The SAT Prep Black Book(4)
What if I want to score a 2400? What if I only need to score a 1500 (or 1800, or 2000, or whatever)?
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to use different strategies to reach different score levels, because the design of the SAT is constant. It would be more accurate to say that in order to score a 2400 you need to be roughly 99% accurate in your execution of the SAT strategies in this Black Book, while in order to score an 1800 you must be roughly 80% accurate, and in order to score a 1500 you must be a little less than 50% accurate, and so on.
So scoring higher isn’t a question of learning separate strategies; it’s a question of how accurate you are when applying a fixed set of strategies.
What if I can’t get the strategies to work?
Most students experience difficulty with some of these strategies at some point in their preparation, even if the difficulty is only limited to a specific practice question.
This can be frustrating, of course, but it’s actually a great opportunity to improve your understanding of the test, because the experience of figuring out how to overcome these temporary setbacks can be very instructive if we let it.
When a strategy doesn’t seem to work against a particular question, the first thing to do is to make sure that the practice question is a real SAT question from the College Board. The next thing is to verify that you haven’t misread the answer key—I can’t tell you how many times a student has reported struggling with a question for a long time, only to realize that he had misread the answer key, and that the correct answer would have made sense the whole time.
Assuming that you’re looking at a real College Board question, and assuming that you haven’t misread the answer key, the next thing to consider is whether the strategy you’re trying to apply is really relevant to the question. Sometimes people mistakenly try to apply a strategy for the Improving Sentences questions to an Identifying Sentence Errors question, for instance.
If you’re pretty sure the strategy you’re trying to apply really should work on a particular question, then the issue is probably that you’ve overlooked some key detail of the question, or that you’ve misunderstood a word or two somewhere in the question. At this point, it can be a very useful exercise to start over from square one and go back through the question word-by-word, taking nothing for granted and making a sincere effort to see the question with new eyes.
If you do this well, you’ll probably be able to figure out where you went wrong and why the question works the way it does. If you make an effort to incorporate the lessons from this experience into your future preparation, then it can be tremendously beneficial to your performance on test day.
On the other hand, if you keep staring at the question and you still can’t figure out what the issue is, then I would recommend that you move on to something else for a while—but do make sure you come back to the troubling question at some point and try to work it out, because the standardized nature of the SAT makes it very likely that any troubling strategic issues you run into during practice will reappear on test day, in one form or another.
Which practice books should I buy?
I designed this book so you would only need “the Black Book and the Blue Book”—just this book, and the College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide, which you can get here: http://www.SATprepBlackBook.com/blue-book. You can also sometimes find copies in the school library or in a local library, but those might have other people’s work in them already, so I don’t recommend doing it that way.
I’m having a hard time visualizing some of your techniques. What can I do?
Visit www.SATprepVideos.com, where I’ve made some sample video solutions available for free to readers of this book, to help you visualize some things more clearly.
Reading Questions
Which vocabulary words should I memorize?
I would say that you shouldn’t memorize any, at least not in the traditional sense of that idea. As I mention in the section on Sentence Completion questions, vocabulary isn’t the main obstacle for most test-takers. The main obstacle for most test-takers is that they don’t know how the questions work in the first place, and that they don’t follow the test’s rules and patterns closely. This is one of several reasons why so many people who memorize hundreds of so-called “SAT words” complain that it hasn’t helped their scores. (See the section in this book on Sentence Completion questions for more on this.)
But it can be very useful to learn how the College Board uses words like “humor,” “argument,” “undermine,” and so on. These kinds of words aren’t on most people’s minds when they talk about learning vocabulary for the SAT, because they don’t typically appear as answer choices on Sentence Completion questions. Instead, these words tend to appear in Passage-Based Reading questions, and they can cause you to miss questions if you don’t know the specific ways the College Board uses them. (For more on that, please see the chapter on Passage-Based Reading questions.)