Three excerpts from Standing Out on the SAT and ACT: Perfect Scorers' Uniquely Effective Strategies for Testing and Admissions Success by Shiv Gaglani and Blake Cecil
Foreword by Joann P. DiGennaro:
Over the past thirty years I have had the singular opportunity to work with thousands of the most intelligent and talented students around the world. These individuals have certainly stood out not only during their high school, collegiate, and graduate years, but most importantly throughout their professional lives. Among them are successful entrepreneurs, such as the founders of Pinterest and General Assembly, professors including Fields medalists (the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics), and renowned physicians, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals.
One can trace their success back to their high school days, during which they were standout students: perfect or near-perfect scorers on SAT, ACT, and AP exams; gold medalists at international Olympiads for science and math; and science competition winners. While impressive, these accomplishments ultimately were of less importance than the underlying motivations that drove them to succeed, and the skills they acquired on their respective paths. This, in essence, is the philosophy espoused in Standing Out.
It is a pleasure to write the Foreword for this unique book, which was first conceptualized by its authors Shiv Gaglani and Blake Cecil in 2011. Shiv was a 2005 alumnus of the Research Science Institute, a flagship program of the Center for Excellence in Education, and has since remained committed to the success of his younger peers - first by writing Success with Science (www.successwithscience.org) and then by founding Osmosis (www.osmosis.org), a novel educational platform used by thousands of students around the world. Equally accomplished, Blake had already helped tens of thousands of students get into college with his invaluable contributions on College Confidential, and participated in a variety of academic competitions. This was before he had even stepped foot at Brown, where he attends college. Both authors have sharpened their teaching skills through extensive personal tutoring.
Shiv and Blake each received perfect scores on both the SAT and ACT, an exceedingly rare accomplishment that makes them stand out even among the most distinguished high school students. However, as they write in Standing Out, it was not the scores themselves that mattered but rather the skills they acquired in the process of preparing for the tests: a more versatile lexicon, the ability to think critically, and a deep understanding of grammar - all of which helped them write this book in the first place!
Unlike other books on the subject, Standing Out eschews gimmicky test-taking shortcuts, which often fall short on all but the most basic questions. Instead Shiv and Blake focus on empowering students with the drive to aim higher – and, of course, the strategic tools, knowledge, and resources to achieve that success. Although the prevailing contemporary attitude among students is that standardized tests are nothing but a waste of time, Standing Out will convince readers that there is a deep educational potential in these collegiate entrance exams, opening their eyes to the rich learning possibilities all around them.
I know that this book will appeal not only to the highly motivated students that the Center for Excellence in Education generally attracts, but also to students who have tremendous potential yet need the right encouragement to unleash it. It is an invaluable resource for these students as well as their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors who may also learn more about what it takes to truly stand out.
One can trace their success back to their high school days, during which they were standout students: perfect or near-perfect scorers on SAT, ACT, and AP exams; gold medalists at international Olympiads for science and math; and science competition winners. While impressive, these accomplishments ultimately were of less importance than the underlying motivations that drove them to succeed, and the skills they acquired on their respective paths. This, in essence, is the philosophy espoused in Standing Out.
It is a pleasure to write the Foreword for this unique book, which was first conceptualized by its authors Shiv Gaglani and Blake Cecil in 2011. Shiv was a 2005 alumnus of the Research Science Institute, a flagship program of the Center for Excellence in Education, and has since remained committed to the success of his younger peers - first by writing Success with Science (www.successwithscience.org) and then by founding Osmosis (www.osmosis.org), a novel educational platform used by thousands of students around the world. Equally accomplished, Blake had already helped tens of thousands of students get into college with his invaluable contributions on College Confidential, and participated in a variety of academic competitions. This was before he had even stepped foot at Brown, where he attends college. Both authors have sharpened their teaching skills through extensive personal tutoring.
Shiv and Blake each received perfect scores on both the SAT and ACT, an exceedingly rare accomplishment that makes them stand out even among the most distinguished high school students. However, as they write in Standing Out, it was not the scores themselves that mattered but rather the skills they acquired in the process of preparing for the tests: a more versatile lexicon, the ability to think critically, and a deep understanding of grammar - all of which helped them write this book in the first place!
Unlike other books on the subject, Standing Out eschews gimmicky test-taking shortcuts, which often fall short on all but the most basic questions. Instead Shiv and Blake focus on empowering students with the drive to aim higher – and, of course, the strategic tools, knowledge, and resources to achieve that success. Although the prevailing contemporary attitude among students is that standardized tests are nothing but a waste of time, Standing Out will convince readers that there is a deep educational potential in these collegiate entrance exams, opening their eyes to the rich learning possibilities all around them.
I know that this book will appeal not only to the highly motivated students that the Center for Excellence in Education generally attracts, but also to students who have tremendous potential yet need the right encouragement to unleash it. It is an invaluable resource for these students as well as their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors who may also learn more about what it takes to truly stand out.
Chapter 1 of Standing Out elaborates on the belief that the SAT and ACT are, rather than mere stepping stones, opportunities to learn skills and excel. This passage also demonstrates our use of in-text vocabulary training and gives a small taste of our college admissions coverage.
Chapter 1
Why You Should Care
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
Beverly Sills (1929-2007)
American Opera Singer, Grammy and Emmy Winner
The Stepping Stone Myth
Like most high school students, you have probably heard something like this before:
“You should go to college.”
Why?
“Because getting a college degree is the way to get a great job. It’s a stepping stone.”
“You should aim for a great job.”
Why?
“Because having a great job is a stepping stone to making lots of money.”
“You should make lots of money.”
Why?
“Because making lots of money is a stepping stone to buying an expensive Ferrari.”
“You should buy a Ferrari.”
Why?
“Because driving a Ferrari is a stepping stone to happiness.”
“But first … you should score high on the SAT and ACT, maintain a great GPA, and do a lot of extracurriculars.”
Why?
“Because doing those things is a stepping stone to getting into college and, thus, everything else above!”
This line of reasoning is apocryphal9 – but not because it claims that doing well on the standardized tests and in your classes and being student government president will help you get into college; that part is true. The problem is in thinking that the tests, classes, and extracurriculars are just stepping stones that you have to cross on your way to eventual happiness. That is a surefire way to be underprepared for college and life. If this is how you look at things – no love lost if so, because it is a common perspective that many subscribe to – let us correct course before your proverbial ship (you) crashes into the proverbial iceberg (reality).
The fact that you are reading this book makes it clear that you care about your future (or at least that your parents care about your future). In either case, someone cares about your future, for which you should be glad. The Stepping Stone Myth is an unfortunate byproduct of this care and the fact that college admissions have become more competitive. When Shiv applied to Harvard, there were about 22,000 applicants for 2,000 offered spots, for about a 9 percent admissions rate. At the time of this writing, there were about 35,000 applicants for a similar number of spots – nearly a 6 percent admissions rate! The desire to get into a good college – and the fact that doing so has become more difficult – has produced an arms race among high school students. But instead of stocking up on WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), students are stocking up on the “ETGs”: extracurriculars, test scores, and grade point averages.
Amassing10 any one of the ETGs alone takes a significant commitment, so together they can appear overwhelming. The Stepping Stone Myth is a coping mechanism that makes us think we can cut corners in an effort to “game the system.” Examples include cramming for a foreign language test the night before and then forgetting everything immediately after; padding a resume by creatively rounding up your community service hours (driving to the soup kitchen counts, right?); and practicing how to guess on or otherwise game the SAT rather than learning how to do math, understand what you read, and use English. If our goal is merely to step to the next stone along our path – present enjoyment and future readiness neglected – we are thinking in narrow and short terms.
Those machinations11 may help you get into college and may even help you do decently well there. However, the realization that the Stepping Stone Myth actually hurts you rather than helps you will ultimately hit you so hard that you will feel as if the stones themselves fell on top of you. Shiv remembers this happening to him during his second week at Harvard, where it seemed that almost everyone was a polyglot.12 During high school he viewed the foreign language requirement as a stepping stone to jump over and thus became very good at memorizing long lists of Spanish vocabulary words ten minutes before a test and then regurgitating them, in the process forgetting what each word meant as soon as he had written it down. Though Shiv “earned” A’s in each of those Spanish classes, he was only slightly more fluent than the Chihuahua from the Taco Bell commercials (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”). At Harvard he realized his folly and decided to retake Spanish and even spend a summer in Chile, though his current level of fluency would have been much higher if he had viewed foreign language not as a stepping stone but rather as a useful skill.
9 SAT Word Alert: Apocryphal (adjective) means “of doubtful authenticity”
10 SAT Word Alert: Amass (verb) means “to collect”
11 SAT Word Alert: Machination (noun) means “scheme or plot, usually for bad intentions”
12 SAT Word Alert: Polyglot (noun) means “one who can speak or write several languages.” In fact, during Shiv’s senior year at Harvard, his group of five roommates collectively spoke eight languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.
A far better perspective is to view each of the ETGs as individual steps on an infinitely high escalator. As opposed to stepping stones, which are independent, disconnected, and based on the idea that ultimate meaning lies just beyond the remaining stones, the steps of an escalator move together and build upon each other. Developing a new skill – whether it is fluency in a foreign language, mastery of a golf swing, or an understanding of fractions and percentages – is tantamount13 to moving up a step on the escalator. The skill, like the step, will always be behind you, pushing you further up.
