The SAT Prep Black Book(19)

3. Before you can identify the correct answer consistently, you have to know and believe that there will always be one correct answer for every question—if you’re open to the possibility that more than one answer will be correct, you won’t be strict about eliminating answers by using the rules and patterns of the test.

4. Most students never realize this, and as a result they never maximize their performance. Instead, they treat the SAT like a regular high school test, which is a huge mistake for the reasons we just discussed.

Now that we’ve established this very important concept, we have to talk about something that comes up often in testing situations . . .





What Do You Do When It Looks Like There Might Be Two Right Answers To A Question?


Even though you know there can only be one answer to every SAT question, there will be times on the test when you think more than one answer might be correct. It happens to everybody. It happens to me, and it will happen to you. When it does happen, you must immediately recognize that you’ve done something wrong—you missed a key word in the question, you left off a minus sign, something like that.

There are two ways to fix this situation. One way is to cut your losses and go on to the next question, planning to return to the difficult question later on, when your head has cleared. This is what I usually do.

The second way is to keep working on the difficult question. Try and figure out what might be causing the confusion while the question is still fresh in your mind, and resolve the issue right then and there. I’m not such a big fan of this one because I tend to find that things are clearer to me when I return to a question after skipping it. But some people find that moving on without answering a question just means they have to familiarize themselves with it all over again when they come back, and they prefer to stay focused on a particular question until they either find the right answer or decide to give up on it for good.

To see which type of person you are, just do what comes naturally, and experiment a little bit with both approaches.





Conclusion


The main thing to remember, for every question, is that there is only one correct answer. If we read a question and we think we see more than one possible answer to a question, we’re wrong. That’s it—no discussion.

To become successful on the SAT, you MUST realize that every multiple-choice question on the SAT has exactly one correct answer, and you must train yourself to find the correct answer every time. This isn’t a regular high school test. Don’t treat it like one.

(I realize, of course, that every once in a while an SAT question is successfully protested. This happens with such rarity that it’s best to proceed as though it never happened at all. The odds are overwhelmingly in favor every SAT question you ever see being totally objective and valid.)





Where To Find “Missing Points”


“Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”

- Peter Drucker

Most test-takers have some idea of a target score that will make them competitive for their target schools, or for certain scholarship programs, and those target scores are usually somewhere in the range of 1500 to 2250, depending on the student’s goals and situation (of course, there are some people whose target scores might be higher or lower, as well).

Most people try to hit their target scores by improving in the areas where they’re weakest, and that’s certainly understandable. But I would recommend that you also consider working to improve the areas where you’re strongest first, for 3 reasons:

oPeople usually feel more comfortable working on their strong areas, so there’s less stress.

oThe mistakes you’re making in your strong areas are more likely to be things related to “careless errors,” or things you can correct with minimal effort.

oThe closer you are to the top of the scoring scale, the bigger the impact of each new question that you answer correctly. In other words, if you’re scoring around a 710 in the Math section, then answering one or two more questions correctly might increase your math score by 30 points or more. But if you’re scoring around a 520, then answering another one or two questions correctly might only raise your score 10 points. This is the result of the norming process that the College Board uses to “curve” the test scores.

So if you find yourself short of your goal score, it might be a good idea to focus first on making your strong areas even stronger, rather than struggling to bring your weak areas up.





But What If I Need To Meet A Target Score Within A Single Section?


Some test-takers don’t just need to reach a certain overall score; sometimes schools are looking for scores on individual sections to meet particular cutoffs. But you can still use the strategy of improving on your strong areas even in these situations, because every section has different question types, and most students are naturally more inclined to some questions types than to others. I would recommend focusing on your preferred question types until you’re basically perfect at answering them before going on to question types that you don’t like as much.