The SAT Prep Black Book(21)
Wasting Time On Tough Questions
Most people who run out of time on the SAT try to answer all the questions in a section in order. This is a huge mistake, since some questions will be easier for you than others, and since every question in a section counts for the same number of raw points as any other question in that section.
When you run into a question you can’t answer quickly, you should skip it and move on to other questions that are easier for you. You can always come back to the harder questions later. There’s no sense in staring at question 6 for a full three minutes when you haven’t even looked at question 7; in those three minutes, you might have been able to answer 7, 8, and 9 correctly.
Personally, when I look at a new question I give myself about 10 seconds to figure out how to approach it. If I can’t work out an approach in that time, I move on to the next question without thinking twice. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying that I solve every question in less than 10 seconds; I’m saying that I give myself about 10 seconds to see if I can come up with an approach that will eventually solve it.)
If I’ve looked at a question for a full 10 seconds and I still have no idea how to attack it, then I’ve probably misunderstood some part of it, and I should move on to another question that makes sense to me. I can always come back to the harder question after I’ve gone through the section and answered everything I can figure out.
Recap
While every student is unique, most time-management issues come down to some combination of the ideas I’ve mentioned in this brief section. But I really want to stress that the most widespread cause of difficulty for most students is that they’re addressing the test in the wrong way, and doing far too much work to answer each question. The best thing you can do to improve your time management is to work on your efficiency, not your processing speed. If you focus on trying to understand and apply the ideas in this book, you’ll probably find that your time management issues largely disappear on their own.
The “Big Secret” Of The SAT
“There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”
- Jean Racine
Before we get into all the strategies and advice for specific areas of the test, I want to start out by sharing something very important with you: the “secret” of the SAT.
Here it is: The SAT frustrates so many test-takers because it asks about very basic things in very strange (but repetitive) ways. The simple reason so many people struggle with the test is that they’re looking at it in completely the wrong way.
Let’s examine why this is.
Imagine that you’re the College Board, which is the company that makes and administers the SAT. Colleges use your test scores to help them figure out which applicants to admit, and they only trust your test because it consistently provides them with reliable measurements. So how do you go about making a test that can be given to millions of students a year and still compare them all in a meaningful way, despite the wide variations in their backgrounds and abilities?
You can’t just make a super-difficult test, because that won’t really provide useful information to the colleges who rely on you. For example, you can’t just focus the math test on advanced ideas from calculus and statistics, because most of the test-takers have never taken those subjects—and, even if they had, the results from your test wouldn’t really tell the colleges anything they couldn’t already learn from students’ transcripts. And you can’t make a test that relies on arbitrary interpretation or argumentation, because then the test results wouldn’t correlate to anything meaningful on a large scale, and colleges wouldn’t be able to rely on the data from your test.
So, if you’re the College Board, you need to design the SAT so that it avoids testing advanced concepts and so that it avoids arbitrary interpretation. Otherwise, your test will be useless for colleges, because colleges want to use a test that measures something meaningful about every applicant in the same way every time.
In other words, you have to come up with an objective test of basic ideas.
But then you have another problem: if you give a traditional objective test of basic ideas to millions of college-bound, motivated students, a lot of them are going to do really well on it—and then your results will be useless for a different reason, because there will be so many high scores that colleges won’t be able to use the results in their admissions decisions.
So how do you solve this problem?
The College Board solves this problem by combining basic ideas in weird, but repetitive, ways. The result is that doing well on the SAT involves the ability to look at a new test question and then figure out how it follows the rules that all SAT questions of that type must follow. And that’s what this book will teach you to do.