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.
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.
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.
Guess what? As I tell my students in class, it doesn’t matter if your facts are accurate, as long as your writing is on topic and you include detailed examples to back up your position. Not too long ago, a researcher at MIT showed that you should also be prepared to write a lot. So make up facts if you have to! Just write well, technically, and at length.
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.
ESC has changed its class schedule in Palm Beach County so that all of our students will be prepared for the new April 14 SAT test date. If you are a Palm Beach County student, please check the SAT Class Schedule & Registration page for new SAT class schedule information.
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.
Practicing taking the SAT makes you better at it. That’s no surprise, but exactly why we get better just may be. According to recent research, your improvement is all in your head . . . literally. Recent brain research has shown that as you practice an activity, your brain produces new neurons and connections that make it, and by extension you, more skilled. It does this whether you like it or not. Evidence for the effects of practice and repetition on skills exists everywhere. For example, how easy is brushing your teeth? Not that it takes much practice to get good at that, but if you’ve ever watched a little kid concentrate on making the toothbrush do what he wants before he’s had much practice, then you’ve seen the difference between a person who has grown neurons and connections for a particular skill and one who hasn’t.
Granted, the tooth-brushing example is overly simple. But the growth of neural connections helps us in our abilities from the simplest to the most complicated: everything from brushing our teeth to solving complex mathematical equations.
Why does this matter to your SAT score? The answer is simple – practice taking the SAT. And practice doing the sorts of activities that the SAT demands – everything from reading complex and unfamiliar pieces of writing, to solving quadratic equations, to writing essays that contain your opinion about some obscure topic, to sitting in an exam room taking long tests and filling in scantron sheets until your eyes water. You will get better at all of it.
Does familiarity breed contempt? Maybe, but it also breeds excellence. Keep up that practice, and your score will go up, whether you want it to or not.
This concept is called neuroplasticity. For a bit more information, check out this Wikipedia article, or read one of the many new books on the subject.
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.
Check back here for updates on all things SAT Prep related, written by our SAT Prep Teachers. The ESC Blog will cover such topics as ways to prepare for the test, what SAT scores mean, SAT news around the web, and various and sundry SAT prep and college admissions related topics. Stay tuned!
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