More Advice

As students work with me, they inevitably ask new and varied questions. I’ll use this space to compile answers to every new question so you can benefit from the same advice I give to my students! This page will be updated periodically, and is easier than doing a full re-print of my book. So, check back as you’re preparing for your test.

The Night Before

The night and day before your test, it can really help to review passages you’ve already done before. Look intently for the evidence you used to disprove answer choices, the types of questions that were asked, and the parts of the passage that were important. You can do this regularly throughout your training, but it’s especially good to do just before your test as it is review and practice, but it’s not new material. You won’t have a ton of time the morning before your test.

Remember, Arvin and I are good at this stuff because we are intense about our basics, we never use calculators, we’ve seen the same tests over and over hundreds of times each. It’s not that we’ve seen 1 million tests. We’ve just seen the same 20 or 30 tests hundreds and hundreds of times. You can do the same, to a slightly lesser extent, and review the same passages multiple times over.

Struggling with Timing?

If you’re struggling with timing in math, it’s just because you don’t know your core math skills well enough. Practice multiplication tables, fractions, factorings, combining like terms, exponents rules, etc. You’ll gain in speed once those skills are solid.

If you’re struggling with timing in reading, see if there is one particular type of passage that takes you far too long. Maybe it’s the scientific passages, maybe the fiction. Whichever it is, move that passage to the very end. Do all the other passages first, THEN do that particular type of passage.

For example, many students spend too much time on the fiction passages because they come first. You’re not pressed for time; you’re not worried; you’re not rushing. BUT THEN…along comes the end of the test. If you had the time, you could definitely get several more questions correct. But, you’ve run out of time entirely.

Instead, you can do all the other passages first, then come back to the fiction passages. That way, when you get to the fiction passage, you know exactly how much time you have left. Your internal clock is much stronger. You’re less likely to take too much time on any one question in that passage. It’s a simple trick, but it can be really effective!

Try this out on your practice tests and see if it works for you. If not, come meet with me and we can figure out a different method. Timing is one of the more difficult things to diagnose and treat, but it can be done.

HOWEVER, if you do this, you MUST MUST MUST remember to bubble in all your questions correctly. Triple check when you place your first bubble on your scantron. This will be around question 11, NOT question 1. Don’t get thrown off on your bubbling and miss every single question! Seriously, check it four times if that’s what you need to do. Just make sure you’re filling in the correct question numbers.

What is Science Really Like?

There are several questions in the scientific passages of SAT Reading that don’t seem to test passage-specific knowledge at all. They’re more just testing if you understand science in general as a field of intellectual study. Here are a few notes.

Correlation is NOT Causation. Thinking about Certainty in Science.

You’ve probably hear this before, but you need to know why it matters. In science and social science studies, we’re often collecting a pile of data and then seeing what that data suggests. We never really know for sure what it means. There are always alternative explanations, hidden variables, things we didn’t account for, things we didn’t know we needed to account for, stuff we haven’t discovered yet…etc.

So, when a question asks you about data in the table, and the answer choice says something like, “This is always true…” or “They were certain that it wouldn’t work…” that’s probably not your answer. Very rarely is data certain. Very rarely is something an “always” sort of a thing. We think a lot of the world is “always” because we constantly experience all the “always” things. Gravity is always. The rotation of earth and the moon is always. We’re taught a bunch of “always” facts in school.

But the truth is, most of science isn’t certain yet. All the tiny questions and nuances and guesses and thoughts we have about every tiny facet of our world…it’s all a lot of speculation sometimes supported (not often fully proved) by some data. So, be very careful with the level of certainty in your data for every chart and graph on the SAT!

What Do Researchers Do?

People who research stuff for a living usually pick a particular field or sub-topic, or even a very specific question, and then research that question for…ever. But, what happens if other researchers (who are researching the same thing) come up with some breakthrough or answer? Will every other researcher just give up their missions in life and change careers?

No. Obviously not. They will usually just pick a slightly different avenue for the same research. If you learned something about THAT bird, then maybe I’ll try to apply the same concept to THIS bird. Or, a lot of science is peer review and verification. So, some researchers will just keep researching the same thing in order to verify the results of the researcher who “figured it out”. Sometimes, people get stuff wrong. That guy might not have figured it out at all!

So, the whole world of research doesn’t just immediately come to an end all the world over as soon as there’s any answer of any kind. We just take that success and keep running with it. Verify it; take it a step further; take it in a tangential direction. What have you.

Precision of Data (Measurement Error)

Some of you may have never learned this. Some of you learned it and forgot. Doesn’t matter. You should know it.

Measurement error is the difference between what you measured and the truth. That’s right, when you measure something and you get that it’s 4.35 inches…That might not be true! It’s possible that the thing happens to be 4.35 inches long. But, the naked eye isn’t perfect at telling these things, and all tools that we use for measurement have a particular capacity for precision, meaning they can only be so exact. Your standard ruler can’t tell you the length of something to 8 decimal places. It isn’t that precise. But, a micrometer can get much more precise.

So, if any lengths are given as, say, 4.35 ± 0.4 inches, that just means that they can’t be exactly sure of THE precise measurement, but their measurement is accurate enough to say that this thing is for sure between 4.31 and 4.39 inches long. That’s basically all you need to know.