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Last Minute SAT Tips for the Last "Old" SAT

1/15/2016

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So you’re taking the last “old” SAT on Saturday, January 23, but you don’t feel prepared yet. What do you do? PANIC! Start looking into the military or colleges that don’t require the SAT for admission. No, wait- I’m just kidding.

This blog entry assumes you are using the Barron's SAT review guide. If you're not, use the corresponding parts of your SAT guide. If you're using the Official College Board guide, you won't have things like the flash cards or vocabulary section, and you should actually GO GET the Barron's guide. The Gruber SAT guide would also work - Kaplan, Princeton Review, and others are probably okay, but generally, I recommend the Barron's guides for most tests (the worst thing I have to say about them is that sometimes the problems are actually much harder than the on the real test, as is the case with their ACT guide, but I digress.)

Review the Math Section – Chapter 9 – Do the review questions at the end of each subsection, and review the part of each subsection that deals with each question you got wrong and/or know you don’t understand (a lucky guess in practice won’t help you on the test!)

Review Chapter 8 – the math tips and tricks – especially “Draw a Diagram,” “Trust Diagrams that Are Drawn To Scale,” “If the Diagram is Not Drawn to Scale, Redraw it to Scale,” “Add a Line,” “Add Equations” “Don’t Do More Work Than You Have to,” “Substitute Easy-to-Work-With Numbers for Variables in Equations,” and “Eliminate Absurd Answer Choices.”

These in a nutshell:

1. Draw a Diagram: If you’re asked just about ANYTHING about geometry, but there’s no diagram with it, DRAW A DIAGRAM. It’s much easier to work out a geometry problem when you can see circles, squares, triangles, lines, transversals, etc.

2. Unless the Diagram is Labeled "Not Drawn to Scale," You Can Trust it!- If a diagram doesn’t say “NOTE: Figure not drawn to scale,” it IS drawn to scale, which means you can estimate lengths of lines (use the edge of your answer sheet, a little piece of paper torn from your test booklet, or your eraser, extra pencil, calculator, etc. as a “ruler”), angle measures, etc.

3. Redraw Figures Not Drawn to Scale: If the diagram DOES “NOTE: Figure not drawn to scale,” it IS NOT drawn anywhere near to scale, which means you CANNOT estimate lengths of lines, angle measures, etc., using the diagram. It’s easy to redraw a scalene triangle to appear equilateral, or a 30-60-90 triangle so that the 30 degree angle appears to be the 60 degree angle, as a trap for the unwary student who knows his or her special right triangles (Barron’s uses this example several times). Fortunately, that means the College Board thought the question would be too easy if they drew the diagram to scale. So redraw it! Use the edge of your answer sheet, a little piece of paper torn from your test booklet, or your eraser, extra pencil, calculator, etc. as a “ruler.”

4. Draw a Line: Many questions show figures that are basically two right triangles squished together, or a rectangle inscribed in a quadrant of a circle, with one corner at the center and one on the edge of the circle, but the given diagonal connects the OTHER two corners – all you need to do is draw a diagonal to see that the weird quadrilateral is two right triangles or that the diagonal of the rectangle is the radius of the circle.

5. Add or Subtract Equations: If you see two or more equations with the same number of variables (e.g., two equations with the same two variables in each, three equations with the same three variables in each) – as in 3a + 2b = 6, 2a + 3b = 8 – what is the average of a and b? Just add the equations and see that 5a + 5b = 14, so a+b = 14/5, and since the average of a and b is (a+b)/2, the average is (14/5)/2 = 1.4.

6.Don’t do more work than you have to – Notice that in the problem in 5., above, I didn’t bother to solve for a or b. The question didn’t require it, and adding equations made it unnecessary. So don’t bother – save some time and do another question you otherwise couldn’t.

