The SAT Prep Black Book(166)
Pages 347 – 364
These pages give you sample problems for the Student-Produced Response questions on the SAT. Try them if you feel like it.
Pages 365 – 376
This section gives you general math questions to practice with. Try them out.
Pages 377 – 889
These pages are the meat of the College Board’s book. They provide you with sample tests written by the test-maker, which you absolutely must use to get your score as high as possible.
The Official SAT Online Course
The College Board provides an online tool that you can use to get extra help on the test. It’s called the Official SAT Online Course, and you can access it from www.collegeboard.com. It has a variety of tools that you might find useful as you apply to college—sample tests, lessons, study planners, and so on. Use these if you want. The sample tests will be especially helpful as you search for more official SAT questions if you exhaust the ones from the Blue Book. The lessons and quizzes probably won’t do you too much good, but I guess they can’t hurt either apart from the time they take up.
Conclusion
You simply can’t prepare for the SAT effectively if you don’t use the sample tests and other resources provided by the College Board—the College Board is the only source of real SAT questions on the entire planet, and real SAT questions are essential to the preparation process.
But that doesn’t mean you should take everything the College Board says at face value! Much of their advice reflects what they wish the SAT were like, not what it actually is.
8 Things You Thought You Knew About The SAT Are Wrong
“As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
If you’re taking the SAT, you’re going to get a lot of advice from other people about the best way to approach the test. It might surprise you to know that the vast majority of SAT information that most people have access to is very, very incorrect. In my years of teaching people about the SAT, I’ve heard all sorts of myths, rumors, and lies about the test. Believe it or not, some of this misinformation comes from the College Board itself. Some of it comes from colleges, guidance counselors, and teachers. And still more comes from your friends and peers, and from popular web sites. Most—but not all—of the people who spread this misinformation are well-intentioned, but that doesn’t change the fact that bad information leads to lower test scores for you, and that’s bad.
With that in mind, I’ve set out a few common SAT myths, misconceptions, and lies about the SAT. But first, I’ll tell you how to verify any SAT rumor you might hear in the future.
How To Find The Truth About The SAT
One of the strangest things about all the SAT myths and rumors that are out there is that it’s so easy to disprove them with a little research, but nobody takes the time. This is a huge mistake.
Make a commitment to yourself that you won’t accept a single new piece of SAT advice from anyone, no matter the source, without checking it out for yourself to see if it’s true. (Yes, I’m including the Black Book in this statement—I’m sure it stands up to the test, unlike most of the other SAT advice you’ll encounter.)
How do you check it out? If the advice is related to the SAT itself, you can usually check to see if it’s true by looking at some sample tests WRITTEN BY THE COLLEGE BOARD. Of course, you can get these by consulting your copy of the Blue Book, The Official SAT Study Guide. Do NOT, under any circumstances, attempt to learn anything meaningful about the SAT by consulting a fake SAT test written by a test prep company or a web site. Many simply don’t know how to write them correctly, and those fake tests are totally useless.
(Note that I’m not suggesting you take the College Board’s advice about the SAT—I’m suggesting that you try out all SAT advice against the actual sample SATs written by the College Board. The College Board is often wrong about its own test, as strange as that might sound. You can prove this by comparing the essay-scoring chart on page 105 of the Blue Book to the actual high- and low-scoring essays that also appear in that book. What the College Board says it rewards is not what actually appears in those essays.)
If the advice is related to the way a particular college or university uses the SAT in its admissions process, one way to check it is to call up the school yourself and get the real answer, or visit the school’s web site. The admissions people typically won’t lie to you (notice I didn’t say they’ll NEVER lie to you). Unfortunately, admissions departments are not a perfect source of information. They may not always give you a straight answer about the role the SAT plays in their schools’ selection processes. Fortunately, though, schools don’t usually lie about their raw data—you can usually do an online search for a school’s median SAT scores and grade point averages for the previous year’s admissions pool, and that information is typically trustworthy.