The SAT Prep Black Book(173)

I know that it’s frustrating to look at a question and feel like the only reason you’re missing it is that it has words you don’t know, but you have to remember that memorizing words from a list is very unlikely to have a significant positive impact on that situation, for all the reasons that I mentioned when we talked about Sentence Completion questions. If your goal is to get the most points you possibly can—and that really should be your goal, of course—then you have to realize that you’ll probably have the easiest time picking up extra points by prioritizing things the way I’ve laid out here.





Conclusion


I hope you’ve found these tips useful. Remember that the SAT is a very unique test, but it’s also a very repetitive test, and even a very basic one in a lot of ways. By focusing on the issues I’ve pointed out above, you should hopefully be able to maximize your score without wasting your time on things that won’t really help you.





One Final Piece Of Advice

(Or: Every Question I’ve Ever Been Asked About The SAT Has Basically The Same Answer)


“The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be.’”

- Richard Feynman

I’ve helped a lot of people with a lot of standardized tests, and in a lot of formats. This means I’ve also gotten a lot of questions from a very wide variety of test-takers. Most of the time those questions are very polite and sincere, but sometimes they’re downright accusatory—something along the lines of “You said I could use a certain strategy on this kind of question, but it didn’t work and my score went down. What are you, some kind of idiot?”

So I wanted to close this book with some words of advice and encouragement for students who are still struggling with some area of the SAT.

First, the advice: In literally every single instance that I can recall in which a student has become frustrated with an idea in this Black Book, the underlying issue has always—ALWAYS—been that the student has overlooked or misunderstood at least one important detail.

Let me say that again.

When you try to apply the ideas in this book to real SAT questions from the College Board and get frustrated by your inability to determine the correct answer reliably, the reason is just about always that you’ve misread or misunderstood some important detail somewhere.

So when you’re having a hard time with a question, whether during practice or on the actual day of the test, you must always, always, always assume that you’ve made a mistake somewhere, and then set out to find and correct that mistake. You need to develop an instinctive faith in the standardization of the test, and an assumption that, if something has gone wrong, it’s gone wrong in your own head, and you can fix it.

Let me also say, very clearly, that all of us—myself included—will run into situations in which we are completely certain that the test has finally made a mistake. No matter how convinced we may be that this is the case, we must remember that we’re actually the ones who’ve made the mistake, and we must go back and re-evaluate our decisions until we can figure out where we went wrong.

The most common type of mistake that I see students make is the general mistake of misreading something. Sometimes a question asks us to compare Passage 1 to Passage 2, but we choose the answer that compares Passage 2 to Passage 1 instead. Sometimes the question asks for the area and we find the perimeter. Sometimes we miss the word “not” in a Sentence Completion question and choose the antonym of the correct answer. Sometimes we overlook the word “positive” in a math question that describes a set of numbers. And so on.

At other times, we may think we know something that actually turns out to be wrong. Yesterday I was talking to a student who incorrectly thought that “taciturn” meant “peaceful” (this is the kind of misunderstanding that often comes from memorizing lists of vocabulary words, by the way). Until a couple of months ago, I though “pied” meant something like “famous” or “skillful,” because of the story The Pied Piper. But it turns out that “pied” just refers to clothing that’s made out of lots of different pieces of cloth stitched together, and I was completely wrong. Or a student might incorrectly think that zero is a prime number. These kinds of mistakes are harder to figure out during the actual moment of taking the test, because it’s usually not possible to realize that something you believe isn’t actually correct until after you’ve chosen the wrong answer and found out it’s wrong.

No matter what the mistake, though, it ultimately comes down to some specific detail (or details) of the question that you have gotten wrong in some way. When you get stuck, your first instinct must always be to re-read the question (and the relevant part of the passage or diagram, if there is one), taking absolutely nothing for granted and expecting that you’ll find out something is different from what you previously supposed. If you re-read a few times and still can’t identify your mistake, you have to be ready for the possibility that some definition that you think you know (whether it’s a word like “taciturn” or a word like “prime”) might actually be wrong. And you have to consider skipping the question altogether.