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  Preparing for Standardized Tests
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   Preparing for Standardized TestsFinancial Aid
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Preparing for Standardized Tests
Enough books have been written about SAT preparation that it’s impossible for me to write everything in a page like this. Instead I will just list down important tips that will hopefully help you during test day.
The best way to prepare is to get an early start. Once you have decided whether you will take the SAT or the ACT, review the prep materials published by College Board and the ACT. These are real past year papers that will help you familiarize yourself with the test format and difficulty of the questions. Read the directions and memorize them so that you don't waste time and energy re-reading them on test day.
Ten tips to acing the SAT
Here are ten tips to acing the SAT, written by William Sullivan of The SAT Lowdown:
1. Read Novels - There will be many questions testing vocabulary and reading comprehension throughout the verbal sections of the SAT. These two skills are also the most difficult to quickly prepare (see #2). To excel on the SAT, a student should plan to work, slowly, surely, and over time, on their reading and vocabulary and one of the best ways to do that is to regularly read novels. Students don't have to read classic novels, or even good novels, to get a benefit from them for the SAT. Reading modern, grammatical English, as written in virtually all novels published in the last hundred years, will help a middle school student with their vocabulary and their ability to understand sentence structure. For SAT purposes, it doesn't matter what a student reads, as long as the student reads consistently.
2. Get to know Dictionary.com -Vocabulary is the hardest to cram for in the few months before the test. So, students should do whatever they can to steadily increase their vocabulary (as we saw in #1) and Dictionary.com can help here, too. The Web site features a "word of the day", which they email to you, that is often an SAT word and always a word worth knowing. Students have about a thousand days until the SAT and even if they remember one in ten of the words, that's a hundred SAT words added from this step alone! (Also see Merriam-Webster (WOTD) and Your Dictionary (WOTD))
3. Keep a Journal - The SAT now includes a writing section. Just as experience reading is the best way to boost a verbal score, practice writing is the best way to boost a writing score. When writing a journal, just as with reading novels, the quality isn't as important as the consistency; the journal should be used for slow, steady progress in writing over the course of years and not for time-intensive essays (students should get plenty of practice writing essays in school.) For now, try to write for 20-30 minutes a day, 5 or 6 days a week. That should help push to your writing to the next level.
4. Do Crossword Puzzles - Greater knowledge of words, including connotations, will help students with the verbal section. Students can answer many SAT questions by knowing something, but not everything, about a word. An example would be knowing what context it usually appears in, or what part of speech a word is. Crossword puzzles use words creatively and playfully, which will help students to see the many ways a word can be understood.
5. Read the Newspaper - The SAT will test lots of reading. Most newspaper articles are about the same length as the SAT passages and experience reading this type of writing will make answering the reading questions on the SAT. For example, students can write new headlines for articles, or substitute new words into the text to help prepare for the questions on the SAT. (Try The New York Times and the Washington Post.)
6. Work Out Logic Puzzles - The SAT has always tested logical thinking and newer SATs test it even more. Students can work on this skill using any of the multitudes of logic puzzle books sold at bookstores, supermarkets, or anywhere. These puzzles will help teach students how to read sentences precisely and notice the difference between what a sentence seems to say and what it actually says (a skill worth having throughout life.)
7. Draw - One of the trickiest parts of the SAT math section is the geometry section, but some drawing skill will help greatly. Some geometry questions will actually not include a diagram of the shape, which is part of what makes the question difficult (many SAT questions are like this in that the content tested is not the hard part of the question, the way the question is asked is.) Being able to quickly and accurately draw the shape(s) described in the question can often make the question much easier to answer. For the geometry questions with accurately drawn shapes (and the shapes on the SAT are accurate unless noted otherwise), a student familiar with shapes can often more effectively estimate angles, distance, lengths, etc.
8. Answer the SAT Question of the Day - Ninth graders probably are ready to take a practice SAT test and they should try out some questions. The College Board publishes a real SAT question on their Web site every day and your student can start there to learn what SAT questions look like and how they work. It's free and only takes a few minutes a day. Students should look forward to practice tests in tenth grade.
9. Memorize Fraction/Decimal conversions - What number is greater, 1/8 or .18? Students will have to make comparisons like this in the SAT math sections and any time taken to work out the conversion during the test is, in effect, points not being scored. Memorizing /2 through /12 will give minutes of time during the test to answer other questions (and get more points!).
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