Hi,
I’ll be taking the PSAT in October, and need to start studying. The school counselor suggested to me and my parents and we should study with Khan Academy. I have no other knowledge with any other prep courses, online or in-person. So assuming I’ll register with KA, how much time should I spend per day during the school year and summer? How are you guys doing it?
Thanks!!!
Are you going to be a junior when you take it? If you’ll be any younger, don’t study, you’ll have plenty of time later.
If you will be a junior (ie you want to do well for National Merit), then your first step should be to take a practice test! How far you are from your goal score will inform how much you practice. I haven’t used KA test prep myself, but I’ve heard it has different types of questions based on the areas you’re struggling with – so, if you set up an account, it may guide your studying itself, as well.
My last piece of advice would be not to go overboard; for one thing, you have other stuff to do and should be enjoying life. For another, if you practice too much you won’t have time to absorb what you’re learning and you may plateau. I find this to be true for beginners in many disciplines.
Thank you for your advice! I will be a junior in Oct, currently finishing up sophomore year. The reason for my question is that, as you know, I do have other schoolwork to do during the year, and other things to do as well. I’m just not sure if say, 30 minutes a day is good, or 1 hour every other day, or other frequency/duration?
Hmm… of course, you should experiment and find what works best for you. I find in life there are generally two types of studying required.
One is the kind of studying where you build up gradually over a long period of time – for example, if you decide you want to work on increasing your vocabulary, don’t cram in a hundred words in an hour. You won’t remember most of them, so instead, do a few every day – ten minutes or twenty or whatever you have time for – so each one has time to settle in your brain.
The other type of studying is the kind where you have to digest big topics – for example, if you needed to learn some more math that you haven’t covered in school. For this, I find you need a larger chunk of time and more time to process it into your brain. I would study something like this one to three times a week, in blocks of maybe 45 minutes to an hour and a half. That lets you master the topic, then have it percolate before you attack the next one.
If your score is pretty close to where you want it to be, I definitely wouldn’t put in any more than a few hours a week (say fifteen minutes of focused review a day, plus an hour and a half on one weekend day). If you want to improve a lot, then you’ll have to decide how much time you’re willing to put in.
I’d recommend hardcopy books over online resources any day. Erica Melzer’s book for the old SAT writing section improved my score by 90 points alone. Overall, I studied around 9 months, starting in spring of my sophomore year and getting the score I wanted in January of my junior year using mainly books and later on an online revision course called PrepScholar, although I can’t say much as to whether it really helped or not. For about 2 of the 9 months I spent at least 2 hours every day and did a full practice test on the weekend.