COMMON SAT PREP MISTAKES

The last thing you want to be when you get your findings is disappointed, disillusioned, or in disbelief. And in the interest of candour, you could unwittingly undermine your exam preparation or performance. You can lose points on the SAT even if you believe you have the ideal study strategy, frame of mind, or the ideal level of preparation.
All we have to do is assist you in recognising any errors you may be making! Identifying these errors if you’re preparing alone is crucial because no one will be present to detect them for you.

HERE ARE SOME MISTAKES TO AVOID.

INADEQUATE TIME MANAGEMENT

On the SAT, poor time management can show up in various ways, but we’ll focus on some of the most typical ways you can misuse your time.

QUESTIONS SHOULD NOT BE SKIPPED

This is the biggest time management issue I observe among SAT candidates. Numerous students have a terrible tendency to devote time to tasks they should skip, whether because of perfectionism, ignorance, or the belief that they could solve the problem correctly with a little more time.

It is advisable to skip a question and return to it later if, within the first 30 seconds, you are still determining how to approach it or you rapidly recognise that, while achievable, the question will take some time to finish.

Even if you get the answer correct, you may easily spend several minutes on a difficult question, and you just only have a little time.

In the best-case scenario, you devote minutes to one question, answer it correctly, and then have to speed through other (potentially more straightforward) questions afterwards. In the worst-case scenario, you spend several minutes on one question and still get the answer wrong while running out of time to finish easy questions that you’d have a greater chance of getting right. That’s at least a three-for-one deal.

READING WITHOUT FEELING RUSHED

For the SAT Reading part, students may read to fully absorb the subject, just like they would if reading a book for class.

The issue is you need more time on the SAT to read for deep understanding… and it’s pointless to try. With around 80 lines of text and 10-12 questions in each passage, there may not even be a question regarding the section of text you need help understanding.

Sure, you should read for comprehension; however, if you’re continually re-reading significant parts of the text for better comprehension, attempting to follow the exact timetable of a scientific experiment, or memorising every narrative detail, you need to read more carefully.

NOT KNOWING HOW MUCH TIME TO DEVOTE TO EACH SEGMENT

• Nothing is worse than switching to the last section of the Reading test and hearing.
• If you’ve been preparing for the SAT, you should know the time limits for each exam. You should never predict how much time you have remaining in any segment.

DIVIDING YOUR TIME EVENLY

If you’re detail-oriented, you may have already determined your time for each paragraph or question. Excellent work! You’ve got one step ahead of us. There will be areas of the SAT that will be more challenging for you than others. They are the parts we want to devote the most time. It can be accomplished by determining which areas of the SAT are easier for you and then finishing those sections more rapidly.

WITHOUT READING CAREFULLY ENOUGH

• We’ve already discussed the necessity of not reading too carefully, but another side of the coin is doing havoc on your SAT score: not reading closely enough.
• You should read more intently if you skim through the Reading part without absorbing any story aspects, details, or facts.
• Reading so rapidly gives you more time to concentrate on the questions. Nevertheless, if you don’t absorb anything the first time around, you’ll wind yourself rereading vast sections of the text anyhow… which will cost you as much time, if not more. With all of that, your understanding may still suffer.
• You may also read so rapidly that you miss important facts, attach opinions or attitudes to the incorrect character or person, or fundamentally misinterpret the aim of an experiment or narrative element. You believe “reading effectively” may be an efficient technique for lowering your SAT score.

MAKING THOUGHTLESS ERRORS

This category of SAT blunders has many problems, and addressing them all would take a long time. For that purpose, we’ll concentrate on the most typical errors we encounter in the Arithmetic, Writing, and Language sections: problems with writing your calculations and punctuation difficulties.
Most careless errors we encounter in the SAT Math sections are due to students writing sloppily or not writing down every step.

CONSTANTLY TAKING THE LONG ROUTE TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

This may contradict our advice about writing everything down in the Math sections. To be clear, mental maths is different from performing things quickly. In truth, we can apply mathematics on the SAT to acquire the answer. You can solve the problem simply by working backwards from your response selections. You may eliminate obvious erroneous choices and then use the plug-in approach for any remaining options.

LAST THOUGHTS

• Even though most of these SAT problems are test-day errors, they are best corrected in practice. Errors are frequently the product of bad habits, which take time to break — you can’t always stop just by being aware of them.
• It will take time, for example, to learn how to read more intently or to read more rapidly. It will take some practice to catch yourself before making a foolish error. It will also take discipline to let go of a question and return to it later.
• In your preparation, remember not just the SAT topics themselves but also your test-taking habits and routines.

To summarise, here are some questions to ask yourself when evaluating your test-day preparation:

• Is it possible that I need to be reading more carefully and wasting time?
• Is it possible that I must read more intently, hence sacrificing comprehension?
• Do I double down on questions that stump me rather than bypassing them and returning to them later?
• Do I divide my time evenly, or do I divide it more favourably?
• Should I be making simple mistakes in the math, writing, and language sections?
• Do I need to improve my efficiency in the Math sections of the test?
• If you’re committing any of these errors, don’t worry; all you need is some fine-tuning.