Are you trying to pop your SAT score that extra 100 points? Do you only have one week left to study? In this blog, we’ll help you learn some tips that can help pop your score fast.
SAT Grammar- Target what you don’t know
The SAT Grammar section is the fastest section to improve. If you’re trying to gain 100 points, 50 alone can come from the grammar section. To do this you’ll have to target what you don’t know. The first thing you’ll want to do is take a practice test. Then you will need to go over the questions you missed and determine what types of questions you need to review. Our online course has an engine that will automatically tag every question with the correct category, which is extremely useful for this process. Other sites like Khan Academy have a similar tagging feature, but it may be more difficult to pinpoint careless errors vs. real issues.
Some types of questions may be easier to identify than others. For example, if you notice every question you miss has a colon, then you know to focus on grammar rules for colons. Other types of questions, such as style & usage and parallel structure might be harder to identify on your own.
SAT Reading- Fast pass vs. Slow pass
A common error for test-takers who are nervous about time is to try and think fast through the whole test. Then when they get to a question that asks them to think back to the passage they just read, they often don’t remember the passage well immediately and get too disorganized. A fast pass is going off of memory, and a slow pass is when you take the time to summarize the passage and think about how accurate the answer choices are.
Remember to read every answer choice in detail. Don’t just go off of what sounds good immediately. It’s okay if you have to go back to reread sections of the passages! The wording is really important. You might have to pass through answer choices more than once.
Scope
Make sure you’re paying attention to the question! It’s easy to only focus on the answer choices, but remember answer choices will try to fool you. You need to find the scope of the question. Find keywords in the question that will help you narrow down what the correct answer should be about. If you can locate keywords in the question, this will help you narrow down your answer choices.
SAT Math- Target Areas to Work on in Depth
If you’re trying to pop your SAT math score the week before the test, you should pick a few topics and focus on them in depth. The four best topics to focus on are percents, quadratics, rates and conversions, and linear equations and slope. Algebra shows up more than additional math topics, so you’ll want to focus on the Algebra topics more if you’re trying to impact your score.
