Most, and probably all, people have had the experience of having to do something about which they are anxious. For many of us, public speaking is a very frightening thing. For others, getting on a plane is scary. For me, waiting to be picked for a team in gym class may have been the most terrifying repeated experience I have ever had to go through. But what about sitting for exams? Are people afraid of that? The answer is a resounding yes. That familiar sweaty-palmed, heart-racing sensation and desire to run out of the room screaming can creep up on many of the most otherwise calm and collected students when faced with the prospect of sitting for an important exam. In small amounts, anxiety during study time and on test day may actually help students’ performance on tests. But if it gets to be too great, anxiety can really wreak havoc on a test-taker’s ability to concentrate and do his or her best. When it looks like it’s going to affect your test scores in a negative way, that’s when we need to take steps to alleviate it.
People who tend to be perfectionists tend to experience more test anxiety than others. So do students who go into a test unprepared, but care about doing well. If you are going to take the SAT and are afraid that you may be in the second group, then taking an SAT prep course may be a good idea for you. If you are prepared, you eliminate the cause of your anxiety. If you are in the perfectionist group, the SAT prep class can also help you on your struggle toward perfection, but you may need a little extra help to stay calm on test day. For that, you might like to try some breathing exercises (take a look at the video below this post).
Test anxiety is a very common occurrence, but you don’t have to let it get in the way of your doing your best on the SAT. Learn some deep breathing, study a lot, and get a good night’s sleep the night before and a good breakfast the day of the test. You will be fine. Good luck!
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
The “Student Produced Response Questions”, or “Grid-In” questions, are unique to the SAT. These 10 questions can be critical in determining a student’s SAT math score. Therefore, it is essential that every student knows the directions perfectly (and not by reading them on the day of the test). Since the answers are recorded in the four-column grid, 9999 is the largest possible answer to any problem. The least possible answer is zero since the directions explicitly state that there are no negative answers. A classic student question is what to do if your answer contains less than four digits. You can place your answer in any column(s) of the grid; the SAT folks only want to see that you’ve got the right answer. The directions clearly state that some problems may have more than one answer. Therefore, a student shouldn’t sit there with a solution such as x > 3 and wonder what to grid. Just pick your favorite number greater than 3 and move on quickly.
Mixed numbers are absolutely not to be bubbled into the grid. This is because a scanner can’t tell the difference between 2½ and 21/2. Use 2.5 or 5/2 if you think the correct answer is 2½. Lastly, be sure you know what to do if you think the answer is a non-terminating decimal. Here again, the SAT folks are trying to be nice. As long as you fill all the columns of the grid, they don’t care if you “truncate” your decimal (a good SAT word meaning to cut off the decimal when you run out of room) or properly round off your decimal.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
Standardized tests such as the SAT receive a variety of criticism. One classic comment is that these tests just show who is best able to choose the right multiple choice answer. Who says that this is necessarily the brightest person? In the early 1990’s to partially address this critique, the Educational Testing Service sought to create math questions without multiple choices. However, the SAT exam does have to be graded by a scanner, not hand-scored. How could this be done? In 1993, we had the first appearance of the Student Produced Response Questions (students have to “produce” their own responses, not just select a choice). The answers to these questions would be placed in a new four-column grid. Each problem contained no multiple choices. The grid would provide a way for students to enter whatever answer they had determined. In the later SAT revision of 2005, 10 “grid-in” questions took their permanent place as questions #9 through #18 on the 18-question, 25-minute math section.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
Last time, we covered the SAT testing environment. This time, we are going to talk about your proctor.
If you are familiar with the environment, bring the required materials, and have practiced taking the SAT so you know pretty much what will be on it, then the only variable you have left to contend with is the identity of the proctor. While there are some horror stories, including a wonderfully awful one in the New York Times about a proctor who arranged flowers and talked on the phone, most proctors know what they’re doing. If, by any chance, you find your proctor acting bizarrely, then make sure you speak up soon after the test; remember, as mentioned in the last article, the College Board can cancel your scores if you ask them to do it by the Wednesday after test day.
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
One of the 3 math sections of the SAT contains 18 questions. The first 8 are multiple choice and the last 10 are “grid-ins” (more on these later). The 8 multiple choice questions are again arranged in almost perfect order of increasing difficulty – #1 is easy and #8 is quite difficult. The problem on this 18-question section is the fact that the hard questions like #7 and #8 are sitting right in the middle of the section. Once again, the student must be honest about his/her potential score. If you’re a candidate for a 700, you need to attack every question. What if you’re shooting for a 500 which requires about half the questions to be answered correctly? To be candid, you should SKIP #7 and #8. Students are always told not to spend too much time on a problem that they find difficult. Correct. However, #7 and #8 are guaranteed to be difficult, so we say the average student should spend zero time on them. Right after #8, you will find the start of the 10 grid-in questions. They begin easy, then come the medium ones and end with the hardest. You need to preserve time for these grid-ins. If you waste time on #7 and #8, you’re taking time away from grid-ins that you can definitely do if you left yourself enough time. The 18-question math section is the key to your math score and not spending too much time on the first 8 multiple choice questions is the key to handling this section.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
It’s news to nobody that the environment in which a student takes a test can affect his or her score. That’s why teachers take such care in preventing talking during exams, seat students where they cannot read off of each other’s papers, and make sure desks are clear of materials that would facilitate cheating. So one would expect the SAT environment to be no different - to be a tightly regulated place where students’ scores should be based only on their merits in a standardized environment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Just as there are variations in environment from classroom to classroom – wooden walls versus cinderblock, rural versus urban environments – there are variations in environment on test day, and these variations can affect students’ scores.
