How to study for the SAT
I can’t say much about this because I’ve never taken the test before, but from what I dissected from my sister’s prep books, this is what works best for me.
My sister was going through a period of intensive test preps last year as part of her to-do list to enter a college in the United States. She had taken the SAT not long before, and her score was pretty abysmal. So she decided to give it another try (actually, three more tries) and give more care into the preparation part.
She bought several SAT books, which now sit disorderly on her desk. Two of them were from Barron, one from College Board. Before the test she set herself a tremendous amount of time studying them, picking up difficult words and jotting down notes along the way. Despite all these painstaking and genuine efforts, she got a very low score. Her not-so-fondly relationship with The College Board triggered me to question the difficulty of the test itself.
Is the test really that hard? It’s almost my turn to take the test now, so maybe I should start investigating. And out I went. I flipped open the two-and-a-half inch The Official SAT Study Guide by The College Board from my sister’s desk and started learning it, page by page. It took me about a week till I got to the test practices at the end of the book. What I found out is that the difficulty level is really subjective. If you try hard enough to understand it, it’s not all that daunting.
What I like about The College Board is that they try to make the test as less scary as possible. From the beginning of the book, they explained all the process that go into the making and the marking of the SAT, the very helpful examples as well as many neat little tricks to use during the test. For example, in the Math section, there are things like:
and in the writing section there are things like:
I like the book so much that I consider it to be the only book you should ever study for SAT. In sharp contrast with most other prep books in the market — which try to discredit The College Board by boasting about how deceptive the test questions look— this book actually gave me a lot of motivation and confidence in myself. And I truly believe that the SAT is not designed to trick you (even though they do have questions that trick you), but rather it’s designed to really test your understanding of high school work.
To prove my point, I took out another SAT book from my sister’s desk. This time from Barron. What’s in there is an extraordinary amount of “strategies” students can use during the test, a lot of which are common sense. If you look through the content page of Barron’s SAT 2400 book:
You’ll probably feel that nobody memorizes things like BLANKS strategy and 4Ps technique! For me, the best way to score high in any test is to understand what the question wants and utilize your knowledge to answer the question, not employ a nonsensical strategy which has nothing to do with the topic being tested.
The conclusion here is that:
* Barron sucks.
Even though they do have quality test questions that are helpful to know, I simply hate the nitpicking strategic acronyms in the book. You can even find test approaches like these in the official guide from the College Board, except in a much much more sane manner. The difference here is that the latter is official. Realize that no matter how many strategies all other books presented, they’re just some kind of imitation from the official one. Period.
I’ve not tried Kaplan’s or The Princeton Review’s books yet (and I don’t plan to), so I don’t know how they compare to Barron. But my point still stays the same. The Official SAT Study Guide from The College Board is the only book you should ever need to prepare for the SAT.
P.S. I’m one of those so-called valedictorians in the school, and my style of scoring is usually YOLO-ing through the tests and not care at all about the textbooks. So. Go ahead and hate me if this doesn’t work out for you.
* I mean, the book, not the company itself.