Now think about the classes, extracurriculars, and tests that you view as stepping stones and consider why they may be more meaningful than you give them credit for.
The SAT and ACT aim simply to gauge the knowledge and reasoning skills in reading, writing, and math that you have hopefully developed throughout high school. Most of the questions do not technically require any preparation beyond what you would get in regular high school English and math classes. However, what is covered in these classes often varies by school, and even by teacher. Therefore, the SAT and ACT college admissions tests are meant to ensure that all college-bound students are ready for college-level work, after which they should be prepared for the post-college job market. (Yikes, the word “college” appeared four times in the last sentence: Note that you should spot redundancy as problematic in the grammar sections of the tests unless the authors are emphasizing a specific point, like we just did.)
Let us be clear: The tests should not be viewed as passive measures of what you have learned, but rather as roadmaps for what you need to improve upon before college. For example, Shiv knows that if he had not taken the time to memorize vocabulary words and read more to do well on the tests, he would not have developed the skills that allowed him to do well in his college courses, get admitted to top professional schools, and receive great job offers. Many required readings in college and for jobs are riddled with SAT-level words (like those found in this book). That is why, instead of being “okay” with not knowing the last few, relatively difficult sentence completion questions or trying to game the system by guessing, it is better to simply learn the words. A strong vocabulary will stay with you like an escalator step.
Now eliminate the Stepping Stone Myth from your mind and replace it with the reality of the escalator! Each step is not a means toward a vague ideal but an opportunity to derive meaning through personal achievement: new and improved knowledge and skills. This revised attitude will serve you well while preparing for the SAT and ACT and, more importantly, while moving forward into college and beyond.
As many wise men and women have said, “Live not for the destination but for the journey.”
Why You Should Care
At a time when most students see a dichotomy14 between education and anything worth doing – like uncovering the hilarious cultural riches of the Internet, forming meaningful memories with their peers, and plotting their escape to college – a test apparently devoid of humor or life comes along to stand in the way of getting into college.
It is a long test. And, by most honest accounts, it is a challenging and intimidating test, popularly known, among its target population, by such pejorative15 labels as “standardized assessment,” “admissions entrance exam,” and even (though on shakier ground) “intelligence test.”
It is understandable, then, that the SAT or the ACT is often a dreaded facet of college admissions (and, in turn, the high school experience) of motivated, college-bound students.
One can see the test as a frustrating and uncooperative hurdle, placed in his or her way by mysterious authority figures, which must be stepped over to get to the next stage of life. In fact, most do.
Those who view it in this way will approach the test with a dismissive defeatism: I’ll take a couple practice tests like everyone told me to; maybe I’ll even go to a couple prep classes at my school. Then I’ll get through the test once – they better not make me retake it! – and get accepted by a college. They will do worse than they are capable of because they are unmotivated. For almost all students, this lack of motivation means less knowledge, fewer skills, and less confidence, not to mention less ability to earn scholarships and college acceptances.
Alternatively, some will approach it with the rabid motivation of necessity and gamesmanship: I have to get into a prestigious, selective university, for which I need a high score! I must take dozens of practice tests and spend lots of money so that I can learn how to game this unfair, unnecessary, stupid test. What does the SAT or the ACT think it is, and why does it get to determine my future? They will do worse than they are able to because they are misguided in their motivation and will waste a lot of time and money in the process.
Fortunately, there is a much better approach to the SAT and the ACT. It is the way we espouse16 in this book, and it begins with a change in your viewpoint, as we brought up earlier in this chapter:
See the difficulty of the test as an opportunity to accomplish something previously beyond your grasp and perhaps even greater than you thought you had the potential to grasp. This feat is in itself meaningful.
See the test not as the product of a group of judgmental enemies who are sitting in a room maniacally concocting17 tricks but as the work of a well-meaning though imperfect team of educators who want merely to craft a series of questions designed to gauge your readiness for college.
13 SAT Word Alert: Tantamount (adjective) means “equivalent in value, significance, or effect”
14 SAT Word Alert: Dichotomy (noun) means “division into two contradictory groups”
15 SAT Word Alert: Pejorative (adjective) means “having an unpleasant connotation”
16 SAT Word Alert: Espouse (verb) means “to support or advocate”
17 SAT Word Alert: Concoct (verb) means “to create or devise”
Do not see the occasional frustrations that will invariably18 arise when you are preparing for the test (no journey worth your time is without hurdles!) as signs that you have run into the boundaries of your intellectual capacity or arrived at the plateau of your potential for progress. These frustrations should instead be a source of motivation. They serve as the objects for your aim to overcome – and then as the escalator steps propelling you to progress further.
Be wary, however, of letting yourself adopt a perverse19 and exaggerated motivation – a mentality that the SAT and ACT ought to dominate your college admissions priorities or usurp20 time you would have spent doing other important things. On the first point, extracurriculars and grades matter as well (remember the ETGs). And on the second point, college admissions are not the end-all of high school life; there is room too for cultivating a happy social life.
You should care about the SAT or the ACT because the process is rewarding and the skills gained in the process – both the specific problem-solving techniques that you will master and the more general strategies that you will develop for tackling challenges – are useful forever after, across all domains and at all levels. One escalator step up is one more escalator step supporting your experience of new heights.
More immediately and practically, you should care about succeeding on the SAT or the ACT because there are also external and very real incentives for doing well on the tests, such as a boost in college admissions and scholarship chances, as you will see.
As abnormal and atypical as it may feel at first, compel yourself to get excited at the chance to do what it takes to succeed on the tests! You will look back proudly, and all of the unpleasant associations with the tests that you may have now will be gone and will, in fact, heighten your sense of accomplishment.
On the way to doing well on the SAT or ACT, you will learn valuable skills. After doing well on the SAT or ACT, you will be exposed to valuable opportunities. These include college admissions, which we touch upon briefly below and heavily later on in the book. They include recognitions, like the Presidential Scholars program through which Shiv received an expense-paid trip to China, and scholarship money, such as the National Merit Scholarship that Blake and Shiv have used to help pay for college. (This latter reason should be motivation enough because, as we will mention in Chapter 3, each test question you get right may be worth up to $100!). And they include other opportunities, such as lucrative21 tutoring posts, stemming from your increased credibility and desirable reputation.
Though there are plenty of self-interested motives for raising your scores, there is at least one other important reason to live up to your potential on these tests: your responsibility to your community. Many students sit bored in their classes, realizing neither the costs that go into their education nor its societal value. Since the tab for our school is picked up by our parents and other taxpayers, there is a misalignment between how we value our classes and what they are actually worth monetarily (the latter often far outweighs the former). We owe it to our parents, our teachers, and our country to make their investments in us worthwhile. Indeed, in this globally competitive environment, we should hold ourselves responsible for developing the skills to become the educated workforce upon whose shoulders our society will continue to prosper.
As John F. Kennedy so famously said in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The advancement of society depends not only on those at the forefront of technological and scientific innovation but also on the population at large to educate and apply themselves. We think that standardized tests are able to provide a compelling, effectively guided stimulus for this education.
Okay, maybe it’s worth it to try to do well on the tests, you may now grant. But can I even do it? How do I do it? Yes, you can. As for how, caring in the right way – in other words, adopting the appropriate mentality and motivation – is a productive and great first step. In the following chapters, we will build upon that step to provide you with the tools to escalate your score.
You should (and can) do well on the SAT and ACT. If you are dubious22 of the above words of encouragement that trying your very best will bring you success, cast those doubts aside! When you do, you will realize the fruits of applying yourself. They taste like achievement: incorporeal23, but sweet.
18 SAT Word Alert: Invariable (adjective) means “not changing; constant”
19 SAT Word Alert: Perverse (adjective) means “not right or good; corrupt”
20 SAT Word Alert: Usurp (verb) means “to take away wrongfully”
21 SAT Word Alert: Lucrative (adjective) means “producing wealth”
22 SAT Word Alert: Dubious (adjective) means “doubtful”
23 SAT Word Alert: Incorporeal (adjective) means “not physical or tangible”
College Admissions
The college admissions process is often abstruse24 and marked by nuances25. The role of test scores in admissions is no exception; this is particularly true of the admissions practices of the nation’s highly selective colleges and universities. (Thankfully, many schools, including most public universities, have more clear-cut procedures within their admissions offices.)
These very competitive schools have adopted what they like to refer to as “holistic”26 admissions policies. In effect, this means that their admissions officers – the people who review your application and decide whether to admit you, deny you, or hold you in some sort of decidedly undesirable limbo (waitlists) – mine through the large amount of information that they have on you as an applicant and try to establish an overall sense of your “fit” for their school.
One crucial element of this fit is your academic credentials, which the admissions officers rely upon to develop confidence in your ability to succeed at the college without unreasonable amounts of effort or overextension on your part. This is both to your benefit – you do not want to find yourself in a situation in which just passing your classes is a lofty goal requiring interminable27 study sessions – and to the benefit of the university, which has an interest in maintaining high graduation rates, keeping professors happy with the quality of the students, and recording impressive statistics on its admissions profile.
