SAT Secrets from Students Who've Been There Wish I'd Known Series
The Princeton Review
You know that old saying, “Hindsight is 20/20”?
Each year, more than 2 million students take the SAT.
Now, there are the lessons you learn BEFORE you sit for the exam — did anyone say comma
splice? — and then there are the lessons you learn WHILE you sit for the exam.
And the knowledge you get AFTER the exam is different — and better – than what you
had going into it.
There’s a reason that students who retake the SAT usually get a higher score the second
time around — according to the College Board’s data.
Those students are wising up!
Today, we’re sharing their hard-won lessons with you so that you can go into your FIRST
SAT with intel from some of the best experts around — students who’ve been there.
[looks at first card]
Oh, I’ll come back to this one later.
[looks at another card]
“I wish I’d known not to spend so much time on the four reading passages!”
Do you see the problem here?
There are five reading passages.
This student spent so much time on the first four, that he wound up having to guess on
most of the last ten questions.
That’s why it’s critical that you understand the flow of the test and get a sense of the
rhythm and pace, so that you don’t spend too much time in any one place.
“I wish I’d known not to rush through the Writing questions!”
After running out of time at the end of the first section, this student overcompensated
by rushing through the beginning of the next section.
Here’s what you’ve gotta do.
Close your eyes for a second.
Take a deep breath.
Snap out of it!
Think of something funny or weird, or think of nothing, and reset yourself.
You’ve got a whole ten minutes between the Reading and Writing sections.
Get up, walk around, and reset your brain.
Don’t let the mistakes you may have made in one section continue to haunt you in the
next!
OK, folks, here’s another one.
[looks at card]
“I wish I hadn’t put the SAT off until the last test date!”
My heart breaks for this student.
She was doing almost everything right, studying diligently so that she’d only have to take
the test a single time.
It’s fine for that to be your goal, but it’d be reckless to, as they say, put all
your eggs in one basket.
What if you’re sick on the day of the test?
Or, like this student, thrown off by distractions in the testing room?
[throat clearing, paper airplane flies in front of desk]
You can—and should—take practice tests, but there’s no substitute for the real thing.
Something else to consider is your stress level.
Professional athletes spend much of their time practicing specifically to take free
throws, penalty kicks, or field goals, and they still miss some of the time.
In the long run, they do well, but imagine if you judged one of them entirely on the
one shot they missed that one time?
Look, the SAT has a superscoring option: in many ways, the makers of the test expect you
to take it more than once.
Now, nobody’s going to make you take the test again, but wouldn’t it be nice to give
yourself the comfort of knowing that you can?
Prepare to take the test once, but plan on taking it twice if needed.
“I wish I’d known not to use my calculator so often!”
This is one of the nastiest tricks on the SAT.
You’ve just taken a 25-minute math section on which you were not allowed to use a calculator,
and now you’re being told that you can use it for this next 55-minute section.
But just because you’ve been given a tool, that doesn’t mean you should use it!
Part of what the SAT is testing is your judgment about when a calculator is appropriate.
You’ve got about 90 seconds to answer each math question, and you’ve got to know when
a calculator will actually help you speed up.
Start by Reading the Question and set up the problem on the paper, with your pencil.
Then only grab your calculator if you need it!
“I wish I’d known to avoid the reference sheet!”
This is a similar trap to the one we just spoke about with the calculator.
The SAT gives you a reference sheet for commonly tested formulas and triangle properties.
If your mind goes blank on a question about the Pythagorean theorem or you forget how
to find the volume of a cone, it’s good to be able to refer back to them.
But it’d be faster still if you knew those formulas off the top of your head and didn’t
have to flip back and forth.
And given all the practice you’re going to do, you will know them.
“I wish I’d known that I could solve the questions in any order!”
This is the one I said, appropriately enough, that we’d come back to later!
You see, one of the biggest mistakes students make is approaching the SAT—or even a literary
passage—as if it’s a book.
They go front to back, beginning to end.
That’s important for a text in which everything’s connected, where the ideas are layered and
cumulative, where if you leave out an early piece of information, nothing else will make
sense.
But the SAT is a series of mostly disconnected questions, and even a passage-based question
can often be approached by picking out a specific window of text to focus on.
In this case, the student hit some early, discouraging roadblocks and ran out of time
at the end of a few checkpoints.
By contrast, students who first jump directly to the questions they feel strongest about
build up a comfort level for the test and do better with their time management.
Here’s something every student should know: this is YOUR test.
Take it the way that works best for you.
Within a section, you should TAKE THE EASY TEST FIRST.
Take it according to your own Personal Order of Difficulty.
Do not let the test makers hoodwink you into following their order.
That’s how you leave points on the table, and you want to make sure that you earn every
point that should rightfully be yours.
Folks, that’s how we take lessons learned the hard way — and transform them into lessons
learned the easy way!
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