<p>I've been practicing on my weakest subject (math) now for the past few weeks and I want to know from all the high scorers here how do they concentrate and pay attention to every single part of the question.</p>
<p>My problem is that I know how to solve the problems the majority of the time, it's just that I don't necessarily answer exactly what the question is asking for. Basically, I make silly mistakes, enough of them to hurt my overall score drastically. How do you guys make sure to pay attention to every single part of the question? I always seem to forget in the midst of solving a Hard question.</p>
<p>Also, is it ever a good thing to skip a question, even if you have narrowed down the answer choices to 4, or 3? There are some times where I am just not sure how to solve a problem but I know that some of the answer choices aren't right. I've thought that skipping them would make more sense because the curve is much harsher than CR or W in that one or two wrong can be -50 points. It's a tossup for me, because sometimes I have that gut feeling about what an answer is, but I just don't want to risk it. Do you guys take that risk?</p>
<p>well first… you have to read the question. If its something like x+y = 10 and it asks to find x i write down x = at the bottom of like the work space and then I would check at the end to make sure I solved for x and NOT y.
If it is like a word problem, I would slow down and read the question carefully to make sure I “understand” what it is asking for.
I try to speed through the ones in the beginning (cause they are really easy…) and I usually have like 4 mins for the last 2 questions (which are the hardest) and make me think. Sometimes they are easy, sometimes they are hard.
If you are making careless errors and missing the hard ones then what I would do is slow down and pace yourself. the easy questions should NEVER be missed. easy questions = hard questions in points.
As for guessing, if I can eliminate at least one choice I would guess; however, I also factor in the amount of “possible” errors I already made (whcih I would circle on the tesT). cause remember, you get docked one off when u get -3 total. So if I am at “-2” then I would simply leave it blank.</p>
<p>I really like writing what you are solving for on the bottom of your work to make sure you answered the question. I’ll make sure to do that.</p>
<p>I never miss the Easy questions (well maybe once I think), but most of the time all of my mistakes happen within the last 3 questions. I’ve kind of psyched myself out in the Math section because of bad experiences the first few times I took a practice SAT. I’ve found out now that most of the Hard problems are extremely easy as long as you know how to use the information they give you correctly, it’s just silly mistakes, and those somewhat frequent occasions where I have absolutely no idea what to do that hurt me.</p>
<p>circle or underline what they are asking for.</p>
<p>sometimes the side of a square is X, and you had to do sooo much work to find that side, but they are actually asking for the area. the problem with that is the devious testmakers will put in the value of plain X in the answer menu.</p>
<p>also, do not overthink problems. the math on this test is relatively simple. what kept me from an 800 is that i thought too much about a problem and ended up using precalc to get the absolute wrong answer.</p>
<p>other than that, every single section tests the same concepts. you seem to have the concepts down. just work slower. you can probably rip through the easy section in 5 or 10 minutes. read the hard questions to yourself as if you were stupid.</p>
<p>The math should not be rushed through, you save what 3-5 seconds missing a word, and then if you’re lucky you catch the error and then you waste 10-30 seconds to even up to a min(if it’s one of the hard problems) redoing the whole problem. There’s no reward for rushing through even the earlier problems other than a gain for 1-5 seconds. It’s not worth it… Just read the whole sentence understand it and work. Most of the time that you run out of time you either wasted too much time on the problem (losing the discipline to skip problems) or you probably can’t do the problem with the most efficient or semi-efficient way in which you had to do the loong guess and check way so yeah… narrow down the time in the beginning questions without losing efficiency and you can save up those precious time for the last 2 or last 4 hard-questions.</p>
<p>whats ironic is i just told u to check at the end to make sure u got what u are solving for. I just got one wrong cause i didnt check T_T i was only 3/4 there to the answers… sigh. but fortunately the curve was only -1 = 790 :D</p>