In addition, the admissions officers are keenly concerned with accepting applicants who will form a cohesive, collaborative, and extracurricularly vibrant student body. They want some students who occupy the traditional niches of the school, and they want some students who do not. In so doing, they aim to cover a panoply28 of interests and personalities in their student body.
24 SAT Word Alert: Abstruse (adjective) means “hard to understand”
25 SAT Word Alert: Nuance (noun) means “a subtle difference or variation”
26 SAT Word Alert: Holistic (adjective) means “related to the idea that an entity is more than the sum of its parts”
27 SAT Word Alert: Interminable (adjective) means “having no end”
28 SAT Word Alert: Panoply (noun) means “a wide-ranging and impressive array or display”
To that end, beyond the initial academic stages of applicant review, admissions to highly selective colleges are often more an art than a science, replete29 with subjectivity, propensity30 to err, and uncertainty. Though the SAT no longer features analogies, we still believe they are important and will use one to clarify the above point:
Consider your college application a painting, and you are the artist. There are a myriad31 of elements that need to come together seamlessly for a painting to be considered a masterpiece: the hues and lights of the colors, direction and force of the brushstrokes, composition of the paints, and texture of the canvas, among others. Curators and critics spend hours poring over and analyzing these details, deciding whether the painting is a good fit for their museum or worthy of acclaim – subjectively, of course, because, as anyone who has been to a museum of modern art knows, beauty is often in the eye of the beholder.
Like a painting, your college application is composed of a number of elements: your test scores, GPA, extracurricular activities, background, recommendations, essays, and others. And it, too, will be reviewed by well-intentioned though subjective “curators and critics” – admissions officers – who will decide whether the painter behind the application – you – should be accepted into their school. Some of these curators will not even consider the painting if it is clear that a fundamental element that they seek for their art collection – say, brushstrokes – is absent (imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had tried finger painting the Mona Lisa). Similarly, admissions officers may scarcely even consider your application if the fundamental ingredient of high SAT and ACT scores is missing.
It is therefore among our goals to help you improve the chances that your college applications will be accepted by providing you with the right ingredients and tools – test scores and skills – and instructions for how to put them together artistically. Fortunately, we developed this artistic sense in time to have collectively been accepted to a number of those “highly selective colleges,” including Brown, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Yale. Wielding the insights we have gained from these application experiences, we have devoted an extensive portion of this book – Chapter 10, “The Art of College Admissions” – to preparing for and succeeding in college admissions. Consider us your personal Bob Ross in helping you make your application painting a college admissions masterpiece.
29 SAT Word Alert: Replete (adjective) means “full or abundant”
30 SAT Word Alert: Propensity (noun) means “a tendency”
31 SAT Word Alert: Myriad (noun) means “a great number”
Why You Should Care
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
Beverly Sills (1929-2007)
American Opera Singer, Grammy and Emmy Winner
The Stepping Stone Myth
Like most high school students, you have probably heard something like this before:
“You should go to college.”
Why?
“Because getting a college degree is the way to get a great job. It’s a stepping stone.”
“You should aim for a great job.”
Why?
“Because having a great job is a stepping stone to making lots of money.”
“You should make lots of money.”
Why?
“Because making lots of money is a stepping stone to buying an expensive Ferrari.”
“You should buy a Ferrari.”
Why?
“Because driving a Ferrari is a stepping stone to happiness.”
“But first … you should score high on the SAT and ACT, maintain a great GPA, and do a lot of extracurriculars.”
Why?
“Because doing those things is a stepping stone to getting into college and, thus, everything else above!”
This line of reasoning is apocryphal9 – but not because it claims that doing well on the standardized tests and in your classes and being student government president will help you get into college; that part is true. The problem is in thinking that the tests, classes, and extracurriculars are just stepping stones that you have to cross on your way to eventual happiness. That is a surefire way to be underprepared for college and life. If this is how you look at things – no love lost if so, because it is a common perspective that many subscribe to – let us correct course before your proverbial ship (you) crashes into the proverbial iceberg (reality).
The fact that you are reading this book makes it clear that you care about your future (or at least that your parents care about your future). In either case, someone cares about your future, for which you should be glad. The Stepping Stone Myth is an unfortunate byproduct of this care and the fact that college admissions have become more competitive. When Shiv applied to Harvard, there were about 22,000 applicants for 2,000 offered spots, for about a 9 percent admissions rate. At the time of this writing, there were about 35,000 applicants for a similar number of spots – nearly a 6 percent admissions rate! The desire to get into a good college – and the fact that doing so has become more difficult – has produced an arms race among high school students. But instead of stocking up on WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), students are stocking up on the “ETGs”: extracurriculars, test scores, and grade point averages.
Amassing10 any one of the ETGs alone takes a significant commitment, so together they can appear overwhelming. The Stepping Stone Myth is a coping mechanism that makes us think we can cut corners in an effort to “game the system.” Examples include cramming for a foreign language test the night before and then forgetting everything immediately after; padding a resume by creatively rounding up your community service hours (driving to the soup kitchen counts, right?); and practicing how to guess on or otherwise game the SAT rather than learning how to do math, understand what you read, and use English. If our goal is merely to step to the next stone along our path – present enjoyment and future readiness neglected – we are thinking in narrow and short terms.
Those machinations11 may help you get into college and may even help you do decently well there. However, the realization that the Stepping Stone Myth actually hurts you rather than helps you will ultimately hit you so hard that you will feel as if the stones themselves fell on top of you. Shiv remembers this happening to him during his second week at Harvard, where it seemed that almost everyone was a polyglot.12 During high school he viewed the foreign language requirement as a stepping stone to jump over and thus became very good at memorizing long lists of Spanish vocabulary words ten minutes before a test and then regurgitating them, in the process forgetting what each word meant as soon as he had written it down. Though Shiv “earned” A’s in each of those Spanish classes, he was only slightly more fluent than the Chihuahua from the Taco Bell commercials (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”). At Harvard he realized his folly and decided to retake Spanish and even spend a summer in Chile, though his current level of fluency would have been much higher if he had viewed foreign language not as a stepping stone but rather as a useful skill.
9 SAT Word Alert: Apocryphal (adjective) means “of doubtful authenticity”
10 SAT Word Alert: Amass (verb) means “to collect”
11 SAT Word Alert: Machination (noun) means “scheme or plot, usually for bad intentions”
12 SAT Word Alert: Polyglot (noun) means “one who can speak or write several languages.” In fact, during Shiv’s senior year at Harvard, his group of five roommates collectively spoke eight languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.
A far better perspective is to view each of the ETGs as individual steps on an infinitely high escalator. As opposed to stepping stones, which are independent, disconnected, and based on the idea that ultimate meaning lies just beyond the remaining stones, the steps of an escalator move together and build upon each other. Developing a new skill – whether it is fluency in a foreign language, mastery of a golf swing, or an understanding of fractions and percentages – is tantamount13 to moving up a step on the escalator. The skill, like the step, will always be behind you, pushing you further up.
Now think about the classes, extracurriculars, and tests that you view as stepping stones and consider why they may be more meaningful than you give them credit for.
The SAT and ACT aim simply to gauge the knowledge and reasoning skills in reading, writing, and math that you have hopefully developed throughout high school. Most of the questions do not technically require any preparation beyond what you would get in regular high school English and math classes. However, what is covered in these classes often varies by school, and even by teacher. Therefore, the SAT and ACT college admissions tests are meant to ensure that all college-bound students are ready for college-level work, after which they should be prepared for the post-college job market. (Yikes, the word “college” appeared four times in the last sentence: Note that you should spot redundancy as problematic in the grammar sections of the tests unless the authors are emphasizing a specific point, like we just did.)
Let us be clear: The tests should not be viewed as passive measures of what you have learned, but rather as roadmaps for what you need to improve upon before college. For example, Shiv knows that if he had not taken the time to memorize vocabulary words and read more to do well on the tests, he would not have developed the skills that allowed him to do well in his college courses, get admitted to top professional schools, and receive great job offers. Many required readings in college and for jobs are riddled with SAT-level words (like those found in this book). That is why, instead of being “okay” with not knowing the last few, relatively difficult sentence completion questions or trying to game the system by guessing, it is better to simply learn the words. A strong vocabulary will stay with you like an escalator step.
Now eliminate the Stepping Stone Myth from your mind and replace it with the reality of the escalator! Each step is not a means toward a vague ideal but an opportunity to derive meaning through personal achievement: new and improved knowledge and skills. This revised attitude will serve you well while preparing for the SAT and ACT and, more importantly, while moving forward into college and beyond.
As many wise men and women have said, “Live not for the destination but for the journey.”
Why You Should Care
At a time when most students see a dichotomy14 between education and anything worth doing – like uncovering the hilarious cultural riches of the Internet, forming meaningful memories with their peers, and plotting their escape to college – a test apparently devoid of humor or life comes along to stand in the way of getting into college.
It is a long test. And, by most honest accounts, it is a challenging and intimidating test, popularly known, among its target population, by such pejorative15 labels as “standardized assessment,” “admissions entrance exam,” and even (though on shakier ground) “intelligence test.”
It is understandable, then, that the SAT or the ACT is often a dreaded facet of college admissions (and, in turn, the high school experience) of motivated, college-bound students.
One can see the test as a frustrating and uncooperative hurdle, placed in his or her way by mysterious authority figures, which must be stepped over to get to the next stage of life. In fact, most do.
