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 11, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Time Management
If you find yourself in the habit of slowing down on the rhetoric questions and then having to race at the end of the English sections, please consider
trying this out. (If you’re fine on time and have no problem with rhetoric questions, you can ignore this post.)
On ACT English, you have 45 minutes for 75 questions, divided into five passages with 15 questions each. That breaks down into 9 minutes per passage, or a little over 30 seconds per question.
As you may already know, however, some ACT English questions take far more time to finish than others. Grammar questions are often fairly straightforward and can often be done in a matter of seconds. However, rhetoric questions, especially ones that require you to reread substantial portions of the passage, can take much longer.
Now, rhetoric questions are usually located at the end of each passage — but not always. Sometimes they come right at the beginning. Sometimes they’re mixed in with grammar questions. When that’s the case, forget them for a little bit. Mark the ones you skip so you won’t forget to come back to them later, then do all the grammar questions.
If you get done with the grammar questions before the 9 minutes are up, go back to the rhetoric questions you skipped; if not, move on and do the same thing for the next passage (but don’t forget to guess on the ones you skipped; it can’t hurt you).
Your goal should be to get as many questions right as fast as you can. No question counts more than any other question, so it’s in your interest to first do all the questions you’re sure of, then worry about the ones you’re shaky on.
So the bottom line is this: don’t waste time working on a question you might not get right at the expense of working on a question you’ll almost certainly get right.
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.
