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An Important SAT Preparation Strategy (That almost everybody overlooks!)

By: Mike Barrett
Application Boot Camp SAT Guru

Everybody knows that taking practice tests is an important part of getting
ready for the SAT. And most people know that you should only use real
practice tests written by the College Board, instead of fake questions
written by companies like Kaplan or The Princeton Review.

Very few people realize that practicing with actual College Board tests
isn’t enough on its own. Don’t get me wrong–taking real practice tests is
an essential part of preparing. But, it’s only half of the story.

You see, in order to make significant improvement, you have to do more than
just take practice tests.

You have to review those tests as well.

I can’t tell you how many times students have told me they take practice
tests, score them, and then move on to the next test without giving any
consideration to the mistakes they made. Most of the time, they’re too
reluctant to face up to their shortcomings, so they go straight on to the
next practice round. This is really a shame, because reviewing your
practice questions is a much faster (and usually much more interesting!) way
to improve your practice scores.

So how do you do it?

It’s simple, really–after you take a practice test, let a day or so go by
to clear your mind and then sit down with your results. The first thing you
want to do is take another look at any questions you missed. Your first goal
is to figure out why you missed these questions. Did you make careless
mistakes? Did you misread the questions or the answer choices? Were you
unfamiliar with any terminology? If so, which? Make a quick note of the
major reasons that you’re missing questions.

Next, look for similarities among the questions you’re missing. Some of
these similarities will be obvious–maybe you always miss math questions
about triangles, for instance. Some similarities will be less obvious–maybe
you tend to miss the middle third of the Sentence Completion questions, even
when you know the meanings of all the words in the questions. And some
similarities are even more subtle, and will take a lot of thought to tease
out.

This analysis can take a decent amount of time. Don’t rush it–look closely
at the questions you’ve missed and really try to figure out what caused the
mistakes. This way, when you take the next practice test, you can be alert
to the sorts of situations that often cause you to make mistakes.

That alone will help your scores increase, but there’s one more tactic you
can use that will speed the process up even more.

When you review your test results, don’t just focus on the questions you
missed. Pay a lot of attention to the questions you got correct, especially the questions that the College Board thinks are especially difficult. (You can find out how hard the College Board thinks a question is by looking at the answer sheet, which includes individual difficulty rankings for each question.) Look at these correct answers and try to figure out how you arrived at them — doing so will start to show you how simple
the “hard” questions really are.

Using these review tactics will help you improve your scores with less time
and effort. Remember: It’s much harder to improve if you don’t learn from
your past performances!

MAKE SURE TO READ THE SAT BREAKING NEWS POST!

Mike

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Posted in SAT, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

Comments

One Response to “An Important SAT Preparation Strategy (That almost everybody overlooks!)”

  1. Bob on August 24th, 2008 9:51 pm

    Gracias. Good idea. I’ll become your regular visitor and RSS subscriber.

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