The SAT Prep Black Book(164)

I talk a lot about how you need to use College Board materials when you study, especially the Blue Book. The College Board is the company that writes the SAT, and they’re the only source of real SAT questions, which are absolutely essential if you’re going to prepare intelligently.

But that doesn’t mean that you should take everything the College Board says about the SAT as the truth. Trusting them too much would be a huge mistake.

I keep telling you to practice with the Blue Book, which is the College Board publication The Official SAT Study Guide. But I don’t want you to listen to the College Board’s advice on test-taking, because it’s usually pretty bad. So I’ve written this section of the Black Book to explain exactly how you should use the College Board’s materials. You have to use them properly if you want to do your best.





The “Blue Book” (The Official SAT Study Guide)


The first thing we’ll look at is the proper way to use the College Board publication The Official SAT Study Guide. I’ve gone through the book page-by-page to explain the best way to approach it.





Third unnumbered page


The third unnumbered page of The Official SAT Study Guide contains a letter from Gaston Caperton, the President of the College Board. It includes this sentence:

The best preparation for the SAT, and for college, is to take challenging courses.

This is laughable.

You should take challenging courses because they help you become a better person. They don’t do anything at all to help you on the SAT, and it can be argued they don’t do anything to help you in college either. I would love it if they did, but they don’t.

Advanced courses will teach you to write well, for example, while the SAT will reward the sort of elementary, cookie-cutter writing that appears in our earlier discussion on the SAT Essay, and in the College Board’s own sample essay. Advanced courses will teach you higher math principles that will never appear on the SAT. Advanced courses will teach you to read and analyze a text like a literary critic, but the SAT will ask you to forego all subtlety and nuance and answer questions like a third-grader writing a book report.

The best way to prepare for the SAT is to get a bunch of sample tests written by the College Board and pull them apart on a technical level to see what they keep doing, and then learn how to do those things—and only those things—well. And that’s what the Black Book is all about.





Pages 3 – 6


These pages sketch out the format and background of the SAT and its development. You can read them if you want, but they’re pretty useless as far as doing well on the test is concerned.





Pages 6 – 8


These pages explain the way the test is scored, and tell you how to interpret your score report. You’ll definitely want to read them when you get your scores back, but if you haven’t taken the test yet you can skip them for now.





Pages 9 – 10


This section explains the College Board’s general theory about how you should prepare for the SAT.

Ignore it.





Pages 10 – 11


This lays out the online resources that are available to you through the College Board’s web site.





Pages 12 – 13


You MUST read these pages before test day. They lay out the things you’ll need to take with you to the testing site.





Pages 13 – 15


You can pretty much ignore this part. You should especially ignore the part on page 14 that talks about the difficulty level of questions going from easy to hard within a section. (See the section of this book called “8 Things You Thought You Knew About The SAT Are Wrong.”)





Pages 15 – 17


These pages discuss the traditional guessing strategy. Skip them, and check out my section on SAT-guessing in the Black Book instead.





Pages 17 – 18


These pages give you the College Board’s take on test anxiety. It might be useful to read this if you’re looking for another perspective on the issue, but it isn’t necessary.





Pages 20 – 26


These pages explain how to use the PSAT. They’re useful as general information.





Pages 29 – 30


These pages give you the College Board’s general advice on how to approach the Critical Reading Section. You should ignore it.





Pages 31 – 43


This section gives you some sample Sentence Completion questions and lets you see the College Board’s approach to them. It’s different from the approach I recommend, and it doesn’t take you step-by-step through the process of completing any question.





Pages 44 – 48


These pages give you some sample Sentence Completion questions to practice on. Give them a shot if you want.