The SAT Prep Black Book(91)
The Recommended Math Path
Now that we’ve explained the rules and patterns that you’ll find on the SAT Math section, we can look at the process that I recommend for those questions. I call it the “Math Path,” mostly because that rhymes.
The Math Path is a set of guidelines to help us figure out how to attack tough questions. You won’t need to use it on every question, and you can modify it as you keep practicing. I’m teaching it to you because it’s a good way to keep all of the elements of SAT Math questions in mind. If you practice with these ideas, you’ll find that they become second nature.
1. Read the question carefully.
This might sound kind of strange, but if you asked me to pick the single mistake that costs people the most points on the Math part of the SAT, I’d say it’s the mistake of not reading the questions and the answer choices carefully.
In fact, we should really think of the entire SAT, including the Math portion, as an extended test of reading skills. Most of what we do on the Math portion of the test will depend on our ability to notice key phrases and details in each question.
By the way, because of the way SAT Math works, if you know the meanings of every word in a particular question, then you know enough math to be able to answer that question. Trust me on this—we’ll see proof of it as we continue.
2. Read the answer choices if there are any.
Most students ignore the answer choices in a Math question until they’re basically done with the question. They typically read a question, try to figure out the answer on their own, and look for that answer (or a similar answer) in the answer choices. Now, if you could successfully do that for the course of an entire test without making a single mistake, it’s true that you wouldn’t miss any questions. But so many questions become so much easier to answer when we consider the answer choices as part of the question from the very beginning.
Remember that the College Board likes to play little games in the answer choices of the SAT Math section. We talked about some of those “games” a few pages ago when we covered the hidden patterns of these questions. Sometimes wrong answers will include elements of the right answer, for instance, or sometimes they’ll form a series, and so on. Sometimes, simply noting that all the answer choices are one-digit numbers can be enough to help you realize how to approach a question.
So after you read the main part of the question, look over the answer choices and see what kind of options the test is giving you. Try to figure out why the test is presenting the answer choices that way—look at the values in the choices, but also look at the relationships between those values, and try to think about how those relationships might be important to the question.
I said earlier that it’s important to remember that every SAT Math question can be answered in less than 30 seconds each if we’re really on our game. Often, a large part of finding these super-fast solutions involves thinking about how the answer choices relate to the question from the very beginning.
So remember to think of the entire question, including the answer choices, as one big system of ideas. We’ll see several examples of how this works when we look at some real SAT questions from the College Board’s blue book in a few pages.
3. Consider diagrams, if there are any.
As we discussed earlier, there are two questions you should always ask yourself when a math question includes a diagram:
1. Is this drawn to scale?
2. Are any dimensions of the diagram left out of the diagram itself but included in the text underneath it?
If a diagram is drawn to scale, we can often (but not always) find the answer to the question just by looking at the diagram itself.
If the diagram is not to scale, the reason is almost always that drawing it to scale would have given away the correct answer. So if we re-draw the diagram to scale, we’ll often be able to figure out how to answer the question pretty easily.
Any dimensions that are left out of the diagram itself but included in the text of the question will probably be the basis for the first step in the solution to the question.
4. Think about what areas of math might be involved.
Now that you’ve read the question and the answer choices, and considered the diagram if there is one, you should have a pretty good idea of which specific math terms and concepts are mentioned in the question.
Many test-takers overlook the fact that the solution to a question can only involve concepts that are immediately related to the concepts in the question. It sounds kind of obvious once it’s pointed out, but everything in math proceeds in a step-by-step fashion, with each step building on the previous one.