Those who view it in this way will approach the test with a dismissive defeatism: I’ll take a couple practice tests like everyone told me to; maybe I’ll even go to a couple prep classes at my school. Then I’ll get through the test once – they better not make me retake it! – and get accepted by a college. They will do worse than they are capable of because they are unmotivated. For almost all students, this lack of motivation means less knowledge, fewer skills, and less confidence, not to mention less ability to earn scholarships and college acceptances.
Alternatively, some will approach it with the rabid motivation of necessity and gamesmanship: I have to get into a prestigious, selective university, for which I need a high score! I must take dozens of practice tests and spend lots of money so that I can learn how to game this unfair, unnecessary, stupid test. What does the SAT or the ACT think it is, and why does it get to determine my future? They will do worse than they are able to because they are misguided in their motivation and will waste a lot of time and money in the process.
Fortunately, there is a much better approach to the SAT and the ACT. It is the way we espouse16 in this book, and it begins with a change in your viewpoint, as we brought up earlier in this chapter:
See the difficulty of the test as an opportunity to accomplish something previously beyond your grasp and perhaps even greater than you thought you had the potential to grasp. This feat is in itself meaningful.
See the test not as the product of a group of judgmental enemies who are sitting in a room maniacally concocting17 tricks but as the work of a well-meaning though imperfect team of educators who want merely to craft a series of questions designed to gauge your readiness for college.
13 SAT Word Alert: Tantamount (adjective) means “equivalent in value, significance, or effect”
14 SAT Word Alert: Dichotomy (noun) means “division into two contradictory groups”
15 SAT Word Alert: Pejorative (adjective) means “having an unpleasant connotation”
16 SAT Word Alert: Espouse (verb) means “to support or advocate”
17 SAT Word Alert: Concoct (verb) means “to create or devise”
Do not see the occasional frustrations that will invariably18 arise when you are preparing for the test (no journey worth your time is without hurdles!) as signs that you have run into the boundaries of your intellectual capacity or arrived at the plateau of your potential for progress. These frustrations should instead be a source of motivation. They serve as the objects for your aim to overcome – and then as the escalator steps propelling you to progress further.
Be wary, however, of letting yourself adopt a perverse19 and exaggerated motivation – a mentality that the SAT and ACT ought to dominate your college admissions priorities or usurp20 time you would have spent doing other important things. On the first point, extracurriculars and grades matter as well (remember the ETGs). And on the second point, college admissions are not the end-all of high school life; there is room too for cultivating a happy social life.
You should care about the SAT or the ACT because the process is rewarding and the skills gained in the process – both the specific problem-solving techniques that you will master and the more general strategies that you will develop for tackling challenges – are useful forever after, across all domains and at all levels. One escalator step up is one more escalator step supporting your experience of new heights.
More immediately and practically, you should care about succeeding on the SAT or the ACT because there are also external and very real incentives for doing well on the tests, such as a boost in college admissions and scholarship chances, as you will see.
As abnormal and atypical as it may feel at first, compel yourself to get excited at the chance to do what it takes to succeed on the tests! You will look back proudly, and all of the unpleasant associations with the tests that you may have now will be gone and will, in fact, heighten your sense of accomplishment.
On the way to doing well on the SAT or ACT, you will learn valuable skills. After doing well on the SAT or ACT, you will be exposed to valuable opportunities. These include college admissions, which we touch upon briefly below and heavily later on in the book. They include recognitions, like the Presidential Scholars program through which Shiv received an expense-paid trip to China, and scholarship money, such as the National Merit Scholarship that Blake and Shiv have used to help pay for college. (This latter reason should be motivation enough because, as we will mention in Chapter 3, each test question you get right may be worth up to $100!). And they include other opportunities, such as lucrative21 tutoring posts, stemming from your increased credibility and desirable reputation.
Though there are plenty of self-interested motives for raising your scores, there is at least one other important reason to live up to your potential on these tests: your responsibility to your community. Many students sit bored in their classes, realizing neither the costs that go into their education nor its societal value. Since the tab for our school is picked up by our parents and other taxpayers, there is a misalignment between how we value our classes and what they are actually worth monetarily (the latter often far outweighs the former). We owe it to our parents, our teachers, and our country to make their investments in us worthwhile. Indeed, in this globally competitive environment, we should hold ourselves responsible for developing the skills to become the educated workforce upon whose shoulders our society will continue to prosper.
As John F. Kennedy so famously said in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The advancement of society depends not only on those at the forefront of technological and scientific innovation but also on the population at large to educate and apply themselves. We think that standardized tests are able to provide a compelling, effectively guided stimulus for this education.
Okay, maybe it’s worth it to try to do well on the tests, you may now grant. But can I even do it? How do I do it? Yes, you can. As for how, caring in the right way – in other words, adopting the appropriate mentality and motivation – is a productive and great first step. In the following chapters, we will build upon that step to provide you with the tools to escalate your score.
You should (and can) do well on the SAT and ACT. If you are dubious22 of the above words of encouragement that trying your very best will bring you success, cast those doubts aside! When you do, you will realize the fruits of applying yourself. They taste like achievement: incorporeal23, but sweet.
18 SAT Word Alert: Invariable (adjective) means “not changing; constant”
19 SAT Word Alert: Perverse (adjective) means “not right or good; corrupt”
20 SAT Word Alert: Usurp (verb) means “to take away wrongfully”
21 SAT Word Alert: Lucrative (adjective) means “producing wealth”
22 SAT Word Alert: Dubious (adjective) means “doubtful”
23 SAT Word Alert: Incorporeal (adjective) means “not physical or tangible”
College Admissions
The college admissions process is often abstruse24 and marked by nuances25. The role of test scores in admissions is no exception; this is particularly true of the admissions practices of the nation’s highly selective colleges and universities. (Thankfully, many schools, including most public universities, have more clear-cut procedures within their admissions offices.)
These very competitive schools have adopted what they like to refer to as “holistic”26 admissions policies. In effect, this means that their admissions officers – the people who review your application and decide whether to admit you, deny you, or hold you in some sort of decidedly undesirable limbo (waitlists) – mine through the large amount of information that they have on you as an applicant and try to establish an overall sense of your “fit” for their school.
One crucial element of this fit is your academic credentials, which the admissions officers rely upon to develop confidence in your ability to succeed at the college without unreasonable amounts of effort or overextension on your part. This is both to your benefit – you do not want to find yourself in a situation in which just passing your classes is a lofty goal requiring interminable27 study sessions – and to the benefit of the university, which has an interest in maintaining high graduation rates, keeping professors happy with the quality of the students, and recording impressive statistics on its admissions profile.
In addition, the admissions officers are keenly concerned with accepting applicants who will form a cohesive, collaborative, and extracurricularly vibrant student body. They want some students who occupy the traditional niches of the school, and they want some students who do not. In so doing, they aim to cover a panoply28 of interests and personalities in their student body.
24 SAT Word Alert: Abstruse (adjective) means “hard to understand”
25 SAT Word Alert: Nuance (noun) means “a subtle difference or variation”
26 SAT Word Alert: Holistic (adjective) means “related to the idea that an entity is more than the sum of its parts”
27 SAT Word Alert: Interminable (adjective) means “having no end”
28 SAT Word Alert: Panoply (noun) means “a wide-ranging and impressive array or display”
To that end, beyond the initial academic stages of applicant review, admissions to highly selective colleges are often more an art than a science, replete29 with subjectivity, propensity30 to err, and uncertainty. Though the SAT no longer features analogies, we still believe they are important and will use one to clarify the above point:
Consider your college application a painting, and you are the artist. There are a myriad31 of elements that need to come together seamlessly for a painting to be considered a masterpiece: the hues and lights of the colors, direction and force of the brushstrokes, composition of the paints, and texture of the canvas, among others. Curators and critics spend hours poring over and analyzing these details, deciding whether the painting is a good fit for their museum or worthy of acclaim – subjectively, of course, because, as anyone who has been to a museum of modern art knows, beauty is often in the eye of the beholder.
Like a painting, your college application is composed of a number of elements: your test scores, GPA, extracurricular activities, background, recommendations, essays, and others. And it, too, will be reviewed by well-intentioned though subjective “curators and critics” – admissions officers – who will decide whether the painter behind the application – you – should be accepted into their school. Some of these curators will not even consider the painting if it is clear that a fundamental element that they seek for their art collection – say, brushstrokes – is absent (imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had tried finger painting the Mona Lisa). Similarly, admissions officers may scarcely even consider your application if the fundamental ingredient of high SAT and ACT scores is missing.
It is therefore among our goals to help you improve the chances that your college applications will be accepted by providing you with the right ingredients and tools – test scores and skills – and instructions for how to put them together artistically. Fortunately, we developed this artistic sense in time to have collectively been accepted to a number of those “highly selective colleges,” including Brown, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Yale. Wielding the insights we have gained from these application experiences, we have devoted an extensive portion of this book – Chapter 10, “The Art of College Admissions” – to preparing for and succeeding in college admissions. Consider us your personal Bob Ross in helping you make your application painting a college admissions masterpiece.
29 SAT Word Alert: Replete (adjective) means “full or abundant”
30 SAT Word Alert: Propensity (noun) means “a tendency”
31 SAT Word Alert: Myriad (noun) means “a great number”
Chapter 3 begins our discussion of strategies for the SAT and ACT, revealing four core pieces of advice for preparing effectively.
