The SAT Prep Black Book(10)
Then you move on to the next question. Or you eat a sandwich, or go for a walk or something—when staring and pondering in a semi-structured way gets boring, you stop. You come back to it later, when you’re interested to see how much more of the SAT you can figure out. Ideally, the process is relaxed, with no real consideration of time. You’re just letting the ideas rattle around in your head, and letting your brain get used to looking for them in real SAT questions. You don’t get frustrated if you can’t see how something works. You’re just getting used to a new way of looking at test questions in a low-pressure setting.
Of course, when you actually take the test, you won’t want to approach it in this way. That goes without saying. But that shouldn’t stop you from pondering all the different aspects of the test in this kind of relaxed way as a part of your preparation, because the more you do this kind of thing, the more quickly you’ll be able to analyze and diagnose real test questions in the future. Let things percolate a bit and you may be surprised what you start to notice in the future.
2. Practice-And-A-Postie
The word “postie” here is short for the phrase “post mortem,” which in this case refers to the idea of analyzing a test or a practice session after the fact. I included the word “postie” in the name of this exercise because I really, really want to emphasize that if you don’t make a serious analysis of your practice work after you finish it, then you’re really wasting the time you spend practicing.
So basically you start out by doing practice parts of a test, or even entire practice tests. You can do these practice sections with or without time limits, as you see fit (of course, the actual SAT will have a time limit, so you’ll probably want to practice with a time limit at some point, but it might not be beneficial in the beginning).
I wouldn’t recommend that you use practice sections or practice tests until you’ve made some progress in understanding the rules and patterns of the individual SAT questions—otherwise, you’ll just end up wasting lots of time and getting frustrated when you miss a lot of questions and don’t understand why.
I also wouldn’t recommend that you do practice tests or sections without doing a full post-mortem on them, in which you go through all the questions and try to understand why the College Board wrote each question the way it did, what you could have done to answer the question correctly as quickly and directly as possible, and what lessons you can learn from that question that might be applicable to future questions. This post-mortem step is absolutely critical if you want to make a serious improvement on the SAT, but it’s something that most people completely ignore, or do only halfway.
Since the whole point of your practice sessions is to prepare you to do well on test day, the most important thing you can learn from any question is how to recognize its rules and patterns at work in future questions. In other words, as weird as it may sound, the actual answer to a particular practice question doesn’t really matter that much; what matters is whether the question can teach us how to answer future questions on test day. So it’s much better to miss a practice question and learn something from it than to get lucky on a practice question and not learn anything.
And if you don’t really sit and think about the questions you’ve missed, you’re going to keep missing similar questions in the future—maybe not questions that seem similar on the surface (there may not even be any that seem similar on the surface), but you’ll definitely miss questions with similar fundamentals, and there will probably be a lot of them.
So please make sure you give some serious thought to your practice sections after you finish them. Otherwise, the time you spend doing them is basically wasted. (By the way, if you do a good job on your post-mortems you should find that you dramatically reduce the amount of practice that you need to reach your goal, so you save yourself a ton of time in the long run.)
3. The Shortcut Search
In this exercise, which can be part of a post-mortem or just an exercise on its own, you look at some real SAT questions for which you already know the answers. If you’ve already done the questions and graded them, then you’ll know the answers from that; if you haven’t, then just look at the answer key and mark them down beforehand anyway.
Our goal with this exercise is not to figure out the right answer to a question, but to figure out the fastest and easiest way to arrive at that answer with certainty. For a Passage-Based Reading Question, we want to figure out which phrases in the text support the correct answer, and we want to figure out how we could have arrived at those key phrases with a minimal amount of reading and frustration. For a Math question, we might think about ways to use diagrams or answer choices (if the question has some) to avoid using formulas in our solutions. And so on.