Crack the SAT

With the Scholastic Aptitude Test round the corner, Shubhajit Bandopadhyay gives tips on how to go about with the preparation at each stage

The next administration of the new redesigned SAT, which will be its first administration in India, is just about six weeks away. Here is some expert advise for candidates to follow.

Six weeks before

• Take a full-length timed diagnostic test if you haven’t taken one yet. This will help you to determine what kind of preparation you need for the new SAT.
• Make a study plan if you haven’t made one yet. In the plan you should include not only the concepts you need to learn, along with how and when you will learn those concepts, but also the number of drills and tests you will do during these six weeks, along with a schedule for when you will do them.
• Are there any basic math concepts that you do not understand properlyIJ It often takes time to learn such concepts. Start immediately.
• Become familiar with literature and documents relating to American Founding Documents and Great Global Conversations. Although these are large areas and not very well defined, it will be good to become familiar with the history of American Independence and the Civil War and with ideas relating to freedom, liberty, equality, fraternity and justice,
• Keep learning new words. The new SAT doesn’t have sentence completion questions, so you no longer need to learn those obscure ‘SAT words’. Still, unless you have a very good vocabulary, you will come across unfamiliar words in the SAT. Therefore, you ought to keep learning new ‘not so obscure’ words that are commonly used in a variety of contexts.
• Get a calculator that conforms to the College Board’s calculator policy, preferably one from the list given on the page https://collegereadiness. collegeboard.org /sat/taking-the-test/calculator-policy. For certain questions a calculator can save you a lot of time.
• Start using the calculator when you practice, so that you learn when it is helpful and when it is not. You must also become thoroughly familiar with calculator usage.

Four weeks before

• Focus more on taking full-length practice tests and reviewing your performance. You should take about four full-length tests during this period. More importantly, you must review your tests to fine-tune your strategies and find out gaps in knowledge, if any.
• Continue taking practice drills (relating to a topic) in between full-length tests. As with full-length tests, review your performance in the drills. This will help you to improve your performance from one test to the next. Every time you get a question wrong, ask yourself what you learnt from that mistake and what you must do in the future to get that right.

Two weeks before

• Focus on techniques and strategies to improve your accuracy and time management. Here are a few things you must keep in mind:

Do not leave any question unanswered. Remember that there is no penalty for wrong answers on the new SAT. Choose a ‘letter of the day’ and use that to answer every question that you don’t have time to solve or you don’t know how to solve. Use the process of elimination to get closer to the right answer by eliminating all the answer choices that you know are wrong. Use a two-pass approach. First answer all the questions that you are able to answer quickly and correctly. leave questions that are time consuming or difficult till later.

The day before

• Your brain deserves some rest before the final. Do not take any full-length test on the day before the new SAT, but keep your brain active by doing a few questions applying the techniques that you have already learned.
• Make a checklist of the ‘permitted’ and ‘essential’ things you are going to carry to the test center. look it up on the College Board site:  https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-test/test-day-checklist
• Don’t get a new calculator on the day before the new SAT, but put a new battery.
• Make sure that you know the location of the center.

On D-Day

• Eat your regular breakfast and reach the center in time. Do not try something new.
• Keep your cool and remember to use the techniques that you have mastered.

(The writer is Uber Trainer 1, Manya Education Pvt. ltd)