Are you taking the SAT this weekend and wondering how you should cram because you have minimal time to try to up your score as much as possible? In this blog, I’m going to talk to you guys about how to cram for the digital SAT. I’m going to get into the data on which questions appear the most so that you can focus your energy on what’s going to give you the highest payoff.
Orient Yourself to the Platform
Number one: download the Blue Book app and orient yourself. And hopefully you have already taken a PSAT, so maybe you’ve already oriented yourself to all of these tools. If not, it is really critical that you learn how to use all of the onscreen tools before you show up on test day. You want to look at all these instructions and read all the directions before test day to make sure that you’re familiar with them. The two other things that you want to be familiar with are how to pull up the Desmos calculator and resize it, and how to pull up the reference sheet.
The other thing is that when you’re reviewing specific topics, make sure you also review the reference sheet. You should know how to do all of these kinds of equations and what they mean. So, if there are any formulas that you need on your practice test that you don’t see here, you need to memorize them. We also have a cheat sheet for the SAT math section that you can download for free by subscribing to our mailing list. You can find more information further down. Moving on, make sure that you know all of the shortcuts. You can also practice using things like the strikeout tool, and how to annotate quickly. Some of the shortcuts you can use are Command Shift V to mark something for review, Command Option A to annotate, and Command Option C to open and close the calculator.
Up Your Calculator Game
Number two: up your calculator game. Desmos, Desmos, Desmos. That is the word that I hear all the time in my tutoring community about what the number one thing you have to know going into the digital SAT is. The digital SAT gives you access to Desmos, which is an on-screen calculator that you can find. It’s totally free on the web, so you can practice with it right now. To get there, go to desmos.com/practice, and then select “Choose Assessment.” And you’re going to select “College Board,” then “Start Practice,” and you will get the exact same calculator that you get when you take the SAT on the Blue Book app. Above all, make sure that, on a basic level, you know how to graph and how to use all of the functions that you use on your regular calculator. I would recommend taking a practice test and using Desmos. And for some Desmos-specific tips, be sure to check out the other YouTube videos I have on Desmos and the math section. The other thing I’ll say about upping your calculator game is that if you have a TI84 calculator, there’s also a way to leverage that with calculator programs. My favorite program is finding the slope from two points. We actually have a copy of that program that we’re happy to share with you, as well as some other calculator programs that I recommend you check out.
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Take A Practice Test and Review
Number three: take a practice test and review it. The number one practice material you should be using is official material from the College Board. It is the closest to the thing that you are going to see on test day, so that is what you want to practice with the most. Granted, there are only four practice tests on the Blue Book app, so once you exhaust those, you’ve got to turn somewhere else. But that’s the first place I would go. Take that practice test, go over it. If you take Practice Test 1 and you want to know exactly what you missed, you can also import that into our online course, which brings me to the next tip.
Target Your Weak Areas
Number four is to target the weak areas that your practice test identified. If you’ve got a little more than two or three hours after you review your test, I want you to go in and review the types of questions that you are missing the most. And how do you know what types of questions those are? We have an online course that will tell you exactly what lessons you need to do because you missed items in those areas. So, you can focus your practice on exactly what you need and not on what you don’t. Again, we have a five-day free trial at supertutortv.com. You can import your College Board test results and figure that out. And then what I would do if you’ve got three hours to study on one day and maybe two hours to study the night before is figure out what you’re missing and learn it.
I’m also going to give you a list of the highest-yield areas to study because they show up most frequently on the exam. We did a data analysis of all of the questions that have been part of the released Blue Book practice tests, and this is what we found statistically. The top math areas to study are algebra and advanced algebra. About 36% of questions are what I would call Algebra 1 and basic Algebra 2 kinds of questions. Maybe you do a little bit in Algebra 1 and then extend that in Algebra 2. About 16% of questions are what they call advanced math, or Algebra 2. And if you trigger the harder section in the adaptive test, you’re going to get even more Algebra 2 questions. If you have very limited time, some things that you need to know are the vertex form of a parabola, the circle equation, and how to deal with one, two, or multiple solutions to a system or a linear equation. Finally, you should be familiar with the little pop-up of given formulas that are on the test, and make sure you know what those formulas are and how to apply them. A few other areas, if you have a little bit of extra time to cram, are percentages, rates, and ratios. Those are kind of my next go-to study areas for most students because those kinds of items tend to trip students up more than you would realize.
