SAT Singapore: How to Ace Your SAT Test
Every student should have a strategy to approach the SAT test. In this article, SAT Singapore specialist ICON+ guides you on how to prepare for the witten test...
As a college bound teenager, when I heard the call, “Pencils down!” after hours of grueling testing, I felt an immense sense of relief; I knew I would never have to see an SAT test question again. Little did I know that, 10 years later, I’d sit down to take yet another SAT exam.
Today, as an SAT coach, I work with standardized reading, writing, and mathematics questions on a daily basis. Taking the exam, by this time, should be a cinch for me – right? At least that’s what I thought. WRONG – dead wrong! I’m pretty confident in my score (to be revealed to me by Collegeboard in less than two weeks), but nearly five hours in a testing room oozing with stress hormones was certainly not a piece of cake.
Fortunately, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. I learned a lot from my testing marathon, and here are my SAT tips to help you score higher:
1. Practice writing essays under time pressure
25 minutes to write an essay is less time than you think it is. Despite my experience preparing students for the SAT, while I was writing my essay, I realized that I would have to leave out an example I had included in my outline in order to give myself time to finish the conclusion and check my piece over for errors. Thankfully, my essay flowed well even without the additional example to support my thesis! However, if I could take the SAT yet again, I would work harder on pacing myself during the essay section: I’d practice writing a few essays under time pressure.
2. Devour that SAT vocab list
This time around, the sentence completion questions in the Critical Reading sections left me feeling warm inside; I knew I did well. A decade ago, however, they were the questions that boggled me the most. Why the difference? The answer is really quite simple: I’ve had 10 years to build my vocabulary. In the past 10 years, I’ve read consistently, and I’ve included in my reading list solid works of literature. However, if you are a high school student gearing up for the SAT, you don’t have 10 years to build your vocabulary. Although I do recommend reading quality literature daily for both the mind and the heart, the quickest way to a higher score on the Critical Reading portion is to study and to use words that appear frequently on the SAT test. You should be able to locate a list of such words through a quick internet search or run to the bookstore.
3. Balance gut instinct and logic; use both hemispheres of your brain
One of the first things I tell each new class of SAT prep students is that the exam measures critical reasoning ability – so how dare I mention right-brained thinking?! Well, I’ve found that for some questions, listening to my instincts or finding creative approaches to problem solving help. This is especially true for critical reading sections addressing general meaning, tone, or purpose of passages; difficult mathematics questions; and identifying errors and improving sentences questions in the writing section. For the above types of questions, I tend to first find answers using gut instinct or a creative approach, then see if I can justify my solutions using step-by-step reasoning. For example, in the writing section, I identify parts of sentences that “sound wrong” to me, then figure out what the grammar or style error I am responding to is.
About this article
SAT, which stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test or Scholastic Assessment Test (Wiki: SAT), is an international standardized test for college admissions in the United States. Owned and developed by non-profit organization the College Board, the current SAT Reasoning Test has a duration of 3:45 and costs US$75 for international students. ICON+ provides SAT test preparation classes in Singapore and boasts a reputation of producing students with scores higher than the worldwide average. Read more about ICON+'s SAT Singapore program.
