It’s not a problem that has to do with strategy, memorization, timing, focus, or anything like that. This problem is at the root of the very nature of the SAT itself. And if you don’t come to terms with it, your score can only be mediocre at best.
The problem is that the SAT only gives you one correct answer choice for each question, and this correct answer choice is totally, definitively, incontrovertibly the correct answer—there are no arguments to be made against it (once we know the test’s rules).
But a lot of students never realize this. In this book, I talk a lot about all the specific ways that the SAT is different from tests you take in high school. But I really want to pound this one difference into your head, because it will affect every single thing you do as you prepare for the test.
So I’m saying it again—read closely:
SAT Multiple-Choice questions always have ONE, and only ONE, correct answer. Furthermore, the issue of which answer choice is the correct one is absolutely beyond disagreement. As surely as 2 and 2 make 4, and not 5 or 3, every single SAT question can only be correctly answered in one way.
A Real-Life Example
Why is this such a big deal, you ask?
Imagine this common high school situation, which you’ve probably been through yourself. Your history teacher is going over the answers to a multiple-choice test with you. It’s a test he wrote himself, and he wrote it just for your class. And as he’s going through the test, he tells you that the answer to number 9 is choice (D). Half the class groans—they all marked (B). One of the students who marked (B) raises her hand and makes a convincing argument as to why she should get credit for marking (B). She explains that if you read the question a certain way, (B) and (D) are equally good answers. The teacher, who wants to be open-minded and fair, reconsiders the question, and decides that it’s poorly written. In light of the student’s argument, he can understand why (B) might have looked like the right answer. And, because he’s fair, he announces that he’ll give equal credit for both (B) and (D).
That sort of thing happens every day in high schools all across the country. It’s the natural result of a system in which teachers have to write their own classes’ exams, and don’t have enough time to proof-read them or even test them out on sample classes in advance. Inevitably, some poorly written questions get past the teacher. The teacher corrects the problem later by giving credit as necessary, throwing questions out, or whatever.
What message does this send to students? Unfortunately, students come to believe that the answers to all tests are open for discussion and debate, that all questions are written by stressed-out teachers who work with specific students in mind, that any question is potentially flawed and open to interpretation.
Then, when these students take the SAT, things get crazy. They can never settle on anything, because they’ve been taught that the proper approach to a multiple-choice test is to look for any way at all to bend every answer until it’s correct. They mark wrong answers left and right—usually they manage to eliminate one or two choices, and then the rest all seem equally correct, so they take a stab at each question and move on to the next.
As we know from our discussion on guessing, most of these students are wrong way more often than they think, and they lose a lot of points.
And the thing of it is, they never even realize what’s holding them back.
Two Key Realizations
If you’re going to do well on the SAT, you have to realize two things. First, you have to know that the SAT is a totally objective test, and that every single question has only one right answer. This is not like a test you take in high school. Those tests are written by one or two people, usually with very little review. The SAT, on the other hand, is written by teams of people. Before a question appears on the SAT, it’s been reviewed by experts and tested on real test-takers. SAT questions are basically bullet-proof. No matter how much it might seem otherwise, every question on the SAT has only one good answer. You can’t approach it like you approach a high school multiple-choice test, where anything goes and you’ll get a chance to argue your point later on.
Once you come to accept that, the second thing you have to realize is that you—specifically YOU, the person reading this right now—can find the answer to every SAT question if you learn what to look for. You can. And with the right practice, you will.
So let’s wrap this whole thing up nice and simple:
1. The only way to do really well on the SAT is to mark the correct answer to most of the questions on the test.
2. The only reliable way to mark the correct answer consistently is to be able to identify it consistently.