Chapter 3
The PERFECT Approach: Test Preparation Strategy
Hold Yourself Accountable: Aim for a Perfect Score
Take Official Practice Tests
Master Every Question
Take Both Tests
Hold Yourself Accountable: Aim for a Perfect Score
Imagine that you are window shopping at the mall and see something you really want to buy that’s marked at $20. Having misplaced your credit card (uh-oh, time to cancel your card and prepare for a contrived47 mathematical dilemma), you only have a ten-dollar bill and some spare change in your pocket. Luckily for you, it is 40 percent off! Even better, you have a store card that gives you a 15 percent discount on top of that! Before you zip off to the checkout counter, you need to know beforehand if you have enough money to buy it, especially because you do not want to embarrass yourself in front of that cute cashier. Sound familiar? (No? Well, keep reading anyways.)
Unfortunately, real-life problems like this one do not come in multiple-choice format. An SAT test writer doesn’t pop up from behind a clothing rack and say, “Hey Johnny, after the discounts, will it cost (a) $9.00, (b) $10.20, (c) $11.50, (d) $12.00, or (e) $14.60?” (The answer, by the way, is (b), so assuming that your spare change is more than 20 cents, you’re golden – unless you needed to save some of that money to take the subway back, in which case you’re hopefully buying some comfortable shoes.)
The point is that, in real life, you have to figure out the answer for yourself. (In Chapter 4, we describe why it is also valuable on the SAT and ACT to “Solve for the Answer Itself,” even when you are given choices.)
Granted, you probably have a cell phone with a calculator that you can whip out any time you get a whiff of something that smells like math. But what will your date think while you fumble with it to work out a 20 percent tip on a $40 dinner? And besides, even if you have the calculator do the “hard work” – a myth about mental math that deserves to be wiped off the face of the planet – you still need to know what numbers should be added or subtracted, multiplied or divided. Don’t worry, though! We have devoted a chunk of our chapter on the math sections to helping you kick that calculator habit.
(By the way, the tip would be $8, for a total of about $48 dollars. At minimum wage, that’s almost seven hours of flipping burgers. Whoever your date is better be a keeper!)
Most important, however, is that as the pace of daily life has sped up, we (paradoxically) have become lethargic48 and have lost our sense of accountability. Computers have emancipated49 us from the “tedious”50 tasks of applying math (calculator), learning vocabulary (dictionary), spelling and using grammar (autocorrect), sending letters (e-mail), and remembering our to-do lists (smartphones) – in essence, they have freed us from thinking.
Our mistakes are almost always reversible: For egsample, these statement have bad seplling and grammur, which we can spot immediately on our word processor by the red and green squiggly underlines and correct with a quick right-click if they have not been autocorrected already. It is a mistake to develop an attitude that all mistakes are reversible, because if tests and real life have one thing in common, it is that some mistakes are not. The best way to train yourself for both, then, is to hold yourself accountable.
Relying on your calculator for the math sections, for example, is a decently reliable way of quickly solving most easy questions. But here’s the important answer to the frustrated objections posed by students when they are perennially51 compelled to limit their use of their calculators: defaulting to the calculator hampers creative problem solving. To maximize your potential for a truly outstanding performance on the math sections – to stand out – you must learn to figure problems out first with your brain, then leave only the largest figures to the calculator. (Using mental math for calculations, in addition to contributing to smarter approaches to hard problems, is also quicker for all but the most challenging calculations.)
You may ask yourself, What if I do not expect to get a perfect score? Can I settle for easier methods that will merely help me pass? We answer with an emphatic “No!”
47 SAT Word Alert: Contrive (verb) means “create intentionally and obviously”
48 SAT Word Alert: Lethargic (adjective) means “lazy, indifferent, or apathetic”
49 SAT Word Alert: Emancipate (verb) means “to free”
50 SAT Word Alert: Tedious (adjective) means “dull or boring”
51 SAT Word Alert: Perennial (adjective) means “lasting” or “enduring”
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Nobel Laureate, Literature
We initially considered opening up this chapter with the well-known quote, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” However, we changed our mind once Shiv remembered that one of his college roommates majored in astronomy and astrophysics and would shoot him if he featured that flagrantly52 unscientific statement.
The essential point of both quotes is that by aiming high you can achieve things that you never thought possible. People often set their goals too low for a number of reasons. Some do not have confidence in themselves and underestimate their abilities. Others do not want to be disappointed if they cannot reach the goal. A few may lack motivation or are, frankly, indolent53.
A common reason people set their scoring goals too low on the SAT and ACT is that they are aiming for the “minimum” score that will get them into college or earn them a scholarship. For example, Shiv has taught many students who want to qualify for the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship (close to full tuition at public universities in Florida). At the time of this writing, the minimum required SAT and ACT scores were 1290 (Critical Reading plus Math) and 29, respectively. For most students seeking the scholarship, those scores transform into the goals that they aim for on practice tests. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the pressure or formality of test day, students often score slightly lower than they did on the practice tests, and as a result barely miss the cut-off requirement for the scholarship. The lesson: If you aim high to begin with, you will be much more likely to achieve, if not exceed, the score you want.
Another reason to aim for a perfect score while preparing for the SAT or ACT is accountability. If you do not aim for perfect, you may become apathetic54 when it comes to doing and correcting practice problems. You may fall into a pit of carelessness and come up with false justifications, like, Oh, it’s all right if I miss those last few questions – I don’t need to get them right to get the score I’m aiming for. Rationalize mediocrity, and you will become mediocre.
This sloppy attitude often leads to under-preparation and underperformance. People who do well on these tests (and, more generally, in any endeavor they strive for) hold themselves accountable for every single problem. That way, they will be prepared for anything the test-makers can possibly throw at them. Remember that every point counts! This sense of accountability – both during games and during practice – is also what separates the best athletes from the average ones.
For some, money can be the most compelling reason to take our advice and hold themselves accountable during practice. Consider again the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship. At the time of writing, the scholarship was worth $101 per credit hour; since a four-year bachelor’s degree is 128 credit hours, the total scholarship is worth about $12,928. In order to score the minimum 1290 on the SAT to earn the scholarship, you would only need to get about 100 questions correct. That means each question you get right is worth about $129.28. What would you rather do: flip burgers for 20 grueling hours or get a single question right on the test? Now, if that is not reason enough to view every question as crucial and aim for a perfect score, then we do not know what is.
Remember, then, that a fundamental strategy of the PERFECT Approach is –
Hold yourself accountable for each question: aim for a perfect score!
Take Official Practice Tests
A student who is just beginning to learn about his or her preparation options for the SAT and ACT finds many: official guides, preparatory sessions by his or her high school, companies’ test prep classes, unofficial guides, and online advice.
In response to these choices, some students reason that the official guides do not fit into the “beating the test” mentality espoused by the unofficial guides – How can the College Board’s and ACT’s official materials give me a special leg up on the other test-takers? I need the secret tricks that the unofficial guides have uncovered.
For similar reasons, students turn to test prep classes offered in their areas or online. Some well-known ones are administered by The Princeton Review and Kaplan, both of which also produce popular written guides. These courses are also attractive by virtue of how expensive they can be – hundreds to thousands of dollars for the most popular programs and many thousands for the courses that are billed as more “elite” – because these high costs imply quality and efficiency. Do they follow through?
No. Students’ most common method is buying a few unofficial guides with advice and practice tests and enrolling in a local test prep course offered by one of the big names. Most of these students are wasting significant time and money.
The tutors for the test prep programs and the writers of the unofficial guides often revert to generic, gimmicky strategies that sound a lot better than they work because they are easy to market. Occasionally, you will find a tutor (most likely one working independently or for a specialty company) who really knows his or her stuff and employs this deep understanding of the tests to offer productive and specifically catered advice. Such sage55 tutors are the exception, however.
So what is the right choice? Buy all of the official practice tests you can get your hands on and an unofficial guide heavy on advice that works and light on questions that pretend to replace the real thing. Only when your official materials run out should you turn to unofficial practice exams. This combination not only is cheaper than what most students elect for but also prepares you better. (This is what they call a win-win situation.) For some students, especially those who need help learning math concepts, pairing those resources with reference books (such as Gruber’s) works well – just don’t rely on those source books to refine your test-taking skills.
The writers of unofficial tests struggle to match the type, style, and difficulty of the real tests. As a result, those writers’ questions are frequently poorly illustrative56 of what you will face on the official administration, and your unofficial practice test scores are deceptive. Practice tests written by the makers of the SAT and ACT are, therefore, indispensible as sources for preparing for the exams.
52 SAT Word Alert: Flagrant (adjective) means “offensive or egregious (extremely bad)”
53 SAT Word Alert: Indolent (adjective) means “lazy”
54 SAT Word Alert: Apathetic (adjective) means “lacking concern or emotion”
55 SAT Word Alert: Sage (adjective) means “wise and experienced”
56 SAT Word Alert: Illustrative (adjective) means “serving as an example or demonstration”
For the ACT, unfortunately, there are fewer official tests to practice with, so it is particularly important that you take advantage of those that exist. Get The Real ACT Prep Guide, which includes three official tests. Also purchase the ACT Online Prep course at act.org; this gives you access to two tests, which you can print out, as well as full explanations by the people who wrote the questions. Once they have exhausted these resources, students are usually most satisfied by The Princeton Review’s practice tests.
