Once you grade your test or receive your score report, you can read it to find out how you performed in which areas. Obviously, you want to pick out the areas where you’re not satisfied and work more on them. The way you work on them is up to you. You can do one problem at a time while reading through the steps in this Black Book, you can take one section of your trouble area at a time, or you can go ahead and take the full test.
However, you need to be sure to think about timing when you work up on a full section or a full test—you don’t necessarily need to time every practice session, but you do need to remember that on test day you’ll have a limited amount of time to answer questions.
You also have to be responsible in your practice. If you don’t feel like you’re practicing enough, or if you’re not improving, then you need to put in more time, or go back to basics with the different sections of this book. Just keep working away at it. You get results depending on the quality of the work you put in, so if you want an elite score, remember: Work smarter and harder.
Assessing Weakness
As you practice you will notice certain areas of the test that seem to give you particular trouble. Take note, and work harder on those sections. There is no “I can’t do it”—the information you need is there in every question, just learn to see it and use it. Don’t be tempted to convince yourself that one question type is just too hard or flawed or has some other problem. You can do them all if you will only work on it.
When you do start to notice problem areas, see them as places where you have not yet succeeded, not places where you won’t or can’t succeed. Learn the difference between recognizing weakness and expecting failure.
Making it count
You can spend all the time in the world practicing, but if it’s mindless practice, then you won’t improve. Practice actively and intelligently. Don’t try to look up every word in the verbal section and memorize its meaning, but if you feel like you keep seeing a word with which you are unfamiliar, go ahead and look it up and be sure you understand what it means; the odds aren’t bad that you’ll see it again somewhere.
However, if there is a word in the math section that you don’t understand, look it up every time. This isn’t as extreme, since there are far fewer of them in math than in verbal, but you cannot answer a math question without knowing the vocabulary.
Also, feel free to come up with your own tricks while practicing, but if your tricks don’t work every time, then don’t rely on them. When you’ve mastered all the techniques, you shouldn’t just be right all the time; you should know that you’re right, know why you’re right, and know how you’re right—every time. Remember: if you’re not getting 800s (or whatever your goal is) in practice, you probably won’t get them on the real test.
Parting advice
If you’re putting in all this extra effort to reach an elite score, then you must have some larger goal in mind (improving your chances at a particular school, qualifying for a scholarship, or whatever). Keep that goal in mind. Let it motivate you to continue to work even when you don’t want to. If you get your score report and you’re not satisfied, think of it as a progress report and let your goal keep you working. Repeat this entire process thoroughly in order to optimize your improvement.
At the same time, treat each test as the real thing, because it is. Don’t take a test thinking only that it will help you know what to do better later. It will, but always shoot for your goal or else you might not do as well as you can. Strive to do your best, always.
Advice For Non-Native Speakers Of American English
“Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.”
- Jean Piaget
The SAT involves a lot of reading, so it poses special challenges for students who aren’t native speakers of American English. There are some things we can do to overcome these challenges to some extent.
First, Focus On Questions In Which Language Is Not A Problem
Before we start worrying about building up your vocabulary or grammar knowledge, the most important thing—and the easiest—is to focus on eliminating mistakes in the questions that you can understand well enough to answer with confidence. It doesn’t make sense to try to learn a lot of big words if you haven’t reached a point where knowing the words actually helps you to answer a question. So master the strategies in this book as much as you can before you start trying to memorize stuff.
Next, Focus On “Testing” Vocabulary
Most non-native speakers try to memorize the same lists of words that native speakers try to memorize—and it’s just as big of a waste of time. Maybe even bigger.