7. Plug Easy Numbers Into Questions that Use Variables. For example, the question “If Jack can mow a lawn in m minutes, and Jill can mow the same lawn in n minutes, in how many minutes can Jack and Jill mow the same lawn, working at the same rates?” This is HARD for most people; most of us don’t think in terms of variables. If Jack can mow a lawn in 20 minutes by himself, and Jill can do it in 30 minutes, then we know Jack mows 1/20 of a lawn per minute, and Jill can do 1/30 of a lawn per minute. So then we just need to add 1/20 + 1/30 to get the fraction of a lawn both can mow at per minute, working together. Since the lowest common denominator is 60, the combined rate is 3/60 + 2/60 = 5/60 = 1/12 lawn per minute, so the lawn moving takes 12 minutes. You can then plug in the numbers into each answer choice and pick the one that gives you “12” as the answer. Or you could just know the rate is “1/(time person 1 takes) + 1/(time person 2 takes).”

8. Finally, Eliminate Ridiculous Answer Choices. We know areas of circles, squares, and other geometric figures can’t be negative, so eliminate any answer choices like “5 - 3π,” since 3π is more than 5 (it’s about 9.42), or say if one of the choices to the problem in 8, above were “40 minutes,” we’d know it’s wrong, since even the slowest worker can mow the lawn in 30 minutes…

Review My Previous Blog Posts on Math – there are lots of them – why not use the information I’ve put right here for you? It’s good and it’s free – I want you to do well (Why wouldn’t I ? I probably don’t know you personally, so it’s unlikely I have any personal problem with you that would make me wish bad things on you). The same applies to the verbal section – I’ve made many posts about the verbal section, last-minute SAT prep, and the like.

Review the Word Roots Section , and practice the High-Frequency and Hot Prospects words – look them up in the handy glossary right there in the book, or use a dictionary (dictionary.com is fine); read all the word lists and/or use the flash cards in the book for practice - this is great to do when taking a break from studying math.

Review the Essay Section after reading my blog entry on how to write an essay (12/8/2014) – you’ll have to hit the “Previous” link a few times – do the “topic builder” exercises where they give you topics and you have to come up with examples from your life and not from your personal life.

Review the Critical Reading Section. Do the exercises. Know that extreme answer choices “This is ALWAYS true” or “This is NEVER true” are usually wrong. Also know that “word in context” questions really DO require you to go to the lines referenced and read a few lines before and after. If you’re still stuck, know that if two or three choices seem to relate to a common meaning of the word, they can’t all be right, so they’re almost certainly all WRONG – e.g. “run” can mean “move quickly,” “speed,” “race,” but if those are three choices, I’d put my money on “streak” (like a “run of losses by the local team”) or “sudden demand on” (e.g., a “run” on a bank), or “manage” (“Mr. Witherspoon runs the local bank.”).

Review the Grammar Section. Make sure you know subject-verb agreement, the past perfect, the verb tenses, what happens to the verb tense when one subject is singular and another is plural, and they’re joined by an “and or an or,” and American idiom, all listed in the book. Do the practice grammar sections.

Alternate the English and Math Parts of the SAT – as I mentioned above- the flash cards are a great break-time activity, and you’ll burn out much less quickly if you intersperse verbal sections between math activities.

Do a Full-Length Practice Test Under Timed Conditions. Either do one of the tests from your book, or do the practice SAT at https://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-practice-test .
Do the Hard Thing. If you’re a verbal person, don’t skip the math. If you’re better at math, don’t skip the verbal. Your coach, sensei, or personal trainer wouldn’t let you skip the hard things; you shouldn’t either. Basically, if you don’t want to do it, you SHOULD do it.

I know that this is a lot to do in a week, but hopefully, you’ve already done some of this prep, so much of this will be really quick and easy for you. I wish you the best of luck on the SAT, and I’ll be posting about the new SAT and the ACT soon. Definitely contact me if you have any questions.

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So Why Should I Write a Yelp Review, Anyway?

1/3/2016

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After I wrote my blog entry entitled “How to Have Your Yelp Review Taken Seriously,” I realized some of my blog’s readers might ask “Why should I even write a Yelp review in the first place?” There are several important reasons to review people who provide services or goods to you on Yelp or other websites. Here are a few reasons I can tell you, not necessarily in order of importance, but in the order they’ve occurred to me:

1. You can help other people. If you really liked the service you received from a business, let people know. If there was a problem, you should let people know that, especially if you told the business about the problem and they didn’t solve the problem. While we’ve all heard “word-of-mouth is the strongest advertising,” and I believe that’s true, we don’t always know anyone personally who’s used a particular business, or even the same type of business as the one about which we’d like to learn.

