The Testive Blog

Critical Reading Passages are typically one of the most hardest subjects in SAT prep. Students often find themselves reading passage after passage without seeing an improvement in their overall score. 

While in-person SAT tutoring is the most effective (and still potentially the most cost effective) way to improve rapidly your SAT score, online tutoring is a growing, viable alternative.

It's only been four month since I graduated college, so you can imagine how bizzare it was to find myself proctoring an SAT practice exam. On one hand it was like experiencing other side of the the scenario that haunts every high school upperclassman's dreams. On the other hand, I learned some valuable lessons on how the people giving standardized tests think about the experince. Here's my advice for future proctors (and test takers):

There are many different options for those looking for SAT practice resources. While some good ones are free, your options expand dramatically if you (or your parents) are willing to invest a bit.

Students prepping for the SAT are blessed and cursed with an abundance of free practice tests scattered across the Internet. Unfortunately, most of them are pretty crappy. You'll want to stick with the major brand names and the few smaller players that have invested in building solid tests.

It doesn't take much SAT practice for most students to see some solid score gains in at least one section, but that practice has to be the right kind of practice otherwise you're just spinning your wheels and wasting time.

In the course of tutoring, almost every student asks me to calculate their potential SAT score improvement. In fact, if you're reading this, you probably want me to calculate your SAT score improvement.

One question that all test prep companies, teachers and tutors get from students is "How high can I score on the SAT?"

We've all had that teacher in High School. Every year he or she would give out the exact same test, only with different numbers. The more industrious students among us would round up a copy of an old test and get a serious leg up studying for the new version. Knowing what the questions will be is one quick way how to improve your SAT scores without really trying. It's really just a question of drilling before you can increase your confidence that you'll get the answers correct.

Improving Sentences is the most common question type on the SAT Writing section, but students often lose crucial points by relying on what sounds best to pick the right answer. Because these questions ask you to pick an answer choice that produces the "best sentence,"  it's easy to default to picking the sentence that has the best ring to your ear.