Are you taking the SAT tomorrow or really soon, and are you wondering what you should study the night before the test? In this blog, I’m going to talk about my recommendations for what to study the night before the SAT.
How do you get an awesome test score? I’m not going to teach you stupid tricks that might not work. I’m going to give you some tried-and-true study tips. And the other thing that I’ll say is that I know there are some people out there who like to say that the best way to study for the SAT the night before is to study nothing because you need a good night’s sleep and happiness. And while that’s a nice thought, I’ll ask you a question. How many of you would go into a final exam and not study the night before? Probably none of you.
Study Your Mistakes
So, the number one thing that I study the night before the exam is my mistakes. I even sometimes like to create what I call a mistake journal. So, if you have taken practice tests or drills in the last several months, dig up all the work, scoop it all up, stick it on your desk, and go through all of your mistakes. Ask yourself the questions, and maybe make a little mistake journal to copy it all down. One, what’s the question I missed? Two, why did I get it wrong? Three, what can I do to get it right the next time? And four, if it’s a math question, you can even run the question again. And then I try to find patterns between the different mistakes that I made and try to come up with tips or techniques that apply to those questions.
And the theory behind this is that the night before the test, you could do another practice test and then go over that one practice test. But isn’t it more powerful if you look at every mistake you’ve made over the last two, three, or four practice tests and try to cram all of that learning knowledge from mistakes into your head at the same time as much as possible? It might be a little bit more effective the night before the test.
Study Our Math SAT Cheat Sheet
Number two: study our math SAT cheat sheet. When it comes to math, one of the things that can be a really good quick refresher is to study a math SAT cheat sheet. Well, I have one for free for you, and you can check it out at supertutortv.com. And what I love about this is that it’s a document that kind of goes over all of the little things that you need to know in math. How to find a vertex, what the discriminant means for zero, one, or two solutions to a system of equations, or when there are one zero versus two zeros for a quadratic equation. So, I recommend that you check it out, go through all of the math, and ask yourself if you remember how to do this. And if you find anything that you realize you haven’t done in a long time, you should probably practice that. You can then go and try to find some practice drills.
Study Speed Tips (Especially for Math)
Number three: study speed tips, especially in the math section. I have lots of tips and tricks for math to get faster, shortcuts, so to speak, and we have tons of videos—we put up some thumbnails in the video. You can learn these speed tricks in just a few minutes of your time. They’re not the kind of things where you have to do 20 practice items in order to really lock it in, so that’s also another great thing to try to study the night before. One of the things that my students mess up most often, even those that are extremely prepared, is pacing and timing. So just be sure you don’t screw up that pacing and timing, and the more shortcuts you have in your head, the faster you’re going to be able to go on a lot of questions, even if they’re easy questions. Then, you’ll have that extra time to really tackle those super-hard questions that might take you a little longer.
Review Your Weakest Links with Practice Drills
Number four: review your weakest links with practice drills. So, where do you find practice drills or what kind of questions do you want to drill down on? I’m going to give you two resources. Number one is the SuperTutorTV course. Our course actually allows you to cut and paste your complete results from a Bluebook test and paste them into our course, and then we will tell you exactly what subject areas all of those questions are in. Then, you can click a button, create a custom study list, and drill down the exact things that you have missed on previous Bluebook tests. We also have the same feature for our internal practice test, which, by the way, is a free practice test on our course with our limited free trial. So if you want to try that out, you can do it totally for free if you’ve exhausted all the Bluebook tests and need one more test at supertutortv.com. So that’s one resource that you can use to target your skills and figure out exactly what you need to work on.
The second resource that I want to give you where you can sort of drill down what you’ve missed is the College Boards Question Bank. This will allow you to sort questions by category. It’s not necessarily as specific as the categories on our online course, but you can still sort of narrow down what kind of question types you’ve missed in the past. Maybe you hate those inference questions, miss them all the time, and really want to work on them. Whatever question type it is that you need to drill down, you can drill down those specific question types that you’ve missed in the past, and there are two resources to do it.
I hope you guys like this blog and go crush the SAT!
