Hello, I’m trying to understand what it’s like to get an 800 M and how to get there. I think that I’m getting very close, but I am still lacking something. Nowadays, I very rarely encounter a question I absolutely have no idea how to solve. In fact, I get the hard ones correct more often than the easy ones because I focus more on the end problems to avoid making mistakes.
I think that if I could build more speed and efficiency, I could work through the problems more quickly but maintain my level of accuracy on the hard ones. This would allow me to be able to go back over all my answers and hopefully eliminate silly mistakes/misreadings.
The weird thing is that I can do this decently in practice tests, but on the real thing (I’ve now taken the SAT twice) I seem to barely finish in time, even though the problems don’t seem any harder.
Sorry for the long post; I wanted to provide context for where I’m at. Can anyone relate to this experience and give tips on how to earn the final 40 or so points to nail an 800?
What I did was take about 6-8 practice test and have my mom or brother keep time but only give me 15 mins for the 25 min math sections and only 10 mins for the 20 min sections. I did this for the blue book from the CB and Dr. Chungs book. This increased my speed and familiarity with the test. It also allows you to do it similarly on the real test and have a good chunk of time to check your work and to rest your brain for the next section.
That seems like a good idea. Yesterday my proctor mistimed us for the last math section, and we really had 3 minutes left when I thought we had 8. So, she casually fixed the time (which she wasn’t supposed to do apparently - the proctors are supposed to allow the extra time if they mess up :/), and I never got to the last 3 questions.
If I learned to do everything in 10 minutes for the 20 minute section, there probably wouldn’t have been a problem. Also that’s a good point about resting your brain, I get exhausted near the end.
Thanks.
No problem. Just remember that colleges don’t count high scores as much if you take the test more than 3 times. So make your third time your best and last. Good luck!
Honestly, just practice. Here’s something I did: pretend like I was stupid for the easy problems, so I wouldn’t make careless mistakes. For the hard problems, I pretended like I already knew the answer and I was teaching someone when I was doing them.
If the questions on the app mentioned above were not written by the College Board, they’re probably not as helpful as “real” test questions.