The no calculator portion of the SAT continues to pose a problem for my D16 who can not finish in the time allowed and does very well on all other sections-even math.
Does anyone else have this problem?
She actually cried during that section today but thought the rest was easy. She usually only misses 1-5 in the rest of the practice tests but did not even get to the free response in the no calculator part.
Any suggestions?
Try free practice on Khan Academy(SAT).
Time is a tricky problem. If you make an effort to “think faster” during the test, that can easily lead to silly mistakes. But realizing that you are not going to finish also leads to stress (and even tears).
The only things I have found that make students faster are familiarity and flexibility. So I hope this doesn’t seem to obvious but:
- Has your daughter thoroughly worked through all of the 6 "official" college board tests? Can she explain each question, as if she were tutoring someone else? I would work on that before I turned to the Khan Academy material.
2.Does she have more than one way to attack a problem? Many SAT questions are solvable in multiple ways, some faster than others. It’s good to be able to do the algebra, but it’s also good to use trial and error, or to make up numbers. Those approaches are not presented in any of the college board material, but they can be time-savers.
I posted alternative solutions to the 6 released tests here:
Also, please tell her to try to be calm. It sounds like she is actually doing very well so far and she does have lots of time to improve. She can save the panic for next year!
Agree with the above post but from a pure strategy standpoint-
Under the new test where you are not penalized for guessing, you should not leave anything blank. If you have timing issues, then I would start with the free response first because you can’t just pick an answer there.
For the multiple choice, can she identify a hard, medium, easy question quickly? If so, have her determine the easy questions and do those first. There is nothing that says you have to work them in order. Just be careful for bubbling errors which can be more frequent when you skip around.
If she can’t distinguish quickly, then take the total number of problems divide by the time allowed. If she has spent more than the average amount of time, then stop and go to the next one. Leave enough time at the end to go back to the hard ones and just pick an answer. You can say for every question you did not have time for, you can answer B. Or if she was able to narrow it down to two, just pick.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions.
She is so relieved to have finished her first test yesterday that I’ll wait until after finals to give her these suggestions
:0.
She is such a hard worker that I am sure that she will make a genuine effort.
Her dream school is Vandy where her sister is a Junior, so she is very motivated.
For Non- Calc. Math:
Do not underestimate the importance of elementary school arithmetic skills, given the timing of the non-calc section. I have seen many students lose a lot of time trying to remember that 7 x 8 = 56. Some even get it wrong. If your pencil arithmetic skills are not rock-solid, some drilling and memorization is helpful.
- Drill multiplication tables through 12.
- Memorize squares of integers through 16^2.
- Memorize powers of integers:
a) powers of 2 through 2^8
b) powers of 3 through 3^4
c) powers of 4 through 4^4
d) powers of 5 through 5^4 - Memorize decimal equivalents of common fractions:
1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 1/6, 5/6, 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8.