While any business could have fake reviews, either positive or negative, the more real, honest reviews people like you post, the less of an effect fake reviews have. This is especially true when people compare your review to obvious “astroturfing” (tons of fake positive reviews that are supposedly from local satisfied customers but aren’t – Astroturf is fake grass roots, get it?); “trolling,” where someone’s enjoying provoking reactions from readers with outrageous claims, name-calling, etc.; “spamming,” where some person is trying to promote some other, usually worthless, product or service by placing ads in review spaces; or simply cranky and vindictive, posts. It’s nice to help people make informed decisions before spending money.

2. You can help a business you like without paying extra money. If you liked the service you received from a business, but you aren’t likely to use its services again (very common in the test prep/tutoring field), the best thing you can do to help the business out is to leave a positive Yelp (or other) review. Even if you liked a business so much that you paid a “tip” in addition to the payment you’d already made for the service, that money would run out soon; it’d be a “one-time thing.” However, a good review is a “gift that keeps on giving,” if you’ll excuse the advertising cliché. People could possibly see your review many times, and each new customer the business gains as a result would be, essentially, a gift of money from you, or a “tip that keeps on tipping,” if you will.

Just please, be specific and honest! As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog post, positive reviews that sound like advertising copy, don’t specifically mention what product or service you bought from the business, or that make the business sound “too good to be true” are likely not to be taken seriously. Many readers will think something like “Uh huh, I’ll bet the woman who wrote this review is this guy’s girlfriend, sister, or mother,” and move on.

What I didn’t mention (because I hadn’t thought of it ;-) ) is that if a reader takes a false positive review seriously, then the business has to live up to an unrealistic expectation the review has set up in the reader’s mind. A review that says “This tutor increased my son’s SAT score by 800 points after 3 tutoring sessions, and my son didn’t even have to study on his own between sessions!” seems likely to result in many people with unrealistic expectations to contact the tutor, book sessions, and then get annoyed when they or their children don’t get the results implicitly promised by the review.

3. You can put pressure on businesses that haven’t treated you fairly.

On the other hand, when a business doesn’t live up to your reasonable expectations, and the business refuses to “make it right,” it’s nice to know you really CAN make them regret treating you unfairly. Think about it – until roughly the late 1990s, there really wasn’t much you could do about a business that really screwed you over, but technically didn’t break the law, or a business that did violate the law, but you would have had to sue to get money back. Most likely, you'd just be out of luck. You could complain to anyone who’d listen, maybe post on some online forum, try your luck with newspaper or TV station "We're on YOUR SIDE" columns or news segments to see if they could pressure the business to fix the problem, or sue in small claims court. Most likely, your complaint was going to go nowhere.

These days, a negative online review can cause problems for a business, especially if it’s not the only one (one complaint among many positive reviews is likely to be written off as “some stupid complaint by a crank who’s never happy with anything”), and it’s going to be important to the business to show they’ve handled your complaint in a satisfactory way.

Again, please be specific and honest in your reviews, especially the bad ones! As I’ve mentioned, you can be sued for libel, or possibly other things, if you post bad reviews that you know (and sometimes even if you only SHOULD know) are false. You’re on much more solid ground if you (1) explain what happened; (2) why it’s a problem; (3) what you asked the company to do to fix the problem, as well as their response to your request; and (4) don’t embellish or exaggerate the facts.

4. You can help your own business. If people think your reviews are helpful, funny, cool, etc., they may be more likely to look at your profile and check out YOUR business (especially if you put your business’ URL on your profile on Yelp or whatever ratings site). People are going to be much more confident about doing business with you (and much less likely to treat you like you’re lying and trying to cheat them) if they already have learned they can trust your online ratings.

These are just a few thoughts I have on this matter – feel free to add your own comments below! Thanks for reading this.

John Linneball

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