Panicked Over the Upcoming SAT?

Are you taking the SAT coming up on Saturday? Did you not study enough? Don’t panic. Close the “1001 Great Jobs You Can Get With No College Degree” webpage. I have some advice that may help you, as long as you have an SAT review book, such as Barron’s SAT or any SAT review book.

First, finish the math sections- Chapter 9 in the Barron’s SAT book. My suggestion is to just go to the practice exercises, then read the explanations of problems you got wrong (or just guessed right on), and the section covering the problems you don’t understand.

If you’re a native speaker of English, you’re familiar enough with reading comprehension and American English grammar to do reasonably well on the reading and grammar portions of the SAT, so if you don’t have time to study thoroughly, that’s the part to review last. Most people have a harder time with the math than the English, and the math problems are usually based on a limited number of facts and “tricks” that make easy problems look hard, and hard problems look impossible, unless you know the facts and tricks.  You have much more to gain by learning the facts, tips and tricks from your SAT book before the test, than you do by cram-studying English grammar. That’s because you’ll be able to score higher than people who didn’t bother to learn the math facts and “tricks” they need to know, who will end up falling for “sucker punch answers” (wrong answers that look right) or skipping problems they could easily solve that have been “disguised” as really hard problems.

Definitely practice writing at least one, and preferably two or three, SAT essays using the prompts from the tests in the book.  You don’t want to have your first experience with writing a two-example essay on the fly in 25 minutes when it REALLY counts. Do think of examples from history (e.g. read the Wikipedia article about your favorite historical figure), your ideas on common sayings (Is it true that “The more things change, the more they stay the same?”), and so on, as mentioned in my recent blog post about the essay section.

Do the exercises in the critical reading sections, then do the sentence correction and sentence completion sections if you have time. Don’t forget that you need to make sure you have support from in the passage for any answer to a critical reading question. If you know about a subject covered in a critical reading passage, be especially careful that the answer is actually stated or implied in the passage, and not just something you know is true about the topic.

When you do the sentence correction problems, read very literally, or “read like a meathead,” as I tell my students.  For example, “Steve Prefontaine’s story is more inspirational than Lou Gehrig” is not a correct comparison, because it compares a story (the story of Steve Prefontaine) to a person, Lou Gehrig. Much like the auto-correct on a smartphone, our minds often auto-correct incorrect comparisons to the comparisons we know are intended. The sentence above is obviously intended to compares the stories of two athletes, not the story of one to the other athlete himself. However, a literal reading, such as one a computer or a very naïve person might make, would mean just that, which is why the sentence is wrong.

On the night before the test, go to bed at your usual time. Don’t stress and stay up studying. Cram studying won’t help your score, but not sleeping and getting yourself upset the night before the test will hurt your score.  Be well-rested, make sure you have a calculator (NOT a phone or tablet, just a cell phone), extra batteries for it, and a few sharpened #2 pencils, put them where you won’t forget them, and set your alarm so you’ll wake up in time to get to the test. Good luck!