Josh Ochs of Media Leaders interviews Alexis Avila Founder of Prepped & Polished, LLC in South Natick, Massachusetts. Alexis list his favorite seven tips for teens preparing for the SAT Test.

Take Advantage of Free SAT Material on the Web
Buy the Official College Board Study Guide
Understand the SAT Format
Don’t spend too much time on Sentence Completions
Skip around a little on the math fill-in section
Wake up early Saturday morning for two months
If you get stumped, circle the question, then move on

In this video, we want to show you seven SAT tips for teens. Let’s jump right into the good stuff; you’re going to walk us through seven tips for people that are taking their SAT. 

1. Take Advantage of Free SAT Material on the Web

You’ve got to take advantage of free stuff out there, okay? There’s a lot of free stuff that you can study with. KhanAcademy.com has great videos to help you with problems that are found in the old official college course study guide. CollegeBoard.org, go to it immediately, sign up for the question of the day, and have it delivered to you in the box, SAT problem, free, again. Quizlet.com, if you want to practice your SAT vocab, you don’t have to buy books in the bookstore for that; go to Quizlet.com; it’s all free. Free SAT vocab, practice, and take quizzes.

2. Buy the Official College Board Study Guide

You’ve got to buy the official college board study guide whether you work with a tutor or independently. It has the most realistic practice tests possible in this book; there are ten of them. And I recommend that you get through as many practice tests as possible. And make sure that you time yourself when you take these practice tests. And if you want to get explanations for the questions found in the SAT official college board study guide, purchase Tutor Ted’s SAT Solution Manual. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much the only one out there, the only book out there that actually has an explanation for each question found in the official college board SAT study guide.

3. Understand the SAT Format

This is what I do with all my students: to get them to feel confident and know what to expect. First, section one and section ten are always the same section. Section one consists of essays; section ten consists of a short grammar writing section. The next level of predictability is found in sections eight, nine, and ten. Those are always the shortened versions of the critical reading math, and like I said, section ten is also a short grammar writing section.

Sections two through seven do not have as much predictability but guarantee in those sections; you’re going to find two critical reading long sections, 25 minutes, two math long sections, 25 minutes, and one long, 25 minutes writing grammar section. Then, you’ll have one experimental section.

Also, know the nuances within each section and learn how to pace for them. So, for example, the two long critical reading sections, one of those long critical reading sections has eight sentence completions as opposed to five sentence completions on the other one. So, there’s a different kind of pacing structure that you should learn. So that’s what I have to say about the SAT format. I could go on forever about it.

4. Don’t spend too much time on Sentence Completion

Get to the critical reading. So don’t spend too much time on those sentence completion questions, folk. Why? It’s simple, it’s math,
there are 19 sentence completions versus 48 reading comprehension questions. If you get complacent and smug, and take your sweet old time doing those 19 sentence completion questions, you’re going to have five minutes left to do all that reading. You don’t want to be in that pickle.

So trust your gut, study your vocab, and get through those sentence completion questions relatively fast so you can have ample time to do the reading questions. Scan the questions first when you are at the critical reading, scan the questions first, mark up the passage that answers the specific question on the fly as you’re reading; it’s like an open book test. And then, at the very end, answer all the general questions, and answer those last. It will make sense because you can only answer general questions once you have the full scope of the passage.

5. Skip around a little on the math fill-in section

Skip around on the maths fill-in, the long 25-minute math fill-in section, where you have eight multiple choices and then ten fill-ins after. Why? Because on the SAT, you want to answer all the easy, immediate questions before you tackle the hard ones. Well, the order of difficulty goes from easy to hard, from one to eight multiple-choice, and then they get easy again. So I recommend that you do the first five or six multiple-choice questions; just take a quick glance at numbers seven and eight multiple-choice, which are the hard ones, and if they’re too hard, just circle them and go right to those easy fill-ins, take care of those, and at the very end go back to those last two multiple choice questions.

6. Wake up early Saturday morning for two months

Well this is kind of like another tip, I really believe that kids have to develop a routine going into the SAT. So I recommend you wake up early for at least two months before the test each Saturday leading up to the test, up to two months before that. The key is to build your confidence. It’s to build a consistent study program if you want to get your confidence going up. So you want to wake up early for two months so you get used to doing SAT problems early in the morning. Again, now, while you’re waking up on Saturday, I want you to eat a good, healthy breakfast devoid of fatty foods. Find a quiet study area free of distractions. Have a nice stopwatch so you can pace yourself. And waking up early means going to bed early, too.

7. If you get stumped, circle the question, then move on

The SAT is a marathon; it’s not a sprint, which basically means that you want to keep moving at a nice, steady pace; you don’t want to cram and agonize over question number one. If you can’t answer it, you circle that question, and you keep moving. If you spend more than a minute on a problem, it’s probably a good indicator that you’re kind of going about the problem the wrong way. You circle that problem and then you keep moving to the next question. Answer as many questions as you can, and then at the very end, with a fresh set of eyes, you go back to the questions that you circled along the way and tackle those; that’s the way to go.

Are you preparing for the SAT? Which tip do you find most helpful?

Post your tips/comments below.

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