Skills necessary to ace the SAT® test

How to Ace the SAT

At the most basic level, succeeding on the SAT relies on three fundamental skills:

• Content Expertise: Knowing the material being tested
• Mental Stamina: Ability to solve a large number of questions back to back with minimal breaks
• SAT Strategies: Skills and techniques specific to the SAT

Each of these skills can be learnt. It will take grit and hard work depending on your particular areas of strengths and weaknesses. However, this is not an IQ test. It is important to internalize this if you wish to succeed.

Let’s take a moment to dive into each of these. We’ll explore them in a lot more depth in separate posts.

Content Expertise

The SAT test requires specific knowledge to do well. For instance, the Math section is heavy on algebra with about 50% of the questions covering concepts from school Algebra- 1 and 2. There are no shortcuts here: you need to know these concepts to a high level of proficiency in order to do well. No test taking strategies or techniques can make up for a weak understanding of the underlying concepts for each of the the three sections covering reading comprehension, writing skills, and math. If this weren’t true, the test would not be used by world-class institutions to select students for admission or merit awards worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Mental Stamina

At its core, the SAT test is a mental endurance test. Ask anyone who has taken the SAT, ACT, or other standardized tests and they’ll tell you that at some point during the test, their brains just start fizzling out. Questions that seem ordinary become a lot harder. Many students who can otherwise answer almost any question by itself struggle when those same questions are part of the 154 questions that make up a standard SAT test. A standardized test is not just about what you know, it is also about application of this knowledge while having your brain operate at near maximum output for several hours.  The endurance aspect of these tests raises the bar on the level of expertise necessary to do well: if it takes you a while to recall or apply a concept, then you may not be able to apply it in the short time you have on the test.  Mental stamina is often overlooked in discussion of SAT and ACT, yet can make the difference between an average score and an excellent one. We’ll have much more to say about this in other dedicated posts.

SAT Strategies

As a standardized test, the SAT follows a standard structure. This means we can study the common patterns and types of questions on it and expect that they will repeat on future tests. The format of the SAT test has been fixed since 2016 and the writers of the test cannot go beyond the scope laid out in the official College Board structure. Strategies cover everything from understanding how the different sections are constructed, to types of questions and common gotchas, to time management. 

OK, but isn’t there a shortcut?

Unfortunately, many students get fixated on the idea that a tutor, a prep center, or a book has “cracked” the test, and that they can hack their way to a high score or find shortcuts that others miss, without having the underlying knowledge or extensive practice required for a high score. Nothing is further from the truth. There is a reason that college admission offices and scholarship awards across the US continue to use SAT or ACT to a large extent: the test despite its flaws is a credible metric of students’ overall ability to learn a large body of knowledge and apply it in a strictly proctored test covering a broad set of skills necessary for college. I’ll stress that the test is far from perfect: there are many aspects that can be improved, but dwelling on them doesn’t change anything. 

Takeaways:

Every aspect of preparing for the SAT comes down to one of three fundamental skills. You will need to be methodical and take specific steps to work on these skills, individually and in combination. Whether you do this by yourself or using one of the other approaches is entirely up to you. We explore the pros/cons of common approaches in this post.