The five keys to making sure your SAT practice improves your score
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.
Here's five quick tips to make sure that your time hitting the books boosts your scores:
1. Take good notes on your SAT prep activities and keep them all in one notebook
We often find pieces of paper scrunched into old jackets with lists of A-E on them. It's a common phenomenon among SAT prep teachers, and a terrible habit. Life's too short to do work that youjust shove in a jacket pocket. Learning from something means paying attention to it, and that means keeping notes. Invest in a single notebook for all your SAT practice activities.
Take all your tests in this book. Grade all your tests in this book, and keep a running tally of how you're doing. Is your score improving? Great, keep it up. If not, it's time for something different. If you don't know, you might as well have been playing video games during that time like you wanted to be doing.
2. Spend more time reviewing the answers you got wrong
To many student spend hours doing practice problems and then casually glance over their answers. The real learning takes place in the time where you are reviewing your answers. Student should spend at least as much time reviewing answers as they spend doing practice problems.
Really push yourself to understand why you got the question wrong and what you can do to avoid missing similar questions in the future. Almost every prep question written in any book has an explanation for it in that book or somewhere online. Just Google a few key words from the problem.
3. Don't keep doing the same thing if it's not working
Successful students are prone to this strategy. If doing 20 practice problems isn't working, they'll try doing 40 or just giving up. Einstein is credited with saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing while expecting a different result.
We see this most often with strategies that were effective in raising your score that first 10, 20 or 30 points, but fail after that. When it stops working, it's time to move on. Buy a new book. Ask a friend for help. Consider a class.
4. Stay focused on the real goal: expanding your college options.
No one takes the SAT test for fun (well, no one except us). People take the SAT to get into college. People do SAT practice to get a better score, and people get a better score to expand their college options.
Remember that the pain of the moment is in service of a higher goal. Take some college tours to remind yourself of where you're going, not where you are. Check out the score ranges of accepted students from some schools that you'd like to apply to and set yourself a clear target.
5. Take advantage of the tools available to know where you're starting from.
Your ability to improve your score has a lot to do with where you're starting from. Testive provide a set of rapid SAT practice tests that can give you a score report and areas of focus much more quickly than taking a full length practice test.
Photo Courtesy: Woodley Wonder Works
