<p>Hello lovely members of CC! I get asked a lot how I did so well on the SAT (score of 2390), and give the same answers often. I wrote an article for my school's paper and thought you guys might like it. It's geared towards kids already in the 2000ish range. </p>
<p>The SAT, perhaps the most terrifying acronym known to high school students, is fast approaching for the junior class. Advice for how to conquer this test bombards them from all sides, from parents, teachers, coaches, classes, and the Internet. This is only one senior’s opinion, gleaned from the last year of teaching SAT prep to nervous students, and from a strategy that worked well for me. I share these tips from my own experience, both as a student and a tutor. </p>
<p>My first score came back at a perfectly respectable 2100, which was good, but skewed. With a 760 reading, 680 writing, and 660 math, it was clear my natural tendency to read had paid off, but the work I had done in my English and math classes weren’t showing through. This is when I began studying for the test, and through hard work and learning a few tricks I was able to raise that original score up to a 2390, missing a single math question for the 10 points off a perfect score. This article will share how I did it; while it may not work for everyone I hope it may be useful to some. </p>
<p>First, start with a practice test. Yes, this is fairly standard advice, but it’s incredibly important and often overlooked. Where a student scores on this practice test determines the kind of advice I’ll give. The 2000 mark is a loose line for me, the line between content and strategy. A score below a 2000 means most of the time, the student still has content that needs to be learned. The best way to go about learning content is through more traditional methods, the official SAT blue book or the Princeton review. These books are good for learning the pure content (although at times, I disagree with their strategy tips). This article is mostly for those students scoring around or above a 2000, for kids looking to just get those last few hundred points. This is when it mostly comes down to strategy. </p>
<p>Writing: This breaks down into two subsections, the essay and the multiple-choice section. Although it may seem to be the least precise, the essay can be extraordinarily formulaic. There are many ways to approach it, but I’ll share the strategy that worked for me. I wrote most of my essay before I ever saw the prompt. You can too. The SAT asks extremely broad and generalized questions as a prompt, always. I recommend writing out your introduction in two versions, one if you agree with the statement provided and one if you disagree. I also advise putting your thesis first, it makes it easy on the grader to see where your essay is going with the two minutes they have to read it. </p>
<p>For the rest of the essay, length is perhaps the most important aspect. No matter what, try your absolute hardest to get down the full five paragraphs. Many readers have been trained to look for length, and there is a direct correlation between length and score. Fill this with as much superfluous language as you can. While big words aren’t usually the way to write a good essay, they are a clear indication to the reader that you have (or at least are faking) a well-developed vocabulary. In terms of content, you want to use literary, historical, or current events. Literary and historical are usually the easiest and least controversial. Avoid the obvious (MLK, Shakespeare, and Ghandi all pop to mind), but it should be something you could have learned in school. Don’t worry too much about accuracy here, as unusual as it sounds graders cannot take off points for historical inaccuracy. As long as it’s about right and you aren’t claiming that UFOs abducted Lincoln you should be fine.
Still, it’s best to use real facts whenever necessary. I had a list of about ten books, historical and current events that were my go-to. These were all broad enough to be applied to nearly any essay topic, for example I used Brave New World every time I took the SAT on completely different prompts, because I knew the book very well and it had broad enough subject matter. Find your Brave New World, an event from history or story that you’ve been drawn to, that can be used in multiple contexts. The conclusion to your story is very similar to the introduction, and mostly needs to exist for length and completion purposes. It, like the introduction, can also be mostly prewritten. If you’d like more information on many of these tactics, they are inspired by the ones found the book 2400 in Just 7 Steps, one of my all-time SAT prep favorites. </p>
<p>Now, lets handle the grammar section. Your first defense, if you do read a significant amount, is going to be a gut feel. When you read a sentence, it should be visible that something is ‘wrong’. This can get you up to the original 680 I scored at, but not past this point. That’s when you really need to learn some grammar. Luckily, you don’t have to tackle the entire English language in one go. The SAT only covers approximately thirteen grammatical topics, with a mastery of these you should be set to tackle even the trickiest problems. I won’t go into detail here, but there are a few common mistakes that pop up all over the grammar of the SAT writing section. If I had to pick one favorite mistake of SAT test writers, often times they will alter with the verb so it doesn’t properly match the noun or pronoun of a sentence. Barron’s Grammar Workbook for the SAT, ACT, and More was my favorite book for learning grammar rules, and with enough practice you can learn to see common testing errors. </p>
<p>Reading: The reading section has always been the hardest one for me to give advice on. It also breaks into two parts, vocabulary-based sentence completion and passage reading. The first one is difficult if you don’t naturally possess a large vocabulary, but there are some tricks around it. First, be fluent in your greek and latin roots. These show up all over big vocabulary words, and can often help you extrapolate out meaning. Beyond that, there are about 300 words that statistically show up on the SAT more often than not, I again found 2400 in Just 7 steps to have the best vocabulary review section out of any in there I always approach fill-in-the-blanks by thinking to myself, what kind of word makes sense here? Is it positive or negative? I fill in my own word before looking at the answers, and then find the one that best fits. One last note on these, be wary of words such as “not” and “except” in front of blanks, if you’re reading too quickly you may misinterpret the meaning of the blank word and make a silly mistake. </p>
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this summer I am doing a lot of programs at OSU (state university) and at local hospitals and maybe even a research internship (MAYBE) next year but that’s abt it