I would advise most test-takers to focus on improving the Writing Multiple Choice questions and the SAT Essay last (in either order). Of course, this assumes that your target schools will even care about those scores. If they don’t, then there’s probably no point in devoting your energy to them. You can find out if your target schools consider the Writing score by looking at their websites or contacting their admissions departments and asking directly.
Drills And Exercises
Most people get ready for the SAT or PSAT the same way they would get ready for a school test: they try to memorize stuff (vocabulary, formulas, essay examples, whatever), and then they do a lot of practice questions. After you’ve read the sections of this book that deal with the way SAT questions work, you’ll understand why the memorization/repetition approach won’t help you. The SAT isn’t a test of advanced knowledge, so memorizing obscure definitions and math formulas won’t do much. And it doesn’t repeat test items exactly, so taking tons of practice tests with the idea that you’ll see the exact same questions on test day is also a bad idea.
(This, by the way, is why you probably know so many people who work so hard on the SAT or PSAT and have so little to show for it. They’re getting ready for the test as though it were a final exam in a Geometry class, and that’s not what it is.)
Of course, that raises an important question: if you’re not supposed to get ready for the SAT by memorizing stuff and doing a million practice questions, then what are you supposed to do instead?
You’re supposed to try to understand the test instead. When you understand how the SAT works—really, truly understand it—you’ll find that it’s a very basic test, and that you really don’t need to spend a hundred hours getting ready for it. (If you’re going for a perfect 2400, you may need to spend a bit more time than the average person, but we’ll talk about that later).
You come to understand the SAT by thinking about how the test is designed and why it’s designed that way, so that you can eventually see it the same way the College Board sees it. And you get to that point by thinking about the things that we talk about in this book, and by making a conscious and intentional effort to apply them to a sufficient sample of real test questions.
This process may incidentally involve a little memorization—you’ll want to remember what kinds of patterns and things to look for, for example. And it will also involve a certain amount of practice as you learn to apply these ideas against real test questions. But our ultimate goal is to see the SAT as a coherent, predictable system of rules and patterns that we understand, instead of having to say, “I’ve memorized thousands of words and done 30 practice tests, but my score just isn’t improving.”
Ultimately, you want to realize that the SAT tests the same underlying principles according to the same rules and patterns on every test, but that each individual SAT question will appear unique to people who don’t know how the test works. And you want to be able to identify the ways that an individual question follows those rules and patterns, so that you can “decode” each question and mark the answer that the College Board will reward.
Now let’s talk about some different options for getting to that point. Here are three of my favorite exercises. I’ve given them ridiculous names to help them stick in your head, and to emphasize that they’re different from just mindlessly repeating practice questions over and over again.
1. The Semi-Structured Stare-And-Ponder
The Semi-Structured Stare-And-Ponder is a great way to begin to appreciate how the SAT is actually designed. You start out by learning the general idea of how a certain question type works by reading the relevant portions of this Black Book and looking at a good number of the sample solutions in here. Then you find a question of the same general type (Passage-Based Reading, Improving Sentences, whatever) in the Blue Book or some other College Board source.
And then you stare at the question.
And you ponder it.
You try to figure out how that question is doing the kinds of things that I talk about in this book. You think carefully about the wording, the answer choices, all that stuff. Ultimately, your goal is to understand the College Board’s motivation for writing the question in that way—why the right answer is right, why the wrong answers are wrong, and why the College Board thinks the wrong answers would be appealing to different types of test-takers who might make different types of mistakes.
When you feel you’ve stared at a particular question and pondered it long enough, you move on to another one, and stare at it (and ponder it, too). You look for the same types of design elements and relationships, with the same ultimate goal of seeing the question through the College Board’s eyes, and being able to explain every aspect of the question’s design.