everyone will be so focused on their own work that they won’t have space in their brains to worry about what you’re doing.
According to speed-reading expert Abby Marks Beale,
Because the eyes naturally follow movement, placing a finger, hand or card on a page and strategically moving it down the text, a reader will keep naturally keep their place, be more focused and read faster. This helps readers concentrate and understand what they read making reading a more satisfying experience.
While I’m not sure that most people are seeking”a satisfying reading experience” on the SAT or the ACT, they certainly are looking for increased speed and improved concentration.
This is not just about reading passages, by the way — it helps on every part of the exam. On SAT Writing/ACT English, for example, your eye has a way of filling in the correct answer without your even realizing it (this is particularly true for adjective vs. adverb questions). Unless you look really, really closely, you often simply won’t “see” the error, regardless of how well you understand what’s being tested. And on Math, it’s so easy to forget to solve for 2x and accidentally solve for x instead… Putting your finger on the page may seem like a small thing, but if it saves you from overlooking key parts
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 30, 2011 | Blog, General Tips, The Mental Game
I understand that for most high school juniors and (especially) seniors, the words “SAT” or “ACT” and “happy” have absolutely no business appearing in the same sentence. But please hear me out. I recognize that I’m speaking strictly anecdotally and from limited personal experience, but I seriously think this idea has some merit.
Two quick stories: one of my students who had already taken the SAT twice — and not scored as well as he could have because of serious anxiety — took his third test as a last-ditch effort the day after he was accepted early evaluation (non-binding) to his backup school. He was unbelievably relieved that he had actually managed to get into college somewhere, and when he took the test, he was practically walking on air. With zero studying between that test and the previous one, he went up 130 points.
Another one of my students whose practice-exam scores had been all over the place took the SAT for real the day of a championship soccer game. He was so excited to go play that he didn’t give himself the chance to get nervous about the test — and ended up with his best score ever.
To be sure, my students would not have been able to raise their scores by so many points had they not had the necessary skills to begin with; however, their experiences taught me a major lesson about test psychology. The more stressed out you are about a test going into it, the more likely you’ll start to panic and second-guess yourself, and the less likely you’ll be able to focus and work through things slowly and calmly — which is what prevents you from making the kinds of careless, panicky mistakes that can drag your score down. In retrospect that’s seems obvious, but it’s very easy to get caught up in “omigod I have to improve my score or I’ll never get into xyz college” mentality and lose sight of everything else.
So the day you take the exam, try to plan something fun for afterward. Give yourself something to look forward to so that not everything is about the test. You’ll thank yourself later.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
The short answer:
The summer before junior year. In the meantime, take the hardest classes you can reasonably handle, read lots of challenging material, and work on expanding your vocabulary. Then worry about the test. If you’ve got the skills covered, the actual test won’t be that overwhelming. If you’re weak on the fundamentals, strategy won’t get you very far.
The long answer:
I think that most people recognize that the SAT and the ACT are not tests you can really cram for. Sure, you can memorize a couple of last-minute strategies and rules, but how far they’ll actually get you is debatable. Unless your underlying comprehension of the concepts that these tests actually cover is truly rock-solid and you just need to know about some quirks of the test (e.g. that the College Board considers collective nouns such as “city” or “organization” to be singular), it can be very hard to apply rules you’ve just learned to unfamiliar questions.
On the other hand, it can be just as harmful to start studying for the SAT or the ACT too early. I always hesitate when someone asks me to do serious SAT prep with a student before the second semester of their sophomore year, and I get really concerned whenever I hear about someone who started (strategy-based prep) as soon as they entered high school.
Let me be clear: studying vocabulary and math, and reading SAT-level material are always good, and those are skills that should be built early and consistently. But there’s a big difference between reading a the New York Times op-ed page every night and sitting down with a Princeton Review book; the former will build the sort of vocabulary and cultural knowledge necessary to do well on the test in the long-run; the latter will teach you strategies that will only get you so far if you don’t have the actual knowledge.
I’ve worked with a couple of SAT students who fell into the latter category, and inevitably they were stuck somewhere in the mid-600’s. They had taken dozens of practice exams and knew the test inside and out, but they couldn’t seem to connect the material to anything outside the test itself. They thought that everything was about strategy and memorization, and they lacked (and resisted developing) the flexibility to change their approach based on the particularities of a given question — deadly if you’re trying to crack 700 because this ability is a big part of what the SAT tests.
