Blog post from http://ndasks.blogspot.kr/2017/02/behind-facade-of-high-sat-scores.html
I was a sophomore in high school, and all my Asian friends were studying for the SAT in hagwons. I had never been to a hagwon. They told me these hagwons provide information on everything about the test, such as when and where to take it, the best times to take it, the best times to prepare for it, and most importantly, how to prepare for it. Very little effort was needed to convince my parents that I wanted to enroll for the summer.
Come summer vacation. I took five weeks of classes in June and July, Monday to Friday, from 7 a.m. to noon. Basically it was around 2 hours of Reading and Writing tests followed by classes where Ivy League educated teachers would explain the answers to the test questions. I did not attend Math class.
In my first test, I got a 550 in Reading and 590 in Writing. Depressing. A lot of room for improvement, though. I was motivated, and I spent those five weeks memorizing vocabulary and working through prep book after prep book. The classes were helpful, too. Students were divided up into 10 classes, based on their scores. Each class had around 30 students, but most of them were tired and forced to be there, so there was plenty of opportunity to ask questions. I did around half the talking.
I expected improvement, and there was some. I found the writing questions learnable, and I was memorizing 50 new words a day. By the third week I was getting mid 600’s in both subjects. But I was still far away from getting into Yale, and there was no significant improvement after that. I rarely got scores above 700 that summer. Test questions were too confusing. Too ambiguous. Too often, I would narrow my five answer choices down to two, and would end up with the wrong answer. This was the biggest gumption trap. By the end of the five weeks, I was still at the mid 600’s. I could have extended my course, but I thought that there would be diminishing returns.
I continued preparation into my first semester of 11th grade. I was taking two AP’s and was into a bunch of extracurriculars. Not super busy, but not a lot of time to prepare for the SAT. By now I had a lot of vocabulary memorized and a lot of prep books finished, so I would devote my Saturdays to take a full length test in the morning and review wrong answers in the afternoon. With the test starting at 8 in the morning, I estimated that I would have to wake up at least 3 hours before that to get my brain fired up. I also tried to simulate test conditions, but I had no idea what the test conditions were going to be like. So I tried every condition imaginable. I would take the test with the windows open and windows closed; with the seat up and the seat down; with socks on and socks off; with eyeglasses; with contact lenses; with pen and paper; with pencil and paper; without scratch paper; with my sister practicing flute; with my mother cooking; with the TV on in the living room; and with the lights on and lights off (power outages were very common in China back then) . . . the only thing that I kept constant was the day of the week and the time of the test. This got me mentally prepared be ready for anything.
A few weeks before the test, I stumbled across a New York Times article that said that the essay scores were strongly correlated with essay length. This greatly disturbed me, but I soon realized that I could take advantage of this. I did. The SAT was, after all, a means to an end.
On January 28, 2012, I took the official test for the first time. As planned, I tried to get a good night’s sleep and woke up at 5 a.m., but intentionally arrived a bit late to the testing center. I knew that the first 30 minutes would consist of filling out my name, address, and other contact information that really should take less than 5 minutes. Just two months before that, on December 3, 2011, I had taken the SAT subject tests, and I had found those first 30 minutes to be a tiresome experience, far from the ideal start of a very important and expensive test.
After quickly filling out basic information, I started my essays. I tried to concentrate the whole 3 hours and 45 minutes by trying to be interested in the reading passages. After the first two hours, I started feeling fatigue, but I knew that I could finish it, and that I should, or else I would have to through the whole process again. I wanted to be done with it. That kept me going.
A few anxious weeks passed and results came. I was very lucky. I had guessed on more than three questions on sentence completion alone, but only got 1 wrong. I made two mistakes on the Math section, but my subject test could compensate for that. Again, lucky.
My scores: 800 R, 800 W, 770 M
The best part was that I could now teach at hagwons. The income was enough to earn back everything I had spent on preparation.
Wolfram Alpha placed me somewhere around the 99.9th percentile. But to be honest, I do not belong there. I know too many people with Reading scores less than 750 who are better readers than I am. During my 6 months of studying, neither my real reading nor my writing skills improved. All I gained was vocabulary, a review of basic grammar, and psychological preparedness.
Because I started off in the 500’s, I know how intimidating the 800’s look. But now that I have achieved it, I think the scores are lying. I am not that good. I just had a lot of practice predicting the answers that ETS deemed correct. The test does not require much skill. The test is learnable. Take advantage of this. It is, after all, a means to an end.