<p>Wow silverturtle I’m amazed by your speed. Do you ever sleep?</p>
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<p>Yes, quite often in fact (nearly every day I would say).</p>
<p>would any of you guys say that just practicing/preparing for the SAT be good enough practice for the PSAT? just curious.</p>
<p>^ Yes, I believe so. Just make sure that you take at least one PSAT practice test beforehand to familiarize yourself with that test’s format.</p>
<p>There are valid reasons for wanting to do well on the PSAT. In my son’s case, the reason was that our state flagship university provides a guaranteed full tuition scholarship for national merit semifinalists. Even without that motivation, it is helpful to see if test results in the comfort of your own home match those under the pressure of a test that means something.</p>
<p>For my son he used old PSATs. I bought every test I could find from the college board. I think he ended up taking nine tests total, four before the sophomore PSAT and 5 before the Junior year test. Because of that practice he was quite well prepared for the PSAT, and later the SAT. After the PSAT, he took about another five SAT tests, studied the essay format and took the SAT in Jan. Your life gets so busy at the end of your high school career that it is a real luxury to have the SAT reasoning and SAT subject tests out of the way in your Junior year. Starting early by preparing for the PSAT will help immensely.</p>
<p>You must analyze each test if you hope to gain the most from practice tests. Not just questions you got right, but also questions that you weren’t sure about. If you make a lot of dumb mistakes, analyze why that occurs and try some of the tips on CC and in some of the different prep books to help you. Don’t get obsessed with the test to the exclusion of the rest of your application, but do put some time into it. It has a large weighting in most college admission decisions, spend the appropriate amount of time to get your best score.</p>
<p>silverturtle:</p>
<p>I had a question in the Writing Section- I happen to get caught up in idiomatic phrases. Sometimes I’ll see an awkward phrase and mark it as the error when there is actually no error. Some examples are “When L’Enfant suggested to build the U.S. Capitol at the center of Washington D.C.”- which I thought should be “in the center” and “That the American Discovery Trail comprises more than 200 local,regional…”- which just didn’t sound right. The first question’s error was actually “to build”- that should be “building” (doesn’t make sense). Some questions just seem sporadic.</p>
<p>Any help?</p>
<p>^ Some verbs take infinitive complements; others take gerund complements. You simply have to know which is appropriate for the given verb in order to answer such questions. Most of the time, we can determine it by ear (e.g., I recommend to eat just sounds wrong), whereas sometimes it is difficult. In my guide, I present lists of verbs that fall into each category (i.e., those that take gerunds, those that take infinitives, and those that can take either).</p>
<p>If you had seen those lists prior to being presented with that question, you would have known the answer, as suggest appeared on one of the lists.</p>
<p>Are idiomatic errors common on the SAT?</p>
<p>Hey thanks for your speedy help!</p>
<p>Well, it depends on how you’re using the word idiomatic. In the strictest sense, idioms are phrases that are specific to one language and that do not conform to general linguistic patterns. In that sense, very few phrases are idiomatic (e.g., kick the bucket would be one because it does not make sense given the words’ definitions). </p>
<p>If, however, you are referring more generally to, for example, knowing which prepositions are appropriate, the gerund/infinitive-complement error that we were just discussing, and irregular verb forms (such as uncommon past participles), they are relatively common (probably one to three such questions per test). In my guide, I tackle most of these issues by offering a list of phrasal verbs (including the appropriate prepositions), a list of commonly missed past participles, as well as the aforementioned gerund/infinitive-complement lists.</p>
<p>That should cover everything that one would consider idiomatic.</p>
<p>I appreciate your help again, your comprehensive guide is better than most (actually all) SAT books. Are you considering to publish it?</p>
<p>Wow silverturtle…is your SAT guide on CC?</p>
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<p>No.</p>
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<p>Not yet. It will be soon. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/953827-preview-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/953827-preview-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions.html</a></p>
<p>^ Awesome! Can’t wait to read it!!</p>
<p>How hard is it to get in the 99th Percentile? Any advice on how to get there? Please ?</p>
<p>^ You have to get a perfect score if I’m not mistaken.</p>
<p>^No, 212, much below a perfect score, was in the 99th Percentile for Juniors last year.</p>
<p>How does one get a perfect score? Is there a formula? Or are all the students with perferct scores geniuses?</p>
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<p>There is no advantange in getting a perfect score on the PSAT. However, you get a perfect score by getting all the questions correct or by missing only one on the CR section.</p>
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<p>Woops, “advantage.”</p>
<p>I would agree with silverturtle, it is far more useful to get a perfect score on the SAT or even SAT. As far as I know, you can get 2 (or even 2-4 if you’re lucky due to the curve) questions wrong on the ACT and still attain a perfect score. I haven’t checked this in the SAT yet.</p>