The SAT Prep Black Book(174)

Now that I’ve finished with the advice, let me offer some encouragement. I know how hard it is to stare at a question and feel defeated. I know the frustration you feel when you’re sure you’ve answered a question correctly and you find out later that you were wrong. And I know that it’s tempting, in those moments, to reject what you’ve learned here and assume that the SAT really is unbeatable, like everybody says.

But I’m here to tell you that those moments of frustration are also the moments that offer the most opportunity for progress. When you’ve wrestled with a question for a while and then you finally figure out how it works and where you went wrong, you learn a tremendous lesson about the test, and about how you’ve been approaching it. And your score improves.

When you truly figure out a challenging question, you learn something that you’ll be able to apply on future questions, because the SAT is standardized. You also develop a stronger trust in the design of the test, which will help you in the future. More importantly, though, you can learn something about your own problem-solving process, because you can start to figure out what parts of the question kept you from understanding it correctly in the first place, and you can start to reflect on the process you used to uncover and correct that mistake, so that you can make that process much smoother in the future.

With the SAT, as with most areas of life, we make the most progress when we’re confronted with a difficult situation that we eventually overcome. Good luck!