People who start prepping intensively too early also burn out early; by the time they hit junior year, they’ve had it with test-prep and simply don’t care anymore. Even if they do have the skills to get their score higher, they’re too exhausted to make use of them.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t make the SAT out to be more than it’s worth. It’s a test — a very important test to be sure — but you shouldn’t let it dictate your life. If you hit 2250, it’s probably not worth it to spend the next six months obsessing over how to get to 2400. Sure you can take it again and try for a higher score, but colleges admit people, not test scores, and all other factors being equal, they will pretty much always take the more interesting applicant with marginally lower (but still perfectly acceptable) test scores over the applicant with super-high test scores and absolutely nothing else.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 11, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
I’m the first person to admit that studying for the SAT is exhausting. After even an hour-and-a-half of tutoring, I often find that I need to take a long walk to clear my head. Sometimes spending 90 minutes explaining why choice (A) wrong because it contains a single incorrect word while choice (C) is actually right because it restates the main idea of lines 25-42, only in more abstract terms, is just so intense that it really does take me a while to recover. Given that, I find it amazing anyone could study for a standardized test for a long stretches of time.
My advice is, quite simply, don’t. Studying for the SAT or the ACT can be exhausting. If you treat them like a sort of mind game or logic puzzle, these tests can also be fun, but let’s face it, a lot of the time, they’re not. Especially if you’re sitting down to the Official Guide after doing two hours of AP Calc homework and trying to write that essay on Ulysses.
The most important thing for SAT/ACT prep is that you study consistently, not that you study a lot at a time. If you try to swallow the whole thing at once, you’ll get burned out and frustrated, and the test will start to seem totally overwhelming. Instead, spend maybe 15 minutes a day prepping, and only focus on the things you don’t know how to do. You won’t forget the other stuff.
Studies have shown that the people at the top of their fields spend most of the practice time strengthening their weakest skills rather than simply rushing through everything they’re already good at. The same applies to the SAT and the ACT. Quantity of studying does not equal quality of studying. You will need to spend some time figuring out which kinds of questions give you the most trouble, but once you’ve determined that, make a list of the rules/concepts you don’t know, and work through them one at a time. Fifteen minutes a day every day is better than doing nothing for two months and then trying to cram in two or three hours a day. You’ll be be calmer, retain more information, and your score will most likely improve more than it would have otherwise.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 4, 2011 | Blog, General Tips, Time Management
Myth: the best way to study for a timed standardized test is to always time yourself rigidly and focus on getting your speed up.
Reality: sometimes it’s better to first focus on learning the test material along with strategies for handling it, then deal with time issue.
Let me put it this way: suppose you had a math final that would last 90 minutes. You knew that it would cover all the material you had learned during the semester, and that it would require you to apply your knowledge in new ways so that your teacher could see if you really understood what you’d learned.
What would you do?
Would you spend all of your time worrying about the fact that you only had 50 minutes to finish the test and study mainly by trying to answer practice problems faster, or would you go back to your notes and work on mastering understanding the fundamentals of what you’d covered so that you could in fact apply your knowledge to a kind of problem you’d never seen before?
I’m guessing you picked the latter (if you didn’t, well… you might want to rethink some of your study habits). So why would you treat the SAT any differently?
I know that everyone says studying for these tests is totally, completely, utterly different from studying for a test in school, but actually that’s not quite true.
As I’ve written about before, time issues are usually knowledge issues in disguise. If you work on solving the knowledge component, the time issue usually goes away on its own. Spending an hour deconstructing four or five questions to the point at which you understand the rules they’re testing cold is infinitely more productive than taking a full test and missing the same old things you usually miss. Then when you feel like you understand things, move up to a full section, and finally start to time yourself.
If you’re planning to take the SAT in three days, as some of you may be, then obviously this isn’t going to work. But if you have some time, even a month, then try it.
The other reason why working slowly at first is so important is that most SAT questions — and some ACT questions — have a sort of “back door” that allows you to solve them very quickly without wasting time pondering the answers. For example:
Word Pair questions on the SAT Writing section: if you know all the word pairs cold (see the grammar rules page for the complete list), you can spot many correct answers without even reading through all of the choices.
“The point of lines xxx…” on Critical Reading. Usually reading the sentence before the given lines will get you the answer. If you can match the idea of that sentence to an answer choice, you’re done.
On ACT English, you can automatically eliminate grammatically equivalent answer choices such as Comma + FANBOYS, Semicolon, and Period.
More than anything else, teaching yourself to recognize those back doors will help you get your time down. But, paradoxically, you might have to go very, very slowly at first in order to achieve that.
