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<p>For those who ace one test and actually bother to take both, I’d say the odds are fairly high – maybe even better than 50-50. Consider:</p>
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<li><p>On a question-by-question basis, the material covered is not particularly difficult for high schoolers with decent teachers</p></li>
<li><p>The “perfect scores” we talk about are not necessarily perfect: one can miss 3 (maybe even 4 on a hard curve) questions in the right places and still get the max score. That allows some tolerance for minor oversights.</p></li>
<li><p>For the ACT, you can usually get -1 in reading and still get a 36 sub-score; in two others, a -1 would usually get you a 35 sub-score, but 35.5 and above are rounded to 36</p></li>
<li><p>For the SAT, in reading you can usually have -2 and still get an 800 sub-score; in writing you can either get a 10 on the essay with perfect multiple choice or a 12 on the essay with -2 on the multiple choice</p></li>
<li><p>While the tests are slightly different, there are predictable tricks and traps, and the very best test-takers have developed their own ways of making good use of them</p></li>
<li><p>Many students who report a perfect score also note they had sufficient time left over to check much of their work and catch sloppy mistakes – or were able to devote 5 minutes or more to a particularly vexing problem</p></li>
<li><p>Many students panic and play watch-the-clock. Top test-takers have the self-confidence to not panic or doubt themselves, which reduces wasted time and allows emotional detachment</p></li>
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<p>Really, the hardest thing about these tests are that they require one to have a broad knowledge of vocabulary, grammar rules, and math skills immediately at the ready. In my readings and my observations with my two sons (my older one “only” got a 35 on his ACT but he took the test as a high school junior at age 13), right-brain learners have a significant advantage here.</p>
<p>Left-brain learners, the vast majority (70%+), learn by drill and repetition. Information gets stored in short-term memory and only slowly moves into long-term memory. Also stored information is generally accessed sequentially – i.e., by one path only. This learning style can become a drawback when trying to immediately retrieve lots of information taught over long periods of time.</p>
<p>Right-brain learners need to first see the big picture framework, but are able to store what they learn immediately into long-term memory. Based on my direct observations, this information is not memorized, it’s somehow disassembled and stored as cross-relationships. Done at the extreme, the process can look like magic: I watched my younger son teach himself a semester’s worth of college material – AP Physics C Mechanics – in 3 afternoons, two quickly scanning the material and one taking old AP tests to find his weak areas. Yes, he used his knowledge of Physics B and his self-taught calculus as a baseline. But he never wrote down a new formula or saved it for reference or review, he simply stared at it for a minute or two and moved on. He did not do any practice problems until he finished the entire semester’s worth of material; and when he finished, he moved on to his next subject, 4 of them self-taught in 4 weeks in his spare time while juggling 9 other classes. Three weeks later, he took the test without time for review and got the 5.</p>
<p>So extreme right-brain learners not only have a wide range of facts stored directly into long-term memory, they can access this material in a non-sequential fashion by backing into it from many different directions. That redundancy allows them to more quickly retrieve knowledge or, in math especially, to create their own unique solutions given their understanding of general mathematical principals and the data immediately available.</p>
<p>If you happen to learn like this, repeating your success on basic-knowledge tests like the SAT and ACT, is not unlikely, even without bothering to review the material. It should be noted that there is no “free lunch” in life: such learners have a miserable time trying to answer vague or general questions – the sheer number of possible answers can overwhelm them.</p>
<p>For more on left-brain vs right-brain learners, google Linda K. Silverman and visual-spatial learners.</p>