Moving on to reading and writing: though there are 12 different subject areas, 4 of them make up over half of the questions on the test. The first one is words in context. Words in context make up about 19.34% of questions, and they come up frequently in the hard and easy sections. Now here’s the catch. I know words in context sound like they’re just going to be vocabulary, and while that’s true for some students who are just missing the hardest couple of questions, a lot of words in context questions actually rely more on the idea of finding keywords in the question stem and identifying transition words, trigger words, as well as double negatives, and sorting through the logic of those kinds of question types. So, it is a great question type to practice with, to try to learn, to try to dissect, and to figure out, even above and beyond learning vocabulary. I would say to learn how to do that question type and tackle it.
The second kind of question type that I want you to look at is called boundaries questions. These make up about 12.46% of total questions and a greater percentage of hard questions. Boundaries questions deal with how we make sentences and put them together: commas, colons, dashes, semicolons, and punctuation. There are some tricky question types that come up in boundaries questions that you should be ready and prepared for, but it’s one of the easiest sections to prepare for in a limited amount of time.
The third section of question type that I want you to look at is the command of evidence textual questions. These are some of the hardest questions on the exam. They make up about 9.18% of the questions. So, I want you to learn to map out your passage, practice this question type, and make sure you understand how to anticipate the answer before you look at the possible answer choices.
Finally, the last section is transitions questions. They make up 8.85% of questions and appear across the easy and hard sections. Again, you really want to learn how to identify keywords and how to look out for double negatives. So, another good question type to try to tackle if you have a limited amount of study time.
Snack it Up and Pack it Up
Number five, my last tip for cramming for the SAT: snack it up and pack it up. Make sure you pack in advance and that you have everything you need. There’s nothing worse than showing up on test day unprepared or without your computer charger or something like that, but also without snacks. Snacks are one of the most important and easy ways for you to increase your SAT score. There was a study done a while back on elementary school kids that had either had kids eat a full breakfast in class right before a math test or gave no snack or no meal before their math test. And the kids performed approximately 20% better when they had food in their bellies. Food translates to better brain power. The easiest thing you can do to improve your score is to eat. Eat before the test. Eat during your break. I like to bring an entire lunch, and I try to eat that entire lunch in the 10-minute break. You can do as you wish, but make sure you bring a beverage or food because there’s nothing worse than having low blood sugar and trying to focus on some really hard algebra question at the end of the test. So, make sure you eat and bring lots of snacks.
In addition to snacks and a bag, I also recommend that you bring a printed admission ticket. You should print it out at least a day in advance, or ideally before that. During the last SAT, there was a problem printing admission tickets, and the College Board website was down for a lot of people’s accounts for hours at a time. So, do it in advance. Also, make sure that you have Blue Book preloaded on your device and that your device is 100% charged. Don’t forget to charge your device, and don’t forget to bring your charger. In addition to that, I like to recommend that you bring a portable lithium-ion emergency charger if you happen to have one at your house. You have no idea what your testing center is going to be like in terms of charger accessibility. They may run out of plugs, so make sure you are ready. Photo ID, driver’s license, and passport are best, but if you don’t have those, a student ID is usually acceptable if you’re a U.S. student, but not if you’re an international student. Also, try to bring pens or pencils for scratch work, because they will give you paper. And bring a graphing calculator, and make sure it is charged and loaded with some programs.
A few recommendations for portable lithium-ion chargers are below (note these are Amazon affiliate links that help support our free content).
Sikon AC Outlet Portable Laptop Power Bank
And then finally, a couple of optional things. One, you can bring a watch. The watch is most useful for timing your break because you have this on-screen timer. So you really don’t need it for on-screen reasons, but if you have to go out in the hall to eat your snack because they won’t let you eat in the room, you may need to time your break. Make sure that watch doesn’t beep, by the way. And finally, a backup testing device. The College Board recommends that you also bring a backup testing device if you have one. Don’t freak out too much, because obviously it’s expensive. Don’t go buy a second computer for this. But if your mom or dad has a laptop, you can bring it as a backup, or even an iPad. Bring it and bring a charger, as a worst case scenario kind of situation.
I hope these tips were helpful for cramming for the digital SAT!