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The CollegeBoard has emphasized time and time again that coaching
or test preparation courses will not significantly improve
your SAT score. They also say that there are no "tricks" which
can be used as a substitute for hard work. However, keeping
a few tips in mind before and during the test will definitely
help. Let's strategize!
Timing Yourself
Even though time is strictly limited on the SAT, working too
quickly can damage your score. Many problems hinge on subtle
points, and most require careful reading of the set-up. Because
high school can put heavy reading loads on students, many
will follow their academic conditioning and read questions
quickly, looking only for the gist of what each is asking.
Once they have found it, they mark their answer and move on,
confident they have answered it correctly. Later, many are
startled to discover that they missed questions because they
either misread the problems or overlooked subtle points.
To do well in your classes, you have to attempt to solve
every, or nearly every, problem on a test. Not so with the
SAT. In fact, if you try to solve every problem on this test
you will probably decimate you score (it's called negative
marking). For the vast majority of people, the key to performing
well on the SAT is not the number of questions they answer,
within reason, but the percentage they answer correctly.
SAT Scoring
The two parts of the test are scored independently. You will
receive a verbal score and a math score. Each score ranges
from 200 to 800. The average for both is 500. Thus, the average
total score is 1,000.
In addition to the scaled score, you will be assigned a percentile
ranking, which gives the percentage of students with scores
below yours. For instance, if you correctly answer 48 of the
60 math questions, then you will score better than 90% of
the other test takers.
Order of Difficulty
Like most standardized tests, the SAT lists problems in ascending
order of difficulty. Therefore, when trying to decide which
questions to skip, skip the last ones.
Each SAT section has subsections. Within these subsections,
the problems also ascend in order of difficulty. For example,
the verbal section has three subsections (Sentence completions,
analogies, and reading comprehension). So, for example, Question
1 will be the easiest, and Questions 10 will be the hardest.
Then, Question 11 (the first analogy question) will be the
easiest analogy, and so on.
Skipping and Guessing
Some questions on the SAT are rather hard. Most test takers
should skip these questions. We'll talk about how to identify
hard questions as we come to them.
Often students become obsessed with a particular problem
and waste valuable time trying to solve it. To get a top score,
learn to cut your losses and move on. So skip the hardest
questions and concentrate on the easy and medium ones. Often
you'll find that you can correctly solve several easy questions
in the time it takes to tackle one hard one. Since all questions
are worth the same number of points, don't waste your time
on something you cannot handle.
Although there is a small guessing penalty on the SAT, if
you can eliminate even one of the answer-choices, it is to
your advantage to guess.
2 Out of 4 Rule
It is significantly harder to create a good but incorrect
answer-choice than it is to produce the correct answer. For
this reason, usually only two attractive answer-choices are
offered: One correct; the other either intentionally misleading
or only partially correct (the ETS claims that this is to
ensure that the student is paying attention to the question
at hand, and not staring at the pretty girl sitting next to
him). The other three answer-choices are usually fluff. This
makes educated guessing on the SAT immensely effective. If
you can dismiss the three fluff choices, your probability
of answering the question successfully will increase from
20% to 50%.
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