As fall approaches, I know that some of you will be prepping for the SATs. Bates is great because it doesn’t require you to turn in an SAT score with your application package, but most colleges still do, and a great score will always help your case!
Aside from the usual flash cards and paging through review books, here are a few tips to help you ace this necessary evil:
1. Crosswords: Traveling back and forth on the T (Boston’s subway system) for work, I’ve gotten really into doing crosswords. Now I’m no NY-Times-with-a-pen girl (yet!) but I am getting better day by day. What I love about the crosswords is that they A, are partially logic puzzles, B, bring to mind vocabulary I may not generally use, and C, stir up memories based on their clues. All of these are great for SAT/ college app prep, and way more fun than just flipping over flash-cards mindlessly. The benefit is that (unlike those pesky flash-cards), you have experience really thinking about the vocabulary and how it might be used, instead of just memorizing a word and its definition. In the end, I think this is more useful. I have friends who studied hundreds of words only to have none of them show up on the actual exam. When I did the same, only one word showed up – “abet” – which I already knew the meaning of from TV (think ‘aiding and abetting a criminal’). Logical thinking and practice using words in atypical contexts however, proved invaluable on the exam!
2. Tooth and Nail: You’re probably wondering what fighting or random body parts have to do with the SATs, and the fact is, they don’t. Tooth and Nail is a novel by Charles Harrington Elster. When I was younger, my mom used to listen to vocabulary tapes made by this man in the car, and I used to call him “Mr. Word”. Later, we discovered that he had written a book called Tooth and Nail which also helps people learn vocabulary. That may not sound appealing, but it’s a mystery novel that takes place on a college campus and it’s actually pretty good. (I’ve read it a few times.) Words throughout the book are bolded and their definitions are all right in the back of the book for easy reference. It’s great, because if you know the word, you can just keep reading, and if you don’t, the words are complicated enough that you’ll probably be confused and have to go check the meaning. The meanings are right there, and the book is an interesting enough read that you will probably just check the meaning and keep reading. I definitely suggest you check it out whether you’re studying for the SATs or just want a good read and want to boost up your vocab!
3. Have you heard of Kumon?: I’ve always thought of the SATs (especially the newer 4-hour version) as more of an endurance test than anything else. You need to be able to work fast and keep going. Just getting through the exam is sometimes more grueling than the questions themselves. I suggest getting out your old workbooks from elementary school and middle school and timing yourself on the problems. Set yourself a time limit of 5 minutes and see how many basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, etc problems you can do in that time. Keep practicing so you get faster and faster. If any of you did Kumon in your youth, you have experience with this. The benefit to practicing this basic math is that the more you practice it, the more instinctual it becomes, which means you have more time to spend actually thinking about what the question is asking. This means you’ll get less worn out, and you’ll be less likely to make silly mistakes because you’ll have time to check yourself.
4. 25 minute essay conquered: The newest section of the SAT includes a 25 minute essay. How on earth can you write an essay in 25 minutes? Sometimes it can take me 25 minutes (or more) just to think of a topic! A great strategy that I used was to pre-write my essay. Now before you go thinking that I was cheating, I wasn’t. I just had written out a couple very general essays before that I could use to adapt to any topic that was thrown at me during the exam. One was about a book I had read in school and the other was about a trip I had taken to India to study dance. In both cases, I was extremely familiar with the ins and outs of my essay and had practiced adapting the essays to a variety of topics in 25 minutes when I was studying. I had become so in tune with the two essay topics that I probably could have written them out in the original form from memory. This is actually a skill that will help you far after you take your SATs. Think about it– when you give an interview or network with someone, you will have only your own experiences to build a conversation off of. You have to be able to adapt your knowledge, stories, and skills to whatever turn the conversation takes to keep it going. Being able to adapt your words and thoughts to whatever topic is thrown at you on the SAT is a great way to practice this.
I should note that these tips are really only supplements to help you with studying. The most effective thing for me was, and always will be, just doing as many practice exams as possible without burning yourself out. I used to take the exams on Saturday mornings, just as I would be doing on the actual exam day. That way, when it came to the real thing, I was very used to the routine.
Have you taken the SATs (or other standardized exams) yet? What tips do you have? Post them below and “like” this post if you found it helpful!
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