I recently read this article.  According to a recent poll of college admissions officials, a mere 30 point increase on the SAT can make a difference in the admissions outcome for a college applicant.*  In response to that, I’d like to share a few ways that students can easily get 30 points (or more) on the test.  In the following post, I’ll discuss how changing your approach to practice problems will get you more points on the SAT and, for that matter, any standardized test.

Most students acknowledge that practice is necessary to do well on the SAT; however, most don’t practice properly.  For most students and parents, practice means getting through as many practice problems as possible.  While there is value in that, it will be entirely useless unless done properly.  Think about it: to do better on the SAT you need to improve a set of skills that you have, not simply rehearse them.  If you’re simply repeating whatever you’re doing incorrectly–not consciously honing your skills–you’re just going to become more adept at whatever mistakes you’re making and not going to see the improvement that you want.

There’s a simple fix: think about quality of practice, not quantity.  The way to do quality practice is as follows:

1) First practice problems, then practice the test: Don’t get caught up in doing massive amounts of practice problems or full-length sections until you’ve mastered problems one-by-one.  Once you get the pieces–the problems–then you can put them together and do full-length sections or tests.

2) Work on one thing at a time: At the outset, isolate the particular topic you’re working on and focus on it.  If you’re doing reading comprehension, work on that.  If math, do math.  Don’t try to do everything together until you’re in the later stages of practice.

3) Content –> Problems –> Content –> Problems: Once you’ve decided what you’re working on, first scan instructional materials on the content.  If you’re doing math, make sure you know the basic math concepts.  If you’re doing reading comprehension, make sure you understand the basic question types.  Any good prep book will give you this information.  Don’t spend too much time on the content, just enough to understand it.  You’ll really learn the content when you put it into practice, so there’s not much sense in over-working it in isolation.  Once you’ve covered some content, jump to problems.  When you encounter something you don’t understand in the problem, go back to the content, and so on and so forth, until you understand the content inside out.

4) Repeat problems until they’re perfect (this is the big one): Mediocre students tend to do a practice problem, look at the answer, and then move on.  Good students will try to figure out what they did wrong.  However, that’s still not enough.  Becoming a better test taker requires building skills, and building skills requires correct practice.  Merely looking over your mistakes isn’t enough.  Instead, you should take a fresh version of the problem you got wrong (one that doesn’t have markings on it) and do it again.  You should do this in according to a schedule similar to this:

a) redo the problem immediately until you can do it quickly without pause: If you get a problem wrong, figure out why in the same practice session and then redo it correctly.  If you can’t figure it out, ask someone or look it up online (this is where a tutor is very useful).  Every incorrect problem is an opportunity to improve, so do not rest until you have figured it out.  Then, redo a fresh version of the problem.  Redo it until you can do it quickly.  Once you can, make note of the problem and move on.

b) redo the same problems the next day: Revisit the problem the next day and do it again.  The way that our memory works, it’s most efficient to revisit a problem right before you are about to forget it.  For most people, that means the next day.  Revisit a fresh version of the problem and do it again, making sure to analyze each step and not simply do the problem by rote memorization.  Do it over until you get it correct and can do it quickly.

c) revisit a problem periodically until it’s completely effortless: Once you go a day without doing a problem and get it correct, revisit it after two days, then four days, then a week, steadily increasing the time between iterations.  If you ever get it wrong, go back to (a) and start again.  Always remember to do the problems mindfully, thinking about the concepts and mechanics, not simply by rote.

5) Once you’re successful doing problems, then put them together: you should only be doing full-length practice sections or tests once you’re comfortable with individual problems.  If you do practice sections before you’re ready, you’re rehearsing mistakes and not practicing as efficiently as possible.

Why this works: This method encourages you to actually learn from the mistakes that you make, taking into account that doing well on the SAT is a skill.  Imagine if a musician simply ran through a piece of music once before a big concert without stopping to work on any problem areas, or if a hurdler who knocks over all the hurdles never stopped to improve her fundamentals: neither would ever improve.  Practicing for the SAT is no different.  If you don’t have a method to consciously isolate and fix your errors, you’ll see poor performance continue.  Use this method and learn from your mistakes.  Though you’ll do fewer problems, you’ll see much quicker and more sustained improvement.

Every so often when I tell people what I do (manage Veritas Tutors), I hear someone pooh-pooh SAT prep, “oh, SAT preparation? I read studies that say that it doesn’t work. The test isn’t coachable and you’re just making a lot of money off of people who are scared.”

