Effective Practice

How to make the most out of your SAT practice time

The number one goal of the SAT is to bubble in the highest possible number of correct answers on your scantron. Effective SAT practice always keeps this in mind. Like my post on the most important keys to SAT success, this sounds obvious. But we we can lose track of it when we’re worried about learning math, or grammar, or vocabulary, or tips or tricks or “the top 10 secrets the College Board does NOT want you to know.”

But of course, as you do problems, you’ll find plenty of holes in your knowledge where you need to know something from school that you’ve forgotten or never learned. This is why I recommend you structure your SAT study time into a “practice phase” and a “learning phase.”

Practice Phase

The SAT is a performance skill, just like driving a car, or juggling, or learning an instrument. You get better at performance skills by doing them over and over with an intent to improve. Your practice phase should be focused on one thing: using the knowledge you already have to circle the highest number of correct answers on real SAT questions. During the test, you can’t look anything up. When you don’t know the best method to get an answer, you’re going to have to put something down. You want to practice attacking a question with every tool available to you at the moment, and NOT worrying about the tools you don’t have. Rule out what you know is wrong. Plug in numbers. Underline the relevant parts of the question. When all else fails, practice taking your best guess. The SAT is designed to make you feel helpless. But if you practice getting things right however you can, you’ll quickly see that there is plenty you can do even when you’re not 100% sure what the test is doing.

Because the entirety of your practice phase should be spent doing SAT problems, the most important prep book for you to use is The College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide link. The instruction in the front of the book is honestly not very helpful, especially compared with working with a tutor or even some other prep books. But it has 8 full-length real SATs (almost 600 pages of problems!) and a full answer explanation for each one, and doing problems is the best way to get better at doing problems.

On timing and setting

Your brain is a powerful connection machine. When you learn, your brain on some level everything about your mood, comfort, alertness, and mindset to what you’re learning. This is called State-dependent memory [1]. For this reason, it is important that you match up your practice time as much as possible to how you’ll be taking the test. Much of your setting can’t be perfectly replicated, and when it can’t, you should change things up whenever possible to avoid irrelevant connections (e.g. change up which room in the house you use for practice). But one important thing you should almost always do is work with a timer. Maybe for your first few practice sections, you can slow things down to get a handle on what the test is about. But after that, your practice should always be timed according to exactly how much time you’ll have on the SAT for the set of problems you’re doing. This will amp up the pressure, but that’s a good thing! You’ll be under time pressure on test day, so you should practice using all the time you have to circle as many correct answers as possible on the page.

On days where you want to take a full practice test (I usually recommend you do at least 3 or so before your test date in addition to your more bite-sized daily work), you can match your test-day state even more. Start the practice test early on a weekend morning. Drive somewhere and take it at a 3rd-party location. Eat what you plan on eating for breakfast on test day. Wear what you’re going to wear for your real test. Have someone else run the timer. Tear out a bubble sheet from your book and use it. The more you can match up, the more effective the practice will be!

learning phase

The learning phase is about acquiring more tools that you will use to bubble more correct answers on your SAT scantron. Right after finishing a practice phase, you should check your answers. While you’re looking over what you missed, I recommend you keep two running lists that grow each study session.

The first list should be a list of things you can do better the next time you practice. Most commonly, this list will detail the (probably many, at first!) simple or even silly mistakes you made that you catch while reviewing. But the list should also have more proactive steps. Things like “go with my first instinct when guessing” or “look at the main idea questions again after I’ve finished the rest of the passage’s questions”. Writing down what you’re seeing on the spot will help you to remember the next time you’re in a similar situation, and keeping all of your observations on the same list will make it more clear when the same issue is popping up frequently.

The second list should be a list of topics you want to look up that would have helped you answer more questions right. If the topic pops up more than once, make sure you keep a tally so you know how to prioritize. The bulk of your learning phase will be spent looking these topics up (or asking for help with them from your tutor!). There are plenty of resources online and in print for learning specific topics in math and grammar. I recommend that you always start by trying to find the information on Khan Academy. They have clear, easy to understand videos on a variety of SAT topics. If you have trouble even naming the topic, sometimes just searching for the question/section/test number you want to know about on a search engine or YouTube will provide great advice. If you work better with pencil and paper, The College Panda SAT Math Advanced Guide and Workbook by Nielson Phu and The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar by Erica Meltzer are excellent supplementary books. If all else fails, you can always ask a trusted teacher, friend, or parent/guardian. After you feel more comfortable with the topic you wanted to learn, it is very beneficial to go back over the relevant problems you missed (including on earlier practice phases) to make sure you can use what you’ve learned to get the right answers.

Especially early on, if you’re dividing your practice and learning time correctly (I recommend a 50-50 split to start, shifting to about a 75-25 split close to test day), your list of topics to learn will grow much faster than you can possibly cover. That’s okay! Keep at it, and you’ll find fewer and fewer things to add as you learn more and more. But never lose sight of the main goal: you improve your SAT score by practicing circling the highest number of right answers on the page. You don’t learn how to factor a difference of squares just to know more math because you hear that’s some math on the SAT. You learn how to factor a difference of squares because you missed #15 on Page 729 of your book, and you know you’ve missed a few others like it, and you want to get those questions right the next time you see them on the SAT. Stay on target, put in the time, and your score will skyrocket.