Thankfully, there is more official material available for the SAT. Get The Official SAT Study Guide, a compilation of advice and ten tests published by the College Board and accompanied on its website with official explanations. Also consider getting The Official SAT Online Course for many additional full-length tests. At its online store, the College Board sells many previously administered PSATs, which are helpful in preparing for both the SAT and PSAT.
It is important to note, however, that you should not buy these official guides with the expectation that you will find especially meaningful advice: The utility57 of the strategies is minimal, even to those who have no prior knowledge of good test-taking strategies.
Instead, the power of the official practice tests comes in their ability to provide you with accurate representations of what you will face on exam day. When properly used by the motivated student – which your reading of this book strongly suggests that you are – as opportunities to acclimate58 to the test’s format and questioning style, understand all of the questions that will be faced, and experiment with the application of the strategies learned in the accompanying unofficial guide, the official practice tests will “up your score” prodigiously59.
For the SAT, you may also want to purchase a supplementary vocabulary book; this is discussed further in Chapter Six, “Boosting Your Reading Scores.”
Official practice tests should be your go-to resource for improving your scores. Everything else is merely supplemental.
Master Every Question
So how should you get the most out of those practice tests?
As we have said, the official guides’ test-taking strategies are too obviously commonsensical or generic to be of much help. So you would do fine to skip immediately to the practice tests in these guides once you have read this book as a strategic foundation.
Practice tests provide a good opportunity to experiment with various paces for each section, since you must find what speed works for you by providing the best balance between getting to as many questions as possible while not rushing you so much that you cannot focus on any of them.
Yet that should not be your initial use of the practice tests: Before moving on to finding your sweet-spot paces, you need to learn how to answer the questions on the SAT and ACT. Merely reading through strategies and worked-out practice questions is insufficient; you must also form and internalize your own process for approaching each type of question – What method that I’ve seen before works fastest on this math question? – and your subjective sense for distinguishing between subtly varying answer choices – Was the author’s attitude ambivalent or skeptical?
It is tempting to conflate60 such similar terms, but there is a meaningful difference here: While both ambivalent and skeptical imply that the author is undecided about the topic at hand, the latter adjective goes one step further and indicates active doubt about some claim. If you ask me to mentally multiply 6,879.38 and 8,912.28 and present me with two near and plausible choices, I will be ambivalent about which is correct. But if you present me with two choices that are implausibly low—say, 27,802 and 31,795—I will be highly skeptical that either is correct. (That’s justified skepticism in that case, I should add—or maybe multiply.)
These skills are complex but nonetheless fully attainable through repeated exposure to questions written by the people who are responsible for writing the questions on the test’s official administration.
The usual method for taking practice tests represents an enormously inefficient way of developing those question-answering skills: taking the sections timed, skipping questions that you do not have time for, grading the test, recording your score, and then moving on to the next test.
Rather, in the initial phase of taking practice tests – in which you try to form your question-answering skills – you need to worry not about your scores or time limits but about understanding the questions themselves. To this end, you should spend as long as you need to on your first practice tests, giving no worry to the sections’ time limits. Once you are finished, check the answers (but not the explanations) against your selections; then begin the process of trying to independently figure out exactly why you missed each question that you missed and how you could have arrived at the correct answer.
After you have completed this process as best you can (perhaps you cannot understand a question despite your best attempts, and that’s okay), turn to the answer explanations, making sure to read them in such a way that you understand not only this specific question but also how the explanation would generally apply to similar questions. You can also do this even for questions that you answered correctly but struggled with, in case you were not thinking about the question in the way that the test writers were or in the most efficient way.
You want your successes to be reproducible and your mistakes increasingly rare. Do not move onto the next test until you have understood how to best approach every question on the previous test. In doing so, you may get more out of one test than those who are less meticulous can get out of many.
Eventually, you should begin to take the tests within the allotted time in order to better simulate the stress and pacing conditions of the real test administration, when you will not be able to spend all the time you need. At first, you will probably find yourself crunched for time and unable to think as carefully as you had been about each question; this is normal and, with practice, can be assuaged61 to such a negligible extent that you will ultimately be able to condense your thorough question-answering skills within the time limit without losing accuracy.
57 SAT Word Alert: Utility (noun) means “practical usefulness”
58 SAT Word Alert: Acclimate (verb) means “to become accustomed to”
59 SAT Word Alert: Prodigious (adjective) means “extraordinary in amount or extent”
60 SAT Word Alert: Conflate (verb) means “to merge or fuse two or more separate entities or ideas”
61 SAT Word Alert: Assuage (verb) means “to mitigate or lessen”
In the pursuit of that goal, you should work out any questions that you were unable to get to in the allowed time, even when you have decided to take the tests in a timed fashion. You will thereby be able to strengthen your question-answering skills without compromising your exposure to the timed conditions. All the while, you should of course ensure that you understand every question before moving on to the next test.
Along the way to achieving your goal of succeeding on the SAT or ACT, you will likely face a mix of pleasant surprises or accomplishments – such as improving significantly after just a couple tests or feeling proud after you fully comprehend a question whose solution had previously eluded62 you – and troublesome disappointments, such as reaching a temporary score plateau or making the same mistake recurrently63. Revel64 in the pleasant and transcend65 the troublesome.
Take Both Tests
Unfortunately, there is an extant66 belief that some colleges (especially those in the Northeast, such as colleges in the Ivy League) prefer the SAT over the ACT. This notion is now a misconception: The SAT and ACT are considered on equal ground at nearly every university in the United States.
62 SAT Word Alert: Elude (verb) means “to escape or evade”
63 SAT Word Alert: Recurrently (adverb) means “happening again and again”
64 SAT Word Alert: Revel (verb) means “to take pleasure”
65 SAT Word Alert: Transcend (verb) means “to overcome”
66 SAT Word Alert: Extant (adjective) means “existing”
Every college has its own table for equating scores from the SAT and ACT so that fair comparison is possible. The ACT organization has a recommended concordance table on its website, which indicates that a composite score of 36 (out of 36) on the ACT translates to 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, 33 to 2180, 30 to 2000, 27 to 1820, and 24 to 1650. We shared a more complete chart along those lines in Table 5 of the last chapter.
Many people believe that the ACT is easier than the SAT or even that the ACT is the fairer test. They claim that the SAT is corrupted by tricks or that the SAT is just a veiled intelligence test, whereas the ACT tests what actually matters for college. It seems, however, that this sentiment is mostly the product of rumors or general frustration with the test.
In any case, the SAT and ACT are rather similar: Both assess your reading, writing, English, and math skills. The ACT throws science in the mix as well, though the fundamental assessment in even that section is closely related to reading comprehension. Another notable difference in content is that success on the SAT’s Critical Reading section more explicitly relies on having an advanced vocabulary than does the ACT’s Reading section (which is why we call the vocabulary reviews in this book “SAT Word Alerts”). We will discuss these differences and more in the section-specific chapters, but the important take-away is that there are few, subtle distinctions between two otherwise-alike tests. (Differences in format were explained in the last chapter.) In fact, with the upcoming 2016 SAT changes, the tests will be more similar than ever.
Because of that similarity, it is reasonable to expect that most students would perform at a comparable level on both tests. This is usually the case, but the scores of a student who takes both exams may still differ to a meaningful degree – and in cases in which the differences between the tests happen to make one test particularly well-suited to a student’s strengths, the difference can be quite large.
We have not found that students are accurate in their prediction of which test they will do better on. For this reason we recommend that you try both the SAT and ACT in order to discover which test you prefer. A modest degree of open-mindedness and patience is needed here: Do not give up on the SAT in favor of the ACT (or vice-versa) after just one practice test; give at least one more practice test a try to see whether there is promise for greater improvement on that test. You certainly do not need to continue practicing with both tests, though, if it remains clear that your strengths lie in one over the other. That being said, the skills you acquire in preparing for both exams will continue being useful in the longer term. For example, exposing yourself to the ACT’s Science section is a good idea, since it is our collective societal responsibility to be able to understand and make informed decisions on scientific debates.
When you have prepared for both tests and find that your performance levels are similar, it is a good idea to try your hand at official administrations of each. But in most cases, students will develop a preference during the preparation process.
The PERFECT Approach: Test Preparation Strategy
Hold Yourself Accountable: Aim for a Perfect Score
Take Official Practice Tests
Master Every Question
Take Both Tests
Hold Yourself Accountable: Aim for a Perfect Score
Imagine that you are window shopping at the mall and see something you really want to buy that’s marked at $20. Having misplaced your credit card (uh-oh, time to cancel your card and prepare for a contrived47 mathematical dilemma), you only have a ten-dollar bill and some spare change in your pocket. Luckily for you, it is 40 percent off! Even better, you have a store card that gives you a 15 percent discount on top of that! Before you zip off to the checkout counter, you need to know beforehand if you have enough money to buy it, especially because you do not want to embarrass yourself in front of that cute cashier. Sound familiar? (No? Well, keep reading anyways.)
