How to Score Well on the SAT Exam

The SAT exam scores are still an important component of college acceptance evaluations. To improve your performance on the SAT Exam, concentrate on the three P’s—practice, preparation and pacing.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Get an SAT exam guide that has as many practice exams as you can find. Practicing is the best way to adjust your pace in the different sections. Familiarity with the test will allow you to get through the sections more quickly and make fewer mistakes.

2. Set out everything you need for the exam the day before, including exam ticket, photo ID, pencils, calculator, clothing including a light sweater or extra shirt, a wrist watch and snack foods. Leave plenty of time to get to the exam site 15 minutes before the exam starts.

3. Plan to go through multiple-choice writing and math sections twice, answering the easier questions first, then going back through for harder questions. On more difficult questions, try to eliminate as many wrong answers as possible and mark an ‘X’ next to them in the exam booklet, then make your best educated guess.

4. Spend at least five minutes of the 25 minutes allotted to the essay section in writing down notes on all your thoughts (brainstorming). Then refer to these ideas as you organize them into paragraphs. Leave a minute or two at the end to proofread your essay and make any needed corrections.

5. Try an interactive technique on critical reading sections by alternately reading the text passage and the questions. The questions are sequenced in the order of the text, so answer them in order.
   Answer or make best guesses on all questions for each text passage as you proceed through the section.

6. Check mathematics answers by doing a rough estimate to see if your answer is reasonable. If you get a math answer by calculation that doesn’t match any of the choices, re-read the question because you probably missed something.

Tips & Warnings

• You lose ¼ raw score point for each wrong answer on the SAT, versus gaining 1 raw point for each correct answer. Statistically, random guessing will not raise or lower your score. Educated guessing, however, is very likely to raise your score.
• Practice filling in ‘grid-in’ type answer blocks. Be careful when entering a number like 1 ½, which has to be filled in as 3/2 or 1.5.
• Questions in SAT exams are arranged from easiest to most difficult, except in the critical reading sections.