<p>Hi there! If you're reading this, you're probably some desperate student who's taking the SAT soon (in a few months' time) and want some quick easy tips to do well. However, there's no easy way to go about it - just sheer hard work in the right direction! I hope these tips will be helpful for you :)</p>
<p>Just some background information about me:
I'm an international (Asian - so stereotypically good at math) student, and a senior in high school (I'll graduate Nov 2014) and speak English as my first language. I just took the SAT January test and my score breakdown is CR 790, Math 800, WR 780 (10 essay). I prepared for the SAT for a year without any tuition or external help (stingy haha). I wasn't the most hardworking person, but I did a lot of last minute mugging (December+January) and it paid off. When I started I scored around 2100~2200(blue book, papers 8-10). I did a total of 22 full papers for practice (this may seem like a lot, but it really is quite minimal work in order to achieve such a high score, unless you are a genius). I am a Math and Science person, so I was terrible at CR and WR.</p>
<p>Picking the right practice materials:
I tried a lot of different books during my prep, and 2 months before I took the test, I tried the one of the Princeton Review practice test and scored 1870 (that is the worst - I generally scored 2000+,2100+). For those of you out there who feel that you weren't doing well on the prep books not by CollegeBoard, fret not. I did terribly (compared to my real score) on the Barron's as well, scoring 2100+ only. Personally, the prep books not by CollegeBoard were far from the best. They were almost nothing like the real tests, and my advice to those last minute muggers out there is: don't do those prep books. Of course, for practice, they can be ok in helping you hone your skills. But I found that the scores one would get from these practice papers were totally different from what one would get on the real test. I checked with my peers as well, and many of them agreed. </p>
<p>That said, the Blue Book wasn't great either. Some papers were too easy, and most of them weren't even the real tests. Let's face it - CollegeBoard is so stingy - they wouldn't bother spending so much money to hire people to make practice papers - people are going to buy their books as they are the original test-makers anyway. While I would say that the Blue book is better than Barron's or Princeton Review or whichever SAT books, it's still not so useful. What I found most helpful was <em>drumroll please</em> the torrented past SAT papers online. Yes. I know this may be controversial to many to think of using these torrents, but they are really effective - and you cannot pay for practice papers that are as close to the real one as these are (these are real ones). If you can torrent them, you should. Nearer to the date of SAT (early Jan - very late!), I found out that these can be torrented and I did them for practice. I did about 7 of them, all of which I scored 2300+ on. Previously, I had lost so much hope while doing the Barron's and Princeton Review that I thought I was lucky if I could even scrape a 2200. These practices are your best bets. Also, who knows if CB might reuse the questions from these torrents. I actually found a question in WR section 10 that I had done before (but I had gotten it correct before as well). It made me laugh during the test! ^^</p>
<p>Study methods:
Ok then to the actual studying. So there's no real point in getting good practice papers without making the best use of them. For every paper, I would mark out the questions that I was unsure of, and so after I completed the paper and got them marked, I would check to see why I got these "difficult" questions right and why I got them wrong. Then i would write them down in a small book so that I could just go through my errors whenever I wanted.
The best thing about doing this is that it helped me identify what kinds of errors that I liked to make. More than just for learning the skills/grammatical structures (I did well for math from the start), it made me understand what kinds of questions I should pay closer attention to when I was doing the test. For instance, I found out that while I understood the subject-verb agreement rule well, I did not apply it well during my WR practices. Thus, I paid particular attention to these questions in the real tests and checked them to ensure I got them right. Also, I managed to spot where I like to make careless mistakes on for math, and so I paid more attention to these questions and was less prone to making mistakes.</p>
<p>Vocab) Direct Hits vocabulary + words I didn't know from my practice papers -->revised them the day before SAT</p>
<p>CR) lots of practice papers...just doing them a lot made me used to the kinds of questions, and what kinds of answers the are correct (this is very vague, but when you practise a lot you will get the idea).</p>
<p>Essay) I've never had my essay formally graded and I only got a 10, so maybe my advice is not the best. I follow a fixed structure that I use for most of my expository writing (not SAT). I have a short introduction presenting my view (I make sure I have a clear stand - agree/disagree but no in-betweens) + my thesis statement which presents the 3 topics that I will write for each paragraph. In the body, I make sure I write 3 paragraphs - each beginning with a topic statement, have a short explanation, and elaborated by one example. Conclusion is just a one-liner. I throw in about 5 big words inside the essay, and write at least 1.75 pages. I heard that SAT essays are more about quantity than quality.
I can't remember what I wrote for my essay, but if requested, I will post my essay up after I get the full score report :) </p>
<p>WR) practise, review, practise more and keep reviewing. I identified what kinds of errors that I usually made, tried to explain to myself why the correct answer was as such, and focused on the types of questions that I usually did wrong.</p>
<p>Practise time:
I make sure that when I do a practice paper, I do it like it's the real test. I sit down for 3h25min (none of the practices had experimental section) and have regulated 5 min breaks. I tried to do many tests in the morning (8 a.m.) and tried not to stop until I had completed the entire paper. The key is to get used to the test taking environment as best as I could. This is very important. I had a few friends who did well on their practices but terribly on the real thing. My guess is that they did not time themselves properly or took too many breaks or did a couple of sections a day during their practice. This would for sure have had a big impact on their practice scores. In the real test, it is very likely that one will feel drained out by 2h+. Make sure you get used to the long duration of the test-taking.</p>
<p>Test-taking day:
Eat a huge breakfast, but not one full of carbohydrates. I heard that rice and other carbs make one sleepy, and that is the last thing I want to have happen to me during SAT. Have a protein shake/a sandwich. Don't drink energy drinks in the morning - it's a 3h test, not a 5 min sprint.</p>
<p>Make sure you have some snacks - I bought some goji berries coated with dark chocolate and ginger candy. Ginger candy was for my earlier breaks, to help invigorate me and wake me up a little :) I ate the dark chocolate during my final break so that I could have an energy spurt to do well for the last lap.</p>
<p>Don't be distracted! The guy next to me was shaking his legs and that caused the whole floor to shake, but I didn't let myself get distracted and continued to focus. There may be a lot of unexpected distractions i.e. construction work outside test centre, and you should be prepared for them. There's not a lot of time to get distracted, especially not during the CR sections. </p>
<p>Good luck with your preparation and SAT! </p>
but I wasn’t too fond of it and thought it was over-rated. </p>