Unfortunately, real-life problems like this one do not come in multiple-choice format. An SAT test writer doesn’t pop up from behind a clothing rack and say, “Hey Johnny, after the discounts, will it cost (a) $9.00, (b) $10.20, (c) $11.50, (d) $12.00, or (e) $14.60?” (The answer, by the way, is (b), so assuming that your spare change is more than 20 cents, you’re golden – unless you needed to save some of that money to take the subway back, in which case you’re hopefully buying some comfortable shoes.)
The point is that, in real life, you have to figure out the answer for yourself. (In Chapter 4, we describe why it is also valuable on the SAT and ACT to “Solve for the Answer Itself,” even when you are given choices.)
Granted, you probably have a cell phone with a calculator that you can whip out any time you get a whiff of something that smells like math. But what will your date think while you fumble with it to work out a 20 percent tip on a $40 dinner? And besides, even if you have the calculator do the “hard work” – a myth about mental math that deserves to be wiped off the face of the planet – you still need to know what numbers should be added or subtracted, multiplied or divided. Don’t worry, though! We have devoted a chunk of our chapter on the math sections to helping you kick that calculator habit.
(By the way, the tip would be $8, for a total of about $48 dollars. At minimum wage, that’s almost seven hours of flipping burgers. Whoever your date is better be a keeper!)
Most important, however, is that as the pace of daily life has sped up, we (paradoxically) have become lethargic48 and have lost our sense of accountability. Computers have emancipated49 us from the “tedious”50 tasks of applying math (calculator), learning vocabulary (dictionary), spelling and using grammar (autocorrect), sending letters (e-mail), and remembering our to-do lists (smartphones) – in essence, they have freed us from thinking.
Our mistakes are almost always reversible: For egsample, these statement have bad seplling and grammur, which we can spot immediately on our word processor by the red and green squiggly underlines and correct with a quick right-click if they have not been autocorrected already. It is a mistake to develop an attitude that all mistakes are reversible, because if tests and real life have one thing in common, it is that some mistakes are not. The best way to train yourself for both, then, is to hold yourself accountable.
Relying on your calculator for the math sections, for example, is a decently reliable way of quickly solving most easy questions. But here’s the important answer to the frustrated objections posed by students when they are perennially51 compelled to limit their use of their calculators: defaulting to the calculator hampers creative problem solving. To maximize your potential for a truly outstanding performance on the math sections – to stand out – you must learn to figure problems out first with your brain, then leave only the largest figures to the calculator. (Using mental math for calculations, in addition to contributing to smarter approaches to hard problems, is also quicker for all but the most challenging calculations.)
You may ask yourself, What if I do not expect to get a perfect score? Can I settle for easier methods that will merely help me pass? We answer with an emphatic “No!”
47 SAT Word Alert: Contrive (verb) means “create intentionally and obviously”
48 SAT Word Alert: Lethargic (adjective) means “lazy, indifferent, or apathetic”
49 SAT Word Alert: Emancipate (verb) means “to free”
50 SAT Word Alert: Tedious (adjective) means “dull or boring”
51 SAT Word Alert: Perennial (adjective) means “lasting” or “enduring”
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Nobel Laureate, Literature
We initially considered opening up this chapter with the well-known quote, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” However, we changed our mind once Shiv remembered that one of his college roommates majored in astronomy and astrophysics and would shoot him if he featured that flagrantly52 unscientific statement.
The essential point of both quotes is that by aiming high you can achieve things that you never thought possible. People often set their goals too low for a number of reasons. Some do not have confidence in themselves and underestimate their abilities. Others do not want to be disappointed if they cannot reach the goal. A few may lack motivation or are, frankly, indolent53.
A common reason people set their scoring goals too low on the SAT and ACT is that they are aiming for the “minimum” score that will get them into college or earn them a scholarship. For example, Shiv has taught many students who want to qualify for the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship (close to full tuition at public universities in Florida). At the time of this writing, the minimum required SAT and ACT scores were 1290 (Critical Reading plus Math) and 29, respectively. For most students seeking the scholarship, those scores transform into the goals that they aim for on practice tests. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the pressure or formality of test day, students often score slightly lower than they did on the practice tests, and as a result barely miss the cut-off requirement for the scholarship. The lesson: If you aim high to begin with, you will be much more likely to achieve, if not exceed, the score you want.
Another reason to aim for a perfect score while preparing for the SAT or ACT is accountability. If you do not aim for perfect, you may become apathetic54 when it comes to doing and correcting practice problems. You may fall into a pit of carelessness and come up with false justifications, like, Oh, it’s all right if I miss those last few questions – I don’t need to get them right to get the score I’m aiming for. Rationalize mediocrity, and you will become mediocre.
This sloppy attitude often leads to under-preparation and underperformance. People who do well on these tests (and, more generally, in any endeavor they strive for) hold themselves accountable for every single problem. That way, they will be prepared for anything the test-makers can possibly throw at them. Remember that every point counts! This sense of accountability – both during games and during practice – is also what separates the best athletes from the average ones.
For some, money can be the most compelling reason to take our advice and hold themselves accountable during practice. Consider again the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship. At the time of writing, the scholarship was worth $101 per credit hour; since a four-year bachelor’s degree is 128 credit hours, the total scholarship is worth about $12,928. In order to score the minimum 1290 on the SAT to earn the scholarship, you would only need to get about 100 questions correct. That means each question you get right is worth about $129.28. What would you rather do: flip burgers for 20 grueling hours or get a single question right on the test? Now, if that is not reason enough to view every question as crucial and aim for a perfect score, then we do not know what is.
Remember, then, that a fundamental strategy of the PERFECT Approach is –
Hold yourself accountable for each question: aim for a perfect score!
Take Official Practice Tests
A student who is just beginning to learn about his or her preparation options for the SAT and ACT finds many: official guides, preparatory sessions by his or her high school, companies’ test prep classes, unofficial guides, and online advice.
In response to these choices, some students reason that the official guides do not fit into the “beating the test” mentality espoused by the unofficial guides – How can the College Board’s and ACT’s official materials give me a special leg up on the other test-takers? I need the secret tricks that the unofficial guides have uncovered.
For similar reasons, students turn to test prep classes offered in their areas or online. Some well-known ones are administered by The Princeton Review and Kaplan, both of which also produce popular written guides. These courses are also attractive by virtue of how expensive they can be – hundreds to thousands of dollars for the most popular programs and many thousands for the courses that are billed as more “elite” – because these high costs imply quality and efficiency. Do they follow through?
No. Students’ most common method is buying a few unofficial guides with advice and practice tests and enrolling in a local test prep course offered by one of the big names. Most of these students are wasting significant time and money.
The tutors for the test prep programs and the writers of the unofficial guides often revert to generic, gimmicky strategies that sound a lot better than they work because they are easy to market. Occasionally, you will find a tutor (most likely one working independently or for a specialty company) who really knows his or her stuff and employs this deep understanding of the tests to offer productive and specifically catered advice. Such sage55 tutors are the exception, however.
So what is the right choice? Buy all of the official practice tests you can get your hands on and an unofficial guide heavy on advice that works and light on questions that pretend to replace the real thing. Only when your official materials run out should you turn to unofficial practice exams. This combination not only is cheaper than what most students elect for but also prepares you better. (This is what they call a win-win situation.) For some students, especially those who need help learning math concepts, pairing those resources with reference books (such as Gruber’s) works well – just don’t rely on those source books to refine your test-taking skills.
The writers of unofficial tests struggle to match the type, style, and difficulty of the real tests. As a result, those writers’ questions are frequently poorly illustrative56 of what you will face on the official administration, and your unofficial practice test scores are deceptive. Practice tests written by the makers of the SAT and ACT are, therefore, indispensible as sources for preparing for the exams.
52 SAT Word Alert: Flagrant (adjective) means “offensive or egregious (extremely bad)”
53 SAT Word Alert: Indolent (adjective) means “lazy”
54 SAT Word Alert: Apathetic (adjective) means “lacking concern or emotion”
55 SAT Word Alert: Sage (adjective) means “wise and experienced”
56 SAT Word Alert: Illustrative (adjective) means “serving as an example or demonstration”
For the ACT, unfortunately, there are fewer official tests to practice with, so it is particularly important that you take advantage of those that exist. Get The Real ACT Prep Guide, which includes three official tests. Also purchase the ACT Online Prep course at act.org; this gives you access to two tests, which you can print out, as well as full explanations by the people who wrote the questions. Once they have exhausted these resources, students are usually most satisfied by The Princeton Review’s practice tests.
Thankfully, there is more official material available for the SAT. Get The Official SAT Study Guide, a compilation of advice and ten tests published by the College Board and accompanied on its website with official explanations. Also consider getting The Official SAT Online Course for many additional full-length tests. At its online store, the College Board sells many previously administered PSATs, which are helpful in preparing for both the SAT and PSAT.
It is important to note, however, that you should not buy these official guides with the expectation that you will find especially meaningful advice: The utility57 of the strategies is minimal, even to those who have no prior knowledge of good test-taking strategies.
Instead, the power of the official practice tests comes in their ability to provide you with accurate representations of what you will face on exam day. When properly used by the motivated student – which your reading of this book strongly suggests that you are – as opportunities to acclimate58 to the test’s format and questioning style, understand all of the questions that will be faced, and experiment with the application of the strategies learned in the accompanying unofficial guide, the official practice tests will “up your score” prodigiously59.
