How
To Score High On Your PSATs and SATs
By Justin
Dolecki
The Princeton Review
The PSAT is
a rite of passage for many high school sophomores and juniors.
Like the SAT, the PSAT is a standardized test given to assess
math, critical reading, and writing skills (how good of a job
these tests do at assessing these skills is open for debate),
but unlike the SAT, the PSAT isn’t used to evaluate candidacy
for admission to college.
Order
of Difficulty (OOD)
Each
SAT section is divided into three levels of difficulty: easy,
medium, and hard. The first third of each group are easy, the
second third are of medium difficulty, and the last third are
hard. (The only exception is the Reading Comprehension passages,
which do not follow this order.) An easy question is one that
almost everyone gets right. A hard question is a question that
almost everyone gets wrong.
So,
if a group has nine questions, the first three are easy, the second
three are medium, and the last three are hard. Since easy, medium,
and hard questions are worth the same amount, spend the majority
of your time making sure you get the easy and medium questions
right.
Process
of Elimination (POE)
Instead
of trying to find the right answer, try to find the wrong answers.
By eliminating wrong answers, you greatly improve your chances
of getting the question right because even if you can't narrow
your choices to a single answer at the end, you will have only
two or three to choose from instead of all five. Physically cross
out the wrong answer choices in your test booklet, and then guess
among whichever answer choices remain.
Only
a quarter point is subtracted for every wrong answer, while a
full point is added for every right answer. So, if you can eliminate
at least one answer choice, guess among the two, three, or four
remaining choices.
The
Joe Bloggs Approach
Joe
Bloggs is a fictional, average American student. On the SAT he
scores exactly what the average American student scores: 500 on
each section. So why is Joe Bloggs important? He's important because
he's predictable. Joe gets all the easy questions right, half
the medium ones right, and none of the hard questions.
When
you are taking the SAT, think about how Joe Bloggs would answer
an easy, medium, or hard question. Joe Bloggs always picks the
answer that seems right. If you can narrow down the answer choices
to two or three choices on an easy question, you should pick the
answer that seems right — the Joe Bloggs answer. On hard
questions, find the answer that seems right and eliminate it —
that's the Joe Bloggs answer. If you can eliminate even one answer,
you should guess and move on. Easy questions have easy answers,
and hard questions have hard answers.
Taken
From The PrincetonReview.com
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