That’s simply not true. First, it’s easy for me to deny the validity of any such study simply based on my experience. Students who pursue individualized preparation with us routinely see 100-350 point gains, with a few students achieving 400+ gains every year. It’s not just one or two who see improvement, but almost every single one of them. Other boutique tutoring companies report the same, though I can’t say the same about the big giants, as many of their students come to us after taking prep courses with them and seeing no improvement. So, if so many professional educators are having success, I wonder if the ivory-tower scientist designing this study made a misstep in his experimental design (or just chose an inferior tutoring company to test).

However, just saying “it works,” isn’t enough. There are plenty of witch-doctors out there who say their remedy “works” without good reason. So, in order not to become the Harvard Square SAT witch doctor and to play by post-enlightenment rules of the game, let me give you some good, verifiable reasons:

1) Content. Though the SAT was initially conceived of as an IQ or aptitude test, free from the constraints of pesky content, the test makers realized at some point that ink-blots and shapes weren’t going to cut it. A verifiable fact: the test tests content. The SAT is based on concepts such as algebra, functions, vocabulary, dangling modifiers, subject verb-agreement, slope, y-intercept, and on and on… Yes, there is an abstract reasoning component that’s a bit harder to simply learn. However, everything, including the reasoning, is based on the foundational content of the test. Another verifiable fact: if a student learns the content that’s going to appear on the SAT, he or she will do better.

2) Question Type Recognition. (This is where it gets a little trickier, but there’s no doubt that tutoring still helps.) Using particular concepts, the SAT tries to test a student’s “critical reasoning” skills. In other words, they take a particular concept that a student may have seen and present it in a way that requires a conceptual leap of recognition or reasoning to come to the answer. However, the SAT is not an endless stream of never-before-seen brain-teasers. The test has to be heavily standardized from administration to administration and year to year, so the test-makers have to stay within strict bounds of what they can actually present to students. The result: question types. Question types are not nearly as recognizable on the surface, and are rarely recognizable to a first-time test taker or newbie tutor, but something any great tutor is intimately familiar with. Just as the SAT can only test a finite number of pre-defined concepts, they also only have a relatively finite number of pre-defined “tricks” or conceptual speedbumps that they can throw out. After preparing, most students will start to either intuitively or explicitly recognize these question types and be able to deploy the simple, yet effective, strategies that can be employed to deal with them. Another verifiable fact: if a student is taught to recognize question types, he or she will do better.

3) Familiarity. Finally, the least verifiable but most intuitive of the reasons that SAT preparation works: familiarity. The SAT is a grueling test. Any test-taker who has not prepared in the slightest for the test will feel the effects of the length of the test and is very likely to fall into the traps that the SAT sets near the end of the test for stumbling, weary testers. Just as the car ride to a new place always seems shorter on the return journey once you’re familiar with the route, the test immediately becomes easier once a student knows what to expect. By clearly showing students how the SAT is structured as a whole and coaching them through several practice tests, a tutor can give a student familiarity, strategies to deal with mental fatigue, and, most importantly, confidence.

Simply based on my experience and that of my colleagues, and the clear, intuitive reasons mentioned above, it is very hard for me to trust the experimental design of a study that says tutoring doesn’t work. Experimenter, if you read this and disagree, don’t take my word for it. Just stop by the Veritas Center in November or December and talk to our students.

James, our student from the story in the first post in this series, came to us in October of his senior year, hoping to do some preparation for the November or December SAT. While Fall of senior year is a popular time to prepare for the SATs, it’s the wrong time. James had his college applications due, his rigorous senior year workload, and a pretty bad case of early-onset “senioritis.” If everything had gone his way, James may have squeaked through with his preparation to get the scores he needed. Rarely, though, does it work out so well.

So when is the best time to prepare? When should James have begun? I, along with many other professionals in the field, believe that all students should start thinking about SATs no earlier than the summer after their sophomore year and no later than October of their Junior year. Notice I said thinking about, not preparing.

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As a founder and manager of Veritas Tutors, I have seen over the last four years countless students and parents come in to our office confused about the SAT. Some want to prep too early, others come in way too late and expect miracles. Some don’t take the test seriously enough, and others foolishly make it their entire life for their junior and senior years. Some have tried countless other test-prep companies (thousands of $$$) and come to us to pick up the pieces, and others plan poorly and mis-time the many tests that they have to take junior and senior year.

While I don’t claim to know ALL of the answers in the test-prep game, I do know most of them and am happy to share them with you in this multi-part blog post. Here I will cover all aspects of the SAT, from planning when to take it to deciding which scores to report, and everything in between (including an unbelievably effective method of preparing yourself and which materials to use).

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