For the SAT, you may also want to purchase a supplementary vocabulary book; this is discussed further in Chapter Six, “Boosting Your Reading Scores.”
Official practice tests should be your go-to resource for improving your scores. Everything else is merely supplemental.
Master Every Question
So how should you get the most out of those practice tests?
As we have said, the official guides’ test-taking strategies are too obviously commonsensical or generic to be of much help. So you would do fine to skip immediately to the practice tests in these guides once you have read this book as a strategic foundation.
Practice tests provide a good opportunity to experiment with various paces for each section, since you must find what speed works for you by providing the best balance between getting to as many questions as possible while not rushing you so much that you cannot focus on any of them.
Yet that should not be your initial use of the practice tests: Before moving on to finding your sweet-spot paces, you need to learn how to answer the questions on the SAT and ACT. Merely reading through strategies and worked-out practice questions is insufficient; you must also form and internalize your own process for approaching each type of question – What method that I’ve seen before works fastest on this math question? – and your subjective sense for distinguishing between subtly varying answer choices – Was the author’s attitude ambivalent or skeptical?
It is tempting to conflate60 such similar terms, but there is a meaningful difference here: While both ambivalent and skeptical imply that the author is undecided about the topic at hand, the latter adjective goes one step further and indicates active doubt about some claim. If you ask me to mentally multiply 6,879.38 and 8,912.28 and present me with two near and plausible choices, I will be ambivalent about which is correct. But if you present me with two choices that are implausibly low—say, 27,802 and 31,795—I will be highly skeptical that either is correct. (That’s justified skepticism in that case, I should add—or maybe multiply.)
These skills are complex but nonetheless fully attainable through repeated exposure to questions written by the people who are responsible for writing the questions on the test’s official administration.
The usual method for taking practice tests represents an enormously inefficient way of developing those question-answering skills: taking the sections timed, skipping questions that you do not have time for, grading the test, recording your score, and then moving on to the next test.
Rather, in the initial phase of taking practice tests – in which you try to form your question-answering skills – you need to worry not about your scores or time limits but about understanding the questions themselves. To this end, you should spend as long as you need to on your first practice tests, giving no worry to the sections’ time limits. Once you are finished, check the answers (but not the explanations) against your selections; then begin the process of trying to independently figure out exactly why you missed each question that you missed and how you could have arrived at the correct answer.
After you have completed this process as best you can (perhaps you cannot understand a question despite your best attempts, and that’s okay), turn to the answer explanations, making sure to read them in such a way that you understand not only this specific question but also how the explanation would generally apply to similar questions. You can also do this even for questions that you answered correctly but struggled with, in case you were not thinking about the question in the way that the test writers were or in the most efficient way.
You want your successes to be reproducible and your mistakes increasingly rare. Do not move onto the next test until you have understood how to best approach every question on the previous test. In doing so, you may get more out of one test than those who are less meticulous can get out of many.
Eventually, you should begin to take the tests within the allotted time in order to better simulate the stress and pacing conditions of the real test administration, when you will not be able to spend all the time you need. At first, you will probably find yourself crunched for time and unable to think as carefully as you had been about each question; this is normal and, with practice, can be assuaged61 to such a negligible extent that you will ultimately be able to condense your thorough question-answering skills within the time limit without losing accuracy.
57 SAT Word Alert: Utility (noun) means “practical usefulness”
58 SAT Word Alert: Acclimate (verb) means “to become accustomed to”
59 SAT Word Alert: Prodigious (adjective) means “extraordinary in amount or extent”
60 SAT Word Alert: Conflate (verb) means “to merge or fuse two or more separate entities or ideas”
61 SAT Word Alert: Assuage (verb) means “to mitigate or lessen”
In the pursuit of that goal, you should work out any questions that you were unable to get to in the allowed time, even when you have decided to take the tests in a timed fashion. You will thereby be able to strengthen your question-answering skills without compromising your exposure to the timed conditions. All the while, you should of course ensure that you understand every question before moving on to the next test.
Along the way to achieving your goal of succeeding on the SAT or ACT, you will likely face a mix of pleasant surprises or accomplishments – such as improving significantly after just a couple tests or feeling proud after you fully comprehend a question whose solution had previously eluded62 you – and troublesome disappointments, such as reaching a temporary score plateau or making the same mistake recurrently63. Revel64 in the pleasant and transcend65 the troublesome.
Take Both Tests
Unfortunately, there is an extant66 belief that some colleges (especially those in the Northeast, such as colleges in the Ivy League) prefer the SAT over the ACT. This notion is now a misconception: The SAT and ACT are considered on equal ground at nearly every university in the United States.
62 SAT Word Alert: Elude (verb) means “to escape or evade”
63 SAT Word Alert: Recurrently (adverb) means “happening again and again”
64 SAT Word Alert: Revel (verb) means “to take pleasure”
65 SAT Word Alert: Transcend (verb) means “to overcome”
66 SAT Word Alert: Extant (adjective) means “existing”
Every college has its own table for equating scores from the SAT and ACT so that fair comparison is possible. The ACT organization has a recommended concordance table on its website, which indicates that a composite score of 36 (out of 36) on the ACT translates to 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, 33 to 2180, 30 to 2000, 27 to 1820, and 24 to 1650. We shared a more complete chart along those lines in Table 5 of the last chapter.
Many people believe that the ACT is easier than the SAT or even that the ACT is the fairer test. They claim that the SAT is corrupted by tricks or that the SAT is just a veiled intelligence test, whereas the ACT tests what actually matters for college. It seems, however, that this sentiment is mostly the product of rumors or general frustration with the test.
In any case, the SAT and ACT are rather similar: Both assess your reading, writing, English, and math skills. The ACT throws science in the mix as well, though the fundamental assessment in even that section is closely related to reading comprehension. Another notable difference in content is that success on the SAT’s Critical Reading section more explicitly relies on having an advanced vocabulary than does the ACT’s Reading section (which is why we call the vocabulary reviews in this book “SAT Word Alerts”). We will discuss these differences and more in the section-specific chapters, but the important take-away is that there are few, subtle distinctions between two otherwise-alike tests. (Differences in format were explained in the last chapter.) In fact, with the upcoming 2016 SAT changes, the tests will be more similar than ever.
Because of that similarity, it is reasonable to expect that most students would perform at a comparable level on both tests. This is usually the case, but the scores of a student who takes both exams may still differ to a meaningful degree – and in cases in which the differences between the tests happen to make one test particularly well-suited to a student’s strengths, the difference can be quite large.
We have not found that students are accurate in their prediction of which test they will do better on. For this reason we recommend that you try both the SAT and ACT in order to discover which test you prefer. A modest degree of open-mindedness and patience is needed here: Do not give up on the SAT in favor of the ACT (or vice-versa) after just one practice test; give at least one more practice test a try to see whether there is promise for greater improvement on that test. You certainly do not need to continue practicing with both tests, though, if it remains clear that your strengths lie in one over the other. That being said, the skills you acquire in preparing for both exams will continue being useful in the longer term. For example, exposing yourself to the ACT’s Science section is a good idea, since it is our collective societal responsibility to be able to understand and make informed decisions on scientific debates.
When you have prepared for both tests and find that your performance levels are similar, it is a good idea to try your hand at official administrations of each. But in most cases, students will develop a preference during the preparation process.
The book's Table of Contents indicates its great breadth of advice -- when you purchase Standing Out, you will experience its depth as well.
Foreword
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Standing Out
Chapter 1: Why You Should Care
Chapter 2: Getting to Know the Tests
Chapter 3: The PERFECT Approach: Test Preparation Strategy
Chapter 4: The PERFECT Approach: Test-Taking Strategy
Chapter 5: Acing the Math Section
Chapter 6: Boosting Your Reading Scores
Chapter 7: Mastering the English and Writing Sections
Chapter 8: Surmounting the Science Section
Chapter 9: AP and SAT Subject Tests
Chapter 10: The Art of College Admissions
Chapter 11: 10 (Escalator) Steps to Succeeding in High School, College, and Beyond
Concluding Remarks
Appendix: Setting a Schedule
Appendix: Resources for Standing Out
Foreword
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Standing Out
Chapter 1: Why You Should Care
Chapter 2: Getting to Know the Tests
Chapter 3: The PERFECT Approach: Test Preparation Strategy
Chapter 4: The PERFECT Approach: Test-Taking Strategy
Chapter 5: Acing the Math Section
Chapter 6: Boosting Your Reading Scores
Chapter 7: Mastering the English and Writing Sections
Chapter 8: Surmounting the Science Section
Chapter 9: AP and SAT Subject Tests
Chapter 10: The Art of College Admissions
Chapter 11: 10 (Escalator) Steps to Succeeding in High School, College, and Beyond
Concluding Remarks
Appendix: Setting a Schedule
Appendix: Resources for Standing Out
© 2014 by Shiv Gaglani and Blake Cecil. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior express written permission of the authors, Shiv Gaglani and Blake Cecil, or the publisher, Osmosis Publishing, except in the case of brief quotations used for the purpose of contextualizing critical analysis of the publication and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior express written permission of the authors, Shiv Gaglani and Blake Cecil, or the publisher, Osmosis Publishing, except in the case of brief quotations used for the purpose of contextualizing critical analysis of the publication and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.
