The SAT Prep Black Book(169)

The advice you tend to get from friends and family is a hodge-podge of strategies, study tips, and who knows what else, so this section might seem a little scattered. Also, it’s just about impossible to cover all the rumors floating around out there, so I’m only going to point out some of the major ones.





SAT Misconception 5: SAT Math stuff is for math people, and SAT Verbal stuff is for verbal people.


You hear people complain about this all the time. “I can’t do well on the Math part of the SAT because I’m too creative,” they’ll say, or, “I’m too analytical to do well on subjective questions like Passage-Based Reading ones.”

This isn’t true at all. First of all, the human brain is too adaptable to be good at using only numbers or only words; if it weren’t, we’d never survive. Except in the rarest of cases, people are not strictly good at either math or language.

But more importantly, the sections on the SAT don’t really test Math and Reading skills, at least not in the way the people typically think of them. They just test general reasoning, using basic math and language concepts as the means to an end. In other words, the SAT Math Section isn’t a traditional math test, the SAT Critical Reading Section isn’t a traditional reading test, and the SAT Writing Section certainly isn’t a traditional writing test. So even if your brain were designed to do well on only math or only language, it wouldn’t matter on the SAT because the SAT doesn’t test either of those things directly anyway.

Want proof? Have you ever met someone who thought she was a “math person” who scored hundreds of points lower on the math section than on the other parts of the SAT? I meet people like this all the time. You might even be one of them.

If you are one of them, do yourself two favors. First, stop pigeon-holing yourself. You can be good at anything you want to be good at. Second, realize that the SAT isn’t really a math test or a language test, and just take it for what it is—a highly repetitive standardized test of basic skills and reasoning. Check out all the rules, patterns, and solutions in this Black Book. While they all involve paying careful attention to detail, not one of them rewards the kinds of skills that would be rewarded in the typical English, literature, or math class.

Fact: Anyone can do well on any part of the SAT—or on all of it—by attacking the test intelligently. That’s what this Black Book is all about.





SAT Misconception 6: Answer choices are distributed evenly throughout each section.


A lot of students have told me they changed their answers on the SAT because the answer choices they originally liked didn’t seem evenly distributed—it seemed like there were too many (A)s in a section, for example. When I ask them why they would worry about a thing like that, they say that somebody told them that the answer choices are always distributed evenly on the SAT.

This is partly true—over time, all the answer choices on the SAT are used equally. But within a particular section, the answer choices can be distributed quite unevenly. A particular section might clearly favor one, two, three, or four answer choices, or it might distribute its answer choices almost evenly. You never know.

Let’s prove it. Turn to page 432 in The Official SAT Study Guide. You’ll see an answer key from an actual SAT written by the College Board. Take a look at how often each answer choice appears in each section.

As you can see, there’s absolutely no way to predict how many times a given answer choice should appear in a given section. So don’t worry about the distribution of the answer choices you pick—just focus on trying to get every single question correct, and let the answer choices you select fall where they may.

Fact: Answer choices may or may not be distributed evenly on a given section. Don’t worry about it.





SAT Misconception 7: You can time the SAT to get a higher score.


Some people will tell you that you should take the SAT at a particular time of year to get the highest possible score. The theory is based on the fact that the SAT is a norm-based test, which means that when you take it you’re compared to other test-takers, not to some objective standard. So the idea is to try to take the test at the time of year when the people taking it with you are likely to do the worst.

This idea can’t possibly work, for a variety of reasons. The simplest reason is that you can’t predict when the weaker test-takers are more likely to take the test. Some people say they’re more likely to take the test late in the academic year, because they’re procrastinators. Some people think they take it early in their senior years so that they’ll just barely make the admissions cutoffs. But even if one of these theories could be proven (they can’t), you’d be ignoring the fact that the best test-takers are the ones who take the test often and early—and they’re likely to be in the mix at any given point. So even if there were a time of year when the weakest test-takers took the test, the strongest test-takers are just as likely to be out in full force on any given date as they are on any other.