Monday, September 10, 2007

Preparing for the SATs

The SATs are a painful, frustrating process that just about anyone who wants to go to college must endure. That is the unfortunate truth, so I can’t help you there. However, I can offer some advice on how to prepare for the SATs because if you prepare the whole experience will be much easier and much more rewarding in the long run.

One of the biggest problems with the SATs is the type of test that it is. SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test. It is testing the skills that you should have developed during your time in school. Therefore, if you are coming on this page a week, a day, or the night before the SATs then really there isn’t much you can do besides get a good night sleep before the test. Beyond that, if you haven’t been preparing, then it really is too late. That’s the bad news; let us go on to some more positive information.

I’m hoping that you come on this page (along with this entire site) as a freshman so that you can make the preparation process into something more than just cramming the night before an exam. However, that is not to say that if you are a junior who will be taking the SATs in six months that you should just ignore this. Quite the contrary, there is still a lot that you can do.

I’m going to break this down into the three major sections that make up the SATs:

Verbal

Vocab, Vocab, Vocab. This is what the verbal section of the SAT is all about. Although with the new version of the SATs the analogy section has been removed, this section of the SATs is still largely a test of how well of a vocabulary you have. Several sections are specifically geared towards knowing the definition and usage of vocabulary words, and the reading comprehension section is also partially based on being able to understand the vocabulary of the articles presented to you.

So what can you do? Well, there are tons of places to find SAT vocabulary words. SAT prep books usually have ready-made flashcards that you can pull out and use. The Internet is a great place to find lists and lists of vocabulary words. I just did a quick Google search and came with these sites:

freevocabulary.com

majortests.com

vocabtest.com

Now that you have you list of words, though, you need to study them – every day. There is no way you can learn and remember the hundreds, even thousands, of words that you will be exposing yourself to. This is why I say you should start as early as possible. Let’s say you started when you were a freshman in high school, and you decide to learn 1 word a day, just 1 word. By your junior year you would have learned over 1000 new words. Will you remember them all? Probably not, but you’ll have a much bigger vocabulary than when you started. And you should be constantly refreshing yourself on the words that you’ve already learned – this includes using them in regular speech and in writing. The best way to look at this is that you aren’t just learning vocabulary for the SATs, you are also becoming a more articulate person, which will help you throughout your life.

Increasing your vocabulary is the easiest and most effective way to boost your SAT verbal score. You should also read as much as possible. This will help in two ways. One, you will be exposed to even more words. If you are reading something and come upon a word that you don’t know, look it up (yes I know every teacher you’ve ever had has told you to do this – maybe that is because there is a good reason that ever teacher you’ve ever had has told you to do this, though). Secondly, it will get you to start thinking about what the authors are truly saying. The other half of the SAT verbal is all about reading comprehension. It is about being able to read something and understand what the author is trying to say in that body of work. The only way you’re going to be good at this is if you practice, and by practice I mean to read – a lot.

Math

The math section of the SAT is more about knowing what you can and can’t do, as well as knowing how to do what you can do as fast as possible. The SAT Math covers elementary math (adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, exponents, order of operations, etc.) through geometry, algebra, and some statistics. You might be thinking, “Well I’ve taken all those courses, I’m in calculus now, I’m way ahead.” The problem with the SAT Math is not the subject because these are the subject areas that you should have been exposed to by the time you will be taking the SATs. Rather, the problem is the level of detail and the level of understanding of the subject areas that the more difficult SAT questions require for you to answer them correctly.

Unfortunately the only way to prepare yourself for the SAT Math section is to practice, and practice, and then practice some more. This is where I found the SAT prep books to be the most helpful. Yes, the flash cards were nice for the verbal section, but the math problems that they provide along with the explained solutions that they provide are what I found to be the most useful area of the books. If you don’t have access to SAT prep books then go to your old math teachers, and ask to borrow a textbook. If your teacher doesn’t have any, find some way to get your hands on some of your old math textbooks or any other resource you might be able to think of that would provide you with math problems to work on. The Internet, again, is a great source for this. Another quick Google search yielded these sites:

majortests.com

satmathpro.com

testpreview.com

As with the Verbal preparation, this is something you want to space out over long periods of time. Do a little bit every day, or a couple times a week. You do not need to kill yourself with problems every day; in fact, that is a worse way to study than spacing it out over a long period of time. The thing with the Math section is that many of the problems can be solved in many different ways. You need to be able to identify the fastest way to complete the problem. I’ll talk about this more in the Taking the SATs article (I’ll be posting that tomorrow), but if you come on a problem and after reading it are not sure what areas of math that problem covers as well as what strategies you should be using to solve it then you did not prepare well enough. That sounds a little harsh, and it really only applies if you are going for an 800 because otherwise answering every question is not necessary, but that is the basic idea.

Writing

The writing section is a new part of the SATs (I’m not sure exactly why it was added, but I’ve heard that it was added because certain colleges in the country were no longer going to accept the SATs as a valid aptitude test unless something like the writing section was added). It is split up into main pieces – writing a short essay and revising grammatical mistakes.

The essay writing portion of the test is probably one of the more difficult things to prepare for. I’ll talk about what exactly you should include in your essay tomorrow when I post about taking the SATs, but the actual preparation for the essay writing section is really based off of your grammatical and verbal abilities. If you can write succinctly and articulately then you shouldn’t have any trouble with the essay writing portion. If you can’t write well, though, the best way to learn is to improve your verbal and grammatical abilities.

The grammatical revision section is all about your abilities to spot grammatical mistakes (whether it be something as simple as there being a missing period to something more complicated such as sentence structure) and know how those mistakes should be corrected. As with all the other areas of preparation I’ve already mentioned, studying grammar rules should be done over a long period of time. If you’re taking English classes in high school you should be exposed to this to a certain extent, but more practice will probably be needed. The SAT prep books as well as sites online would probably be your best review sources.

Other Things

College Board.com – you really should familiarize yourself with this site. These are the people that give the SAT, so there really isn’t any more knowledgeable resource. They can provide you with other tips, as well as with resources such as SAT Prep courses and books. Also, I would suggest having them send you their “SAT Question of the Day.” Doing one of these a day gives you the daily practice that I’ve been emphasizing.

Prep-Courses – I personally have mixed feelings about these. There are a lot of SAT prep courses out there that promise to increase your score by X amount of points, but generally these courses are pretty expensive ($300+ for the more developed ones). If you feel that you really need a course to give you structure and to make you study, then by all means go right ahead. However, from my experience there is little in those courses that you cannot get by buying some prep books and reading articles online about preparing for and taking the SATs.

The Night Before – like I said at the top, the night before you take the SATs the only thing you want to do is get a good night’s sleep. Staying up late – whether to study or to go out and do other stuff – is only going to hurt you. So eat a good meal and go to bed early so you make sure you get those crucial 8 hours of sleep.

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