There are, however, ways to mitigate some of the possibly adverse effects of an unfamiliar or unusual testing environment, the best of which is foreknowledge of the particulars of the testing room. If it is possible, arrange to take the SAT in an environment with which you are familiar, preferably where you have sat for an exam previously or where you have at least spent some time. Be familiar with the noise level, seating arrangements, lighting, chalkboards and whiteboards (where proctors may write the time), and visibility of clocks in the room.
If, on the day of the exam, you encounter an unexpected environmental problem, like being seated next to a particularly annoying test taker, then ask your proctor for help. The College Board says that it’s up to the proctor whether, for instance, a student gets to change seats, so by all means be polite when making requests. Your final out if something in the environment causes you problems is the College Board itself. They will cancel your scores if you request that service by the Wednesday after the test day. Remember: be prepared to speak up about problems, or forever live with your SAT scores.
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
To discourage random guessing, the SAT imposes a penalty of 1/4 point for every wrong answer on a multiple choice question. How do they arrive at this fraction? On a 5-choice question, there is one correct choice and four incorrect ones, making the ratio 1:4. The classic advice is that if you can eliminate one or more of the incorrect choices, you have turned the odds in your favor so you should make a guess. That’s absolutely correct. However, this advice is better applied on the reading and writing sections than on a math section. On a reading section, you might know one or two of the words in the multiple choices and this can narrow down your selection. However, consider the situation with most math questions. You are presented with a problem and you can’t solve it at all. While an SAT prep course will show you ways to deal with this situation, you may not have any way to narrow down the choices. Therefore, the best SAT test-taking advice is to OMIT the question. If you review your scores from a PSAT or an SAT that you’ve previously taken, note how many penalty points you have accumulated for all the 1/4 penalties for wrong answers (many of which you would have to admit you guessed on). The only exception to this advice concerns where the problem is located on the test. If you’re pretty sure of your answer to problem #2, but not positive, go ahead and answer it because #2 is an easy problem and you’ve probably got it right. If you’re not so sure about #19, do not answer it, omit this very hard question and save yourself 1/4 point.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
SAT’s are scored in the range from 200-800. The national average math score is approximately 500. Many students enrolled in SAT prep classes are seeking to improve to a score over 500. Some students are unaware of the fact that a score of 500 is achieved by getting about ½, 50%, of the questions right. If a student scores 50% on a classroom math test, that’s an “F” (and trouble with parents at home). Half right on the SAT is 500, the national average, and quite respectable. SAT math sections are arranged with the questions almost in perfect order of increasing difficulty. Approximately the first 1/3 are easy, the next 1/3 medium difficulty, and the last bunch are downright difficult. Consider the 20-question, 25-minute section. If a student is seeking a 500, s/he would want 10 points out of this section (each correct answer is worth one point). Where will these points come from? A conscientious SAT prep company has to be blunt here – these points are not coming from that last group of hard questions. These are just too hard for the average student. Therefore, your best strategy is to take your time and plan to spend your 25 minutes on the first 15 questions. It is out of this group of easy and medium level questions that you will find the 10 points you are seeking. Rushing to get through all 20 is silly for the average student because those last 5 are guaranteed to be hard every time. Incidentally, you would need about 2/3 of the questions correct to score 600. Even then, all you would need is to get all the easy and medium ones right. To get 700, you need to attack all the questions (about 48 of the 54 points on the full math test is needed for a 700).
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
What do the letters SAT stand for? Right now they are just three letters. However, they used to represent the “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” Why isn’t this used as the present-day name of this test? There’s a sensitivity to using the word “aptitude.” An aptitude test is a test of your intelligence, your basic ability. After working hard to compile a solid high school transcript, this single four-hour test helps tell a college what capabilities you have. The Educational Testing Service used to say that you can’t possibly increase your aptitude. This has been dramatically proven wrong. A well-planned program of practice will increase your SAT score. Educational Services Center can help you maximize your score on the reading, writing, and math sections of the SAT. There’s a strategy to approaching the math questions. We’ll review your arithmetic, algebra and geometry. We’ll also show you how to employ other approaches when you don’t see a “pure” mathematical solution to a problem. With dedicated practice, you can definitely improve your SAT score.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
Whether or not you think your admission to college should be governed by your SAT score, there is evidence that it is, and that a mere 30 point jump in your Critical Reading score can get you into college. For more information, take a look at this USA Today article from May 2009. What do you think? Are colleges relying too much on SAT scores?
Share your comments below.
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
"My daughter increased her score and so did her friends who also took your SAT course."
Mrs. S. , Livingston NJ
"From a parent's perspective, it is every bit as strong as the so-called name brand, big company SAT test prep people which cost two, three, and even four times as much!" Henry K., New Providence NJ
"...because of his improvement he is now applying for schools that were previously out of reach..."
James. K., Yorktown Heights NY
"...I'm signing up my second child for your SAT course. I am very happy with it and have recommended it to others..." Mrs. K., Cresskill NJ
