Читать книгу SAT For Dummies - Woods Geraldine, Geraldine Woods, Ron Woldoff - Страница 27

You’re the person who buys summer clothes in December. (Smart! That’s when they’re on clearance.) You also plan ahead — way ahead. This is not a bad strategy for long-term success in life and career. When your SAT is roughly a year out, start with these strategies:

 Sign up for challenging courses in school. Skip the courses that require papers short enough to tweet and just enough math to figure out how many minutes remain before your next vacation. Go for subjects that stretch your mind. Specifically, stick it out with math at least through Algebra II. If high school is in your rearview mirror, check out extension or enrichment adult-ed courses. Colleges will appreciate this initiative along with your SAT scores.

 Get into the habit of reading. Instagram, Snapchat, and Discord don’t do the trick. Instead, take on academic journals, established news sources, and any publication aimed towards an adult audience. The more you read challenging material, the more you build your ability to comprehend it. This will help you in so many ways in life, but on the SAT, it helps you understand vocabulary, analyze reasoning, and deconstruct evidence. Take note of unfamiliar words and check the words online. Also notice how an author makes a point — through description, citing experts, word choice, and so forth. This helps you understand the passages of the Reading Test, recognize the writing methods of the Writing and Language Test, and construct a logical, flowing essay for the optional Essay Test.

 Take a critical eye. Reading the school or local paper, websites, or any publications, look for reasoning techniques. They’re everywhere, and once you spot them, you see them all over. Is the sales pitch, persuasive argument, or editorial using statistics, emotion, anecdotes, or humor to make its point? As a side benefit, you learn to see through these tactics and spot the logic.

 Revisit your math. Resist the urge to burn your geometry text the minute the semester is over. Keep your math notebooks and especially your old exams. Revisit the questions, especially the ones you missed, because these are the topics you’ll see on the SAT. Research shows that memory improves when concepts are reviewed after a period of time, and this will help you when the SAT asks you to factor a quadratic, which you may not have done for a couple of years.

 Take the practice exams in Part 5 of this book. Work your way through all those questions and then check the answers and explanations to everything you got wrong, skipped, or wobbled on. After you identify your areas where you need to focus, you know what you have to practice. There are also free practice exams at www.collegeboard.org.

 Build up your grammar. The grammar review in Chapter 5 covers almost all of what you need for the Writing and Language Test, but the SAT likes to throw the occasional “oddball” grammar curveball that no one is expecting. For a more thorough, in-depth review of English grammar, pick up English Grammar Workbook For Dummies or 1,001 Grammar Practice Questions For Dummies (both authored by Geraldine Woods and published by Wiley).

 Take the PSAT/NMSQT. This “mini-SAT” gives you a chance to experience test conditions. It may also open the door to some robust scholarships, including the National Merit Scholarship (the “NMS” in the title of the test). The PSAT is a good preview of the SAT, and when you get your scores, you get to see the questions you missed along with the right answers — which, as stated in Chapter 1, is like turning on a light to see your exam performance.

This is a good, early start. Now continue on to the medium-range plan as the time before your SAT shortens.