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Important Test Taking Strategies For Your Best Score
Key strategies to use when taking the SAT/ACT.
Keep your own time.
Don’t rely on the wall clock or on the proctors who are supposed to remember to call out time. They have the final word, of course, but it’s dangerous to rely on a clock that you may not be able to see well or on monitors who may forget to call out warnings.
Don’t waste time with multiple-choice guessing shortcuts.
The SAT is put together by psychometricians, who design multiple-choice tests for a living. You can’t outsmart them. Just because C hasn’t come up for a while doesn’t mean its due.
Skip the toughest questions.
Unless you’re planning to get a nearly perfect SAT score, there will probably be a handful of questions that you should skip. Skipping questions means that you run out of time on the hardest questions (the ones you skipped) instead of simply the ones at the end, which may or may not be hard for you.
Maintain your focus.
The SAT is a marathon, not a sprint. Hunker down over your answer sheet, move quickly and answer each question as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Know how the question order and timing works.
Most of the SAT sections are 25 minutes long. Others are 20 or 10 minutes long. Know not only those times, but also how you should be progressing through each section. How long does it typically take you to do the sentence completion questions? To read and complete an eight-question reading passage? To do the last five math problems?
Take shortcuts.
No, guessing tricks don’t work on the SAT. But that doesn’t mean it’s like any old test in school. On the SAT, only the right answer matters — no one is grading how you got to your answer, or whether you did a good enough job of showing your work. So don’t write out every step to a math problem unless it’s necessary. Feel free to test answers to see which ones work, ignoring
the “proper” way of doing the problem. If you found an easy way to eliminate an answer, feel free to do so.
Go ahead and guess.
While students are typically told not to guess randomly on the SAT, on average the wrong answer penalties will exactly cancel out the points you get from correct guesses. So if you have no clue on a question, you can either guess or not guess. And if you can eliminate even one answer, guessing is a nobrainer.