Posted on

The Day Before the Test

Here is a quick checklist of things to do the day before the test:

1) Don’t do anything new – no last minute cramming, no new passages or problems

2) Review – Go back over old problems that you missed in practice. If you’ve done your previous work on a separate sheet, then you can just write down question numbers and go back and rework them as if they were new. If your old answers are right there in front of you, then try explaining why the correct answer is right and why your old answer was wrong (as if you were explaining it to another student).

3) Get your stuff ready – Put everything you need for tomorrow together in one spot (ID, ticket, pencils, calculator, snack, drink, etc. Even consider setting out your clothes. Make sure you bring a snack and drink for the break.

4) Gameplan – Spend about 10 minutes visualizing the test in your mind. What time are you going to wake up? What are you going to do when you wake up? What time will you leave the house? Do you know where your testing center is? Visualize standing in line, sitting down, filling out your personal information. Visualize each section of the test, in order, including breaks. Remind yourself of the pacing for each section.

5) Sleep – Go to bed at a reasonable time for you. If you usually stay up until midnight, don’t suddenly go to bed at 9PM. Go to bed on the early side of when you would normally go to bed anyway (maybe 15-30 minutes earlier than usual).

Morning Of

6) Do a light (10-minute) workout, just enough to get the blood flowing and wake you up. Physical and mental are linked. You cannot perform up to your mental potential if your body is not awake. Get the blood flowing. If you want to do more, do more, but not if you don’t normally workout in the morning. Again, you don’t want to change up your normal routine too much.

7) Eat Breakfast – Eat the healthiest thing that you would normally eat for breakfast. Don’t go get the Waffle House All-Star Special if you normally don’t eat breakfast, but do eat something.

Posted on

My Experience with the New SAT

Yesterday, I dragged my old self down to the local high school to find out what this new SAT is all about. I got out of bed around 7, got dressed, and did a couple of stretches and exercises (an abbreviated version of the workout I do every morning). After eating a bowl of cereal, I grabbed my calculator, #2 pencils, and admissions ticket, all of which I had set out the night before. I hopped in my car and made the quick 8-minute drive from my house to Peachtree Ridge High School.

My admission ticket said to arrive by 7:45, but I probably didn’t walk in the door until closer to 7:50. There was a long line, so I queued up along with the rest of the students taking the test, trying my best to look 17 years old! I got to the classroom at 8:15, but sat there for another 30 minutes waiting for kids to trickle in before finally getting the go ahead to start. I believe we were one of the last rooms to get started at nearly 8:45.

Reading

The reading section was first: 5 passages, 52 questions, 10-11 questions per passage. We had 65 minutes to complete. The time pressure was way less intense than it is on the ACT. On the ACT, you have 35 minutes to do four 10-question passages; here you get 65 for five 10-11 question passages—almost double the amount of time for only a 25% increase in questions. One passage was fiction, the other four were nonfiction. The topics of the nonfiction passages ranged from women’s suffrage to the environment to studies about the brain. None were overly boring; some I even found interesting. I finished the section with about five minutes to spare, and took the remaining time to review a couple of the more challenging questions I had marked earlier (Tip: use your test booklet to star tough questions to come back to if you have extra time).

Writing

We got a 10-minute break after the Reading. I got up went to the bathroom and spent the entire 10 minutes outside the classroom. (Tip: don’t stay in your chair during the break. Get up and do something.) The writing was very similar to the English part of the ACT, albeit shorter (35 minutes, 44 questions vs 60 minutes, 75 questions). This section was a little bit of a blur to me. It was divided up into four passages, 11 questions each. I know I finished on time. For the most part the questions were the same as the ACT English, but there were a few that were different. At least two questions dealt with looking at a graph (almost like the ACT science).

Math

After writing, we dove right into Math-No Calculator. This was a short section, and the one I came closest to running out of time on. I hit one question toward the end of the multiple choice that I didn’t know how to do and took me a while to figure out. In fact, I guessed on it after I had wasted a lot of time. I quickly breezed through the grid-in section, but there was a hard one at the end of that, which also took me some time. I ended up with only a minute to go back and look at the one I had guessed on earlier. I thought I was right but wasn’t sure.

Before the Math-Calculator section, we got a 5-minute break. I spent the time thinking about the question I was unsure of and eventually figured out that I got it right (Yay!!). I found the next math section super easy. I finished it with over 8 minutes to spare, and had over 5 minutes left even after double checking all of the questions I thought had potential for careless mistakes.

Experimental

I thought the test was over at this point, but the proctor said there was a fifth section. Even she seemed confused by it and asked us if our books really contained such a section. Once we confirmed that it did, we all hunkered down for an extra 25-minutes. Our experimental section was math. I wasn’t on my A-game on this section, and I know I missed at least two. One I figured out right after time was called and realized my answer was wrong; the other was a grid-in that I skipped and never got to come back to.

By the time the proctor collected answer booklets and test booklets and dismissed us, it was 12:35, nearly four hours after it started and nearly 5 hours after I reported to the center.

Overall Impression

I found the test much more fair than the old SAT. I even liked it better than the ACT because of the decreased time pressure. Some of the questions were still tricky. You still need to know your stuff. I know a lot of bad things have been said about this new test. I, myself, wanted to hate it, but in reality, I think it could provide a great alternative to the ACT for slower test takers. Additionally studying for one test (ACT or SAT) will now help you on the other much more than it did before.

Posted on

Raise your ACT English – easy trick #2

Raise your ACT English – easy trick #2

September 16, 2015

The next easy trick to raise that English score: favor simple verb tenses over complex ones. I’m not going to get into all the grammatical details regarding verb tenses for two simple reasons:

1. You don’t need to know this to score well, and

2. I’m not an expert on grammar.

Here’s the deal: On the ACT, a simple verb is almost always better than a complex verb phrase. What exactly do I mean by this. I mean always choose a one word verb over a verb phrase. So for example, “He walks to school” or “He walked to school” beats “He [is walking, has walked, had walked, etc] to school” almost every time.

Does that make it sound too simple? Well there is one exception. I have seen a “perfect” verb tense (i.e. a verb phrase starting with has, had, or have) beat out a simple verb tense. But the only time i have seen this happen is when the simple tense had a subject-verb agreement problem. So, bottom line, easy trick #2 is subordinate to easy trick #1. Always make sure your SVA is in order first, then use easy trick #2.