5 SAT Mistakes
Top 5 mistakes students make when preparing for the SAT (and what to do instead)
What I am about to share in this article has come from a decade of helping hundreds of students get the SAT score they deserve, attend the college of their dreams, and earn scholarships! If you are a student trying to prepare for the SAT so you can reach your goals or a parent trying to help give your child the best chance for success, this article is for you!
Hi! My name is Lydia and I have been coaching students on getting the score they deserve for the past 10 years! I say “deserve” because so often ambitious, hardworking, and intelligent students find the skills they used when getting their good grades are not transferring to commensurate SAT scores! I hear frustrated parents tell me their child is a “good student but a bad test taker!” and discouraged students tell me that “the questions just aren’t making sense!” To learn more about my teaching philosophy, you can check out this article.
I am also the parent of a high school student who wants to go to a top university and earn scholarships!
In a perfect world, working hard in high school should result in a good SAT score, but this just isn’t always the case!
So often, I get called to help a student who has tried to prepare for the SAT on their own. While this is certainly possible, a seasoned tutor will help you improve your score in the most efficient and impactful way.
These are the top 5 mistakes I see students make when preparing for the SAT!
Want my help so your child can get the score they deserve? Click here!
#1 Trusting tutors and guides that tell you what you want to hear!
I am immersed in the test prep community. I read a lot of their guides, advertising pitches, and claims other tutors make. They claim there are secret tips and tricks that will magically help a student get a high score or they say their guide is the only guide that covers all the topics. When their advice ultimately doesn’t work out, they blame the student and point to their few students that have improved. However, some students will improve no matter how bad their tutor is, so tutors can't take credit for only their top scorers. What matters is the overall average.
Some will tell you that in order to get top scores, parents have to pay top dollar! They try to sell this idea that if you really love your child, you will pay their prices! The reality is, some of the best tutors I have ever seen work for free, and some of the worst tutors I have ever seen charge tens of thousands of dollars!
At the end of the day, a student will be alone on test day and will only be judged on what they can do, no matter how exclusive the arcane tips and tricks were or how much money their parents threw at fancy tutors.
What to do instead!
No matter what test preparation journey you decide on, it’s so important to make sure that a student keeps the perspective that they have to be able to stand alone.
Let me give you an example…
Here are two responses I got from two different students after I explained there is more than one right way to do something grammatically.
Student A:
Ok, so that’s confusing. How will I know which to choose on test day? What if both correct ways are in the answer choices? Will the wrong answer be wrong in some other way then?
Student B:
So, how should I guess then? What’s the trick?
Who do you think ended up with the higher score at the end?
Student A because they kept an “I have to be able to do this alone on test day!” attitude.
It’s easier to think that just because something is nuanced, it is up to chance so you might as well guess. So many tutors say that (because it’s less stuff to teach), and so many students want to hear that (because it’s less stuff to learn). Tricks can be slightly better than pure guessing, but once a student goes down that path, they limit themselves on the top score they can achieve EVEN IF THEY ARE SMART ENOUGH TO GET A HIGHER SCORE!
They limit themselves from getting the score they DESERVE!
To set up a free consultation session to see if tutoring is right for you, click here!
#2 Trusting tutors and guides that tell you what you don’t want to hear!
What! Didn’t I just say the opposite? Yes, hear me out! On the flip side of this coin are tutors who extol the virtues of the SAT, believe it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and think that the only reason good students struggle with the test is grade inflation!
They don’t believe in “good student / bad test takers” and think a low SAT score means a student shouldn’t go to a higher institution. One of these tutors criticized my "Cognitive Agency Approach" because it worked TOO well! He said I was enabling students who wouldn't otherwise qualify for certain universities. and I was setting them up to fail!
I am not sure he knows what an SAT tutor's job is?
They argue this with full knowledge that white, male, upper class students with college educated parents tend to do better on the SAT!
Even the SAT disagrees with them! When asked about their score distributions correlating with societal hierarchies, they say their test illuminates the effects of inequality and the need for social justice, NOT that their test proves racism, sexism, and classism right!
Still, they are in business, which means parents and students go to them even though these tutors are telling people what they DON’T want to hear.
What to do instead!
Work!
Here’s a very interesting bit of information… EVERY STUDENT I HAVE EVER WORKED WITH HAS IMPROVED! What?!?! EVERY SINGLE ONE? Yes! Now, is that because I am good at my job? I am, but that’s only one part of the reason.
The biggest factor was the WORK the students put in!
SAT scores are not innate complete stories of who a person is and CAN be improved through hard work. A good tutor helps coach a student on how to best work, they don't gatekeep higher scores with secret knowledge that they only give to the deserving.
#3 Not using official resources for preparation
So many students and parents think that preparing for the SAT should be the same as preparing for a high school exam. Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between a high school exam and the SAT.
A high school exam measures what you know.
The SAT tries to get students who know things to get questions wrong anyway!
I have so many students who ask me what textbooks they should get and what formulae they should memorize.
The answer is always the same… everything you need to know for the SAT is free online. If you must get a guide, get the official one!
However, It’s been my experience that the academic content most students need to know, they already know… especially “good students / bad test takers.” So, if you’re studying a book that is teaching stuff you already know, you’re just wasting your time and money!
What’s worse, many unofficial resources are just plain bad!
This is a question a student asked me to help her with from a website that promised SAT practice questions.
None of the given options are the correct answer to the question (it should be 21). I don’t know if the website used AI to generate their questions or if the writer didn’t understand what the median is, but this is a bad question.
The student was very confused and discouraged. Often teenagers don’t feel confident enough to assert that a question is bad. Honestly, I felt insecure about it as well, and I had to check and double check my work before I told her this was a bad question!
What to do instead!
Whenever possible, use official resources. Unofficial resources should only be used as a supplement.
Run away from resources that are using AI to generate questions or other study material!
To work with a tutor who knows the official resources inside and out, click here!
#4 Burning through official resources without learning from them
In 2023, the SAT went digital internationally, and in 2024, domestically. As of 8/25/2024, there are only so many official practice tests in the College Board Bluebook App (Bluebook is the platform the digital SAT is administered on and can be downloaded onto a PC for free):
2x PSAT 8/9
2x PSAT 10/NMSQT
6x SAT
Often I get called when a student has taken all of these exams and still doesn’t have the score they want. When I look at their practice test history, I will often notice a slight jump in score from the first to the second test, but then the scores plateau. I will then ask the student, “did you look over the questions you missed?” Usually, they tell me no.
The problem is, as I said in the last section, unofficial resources usually don’t work very well!
So what should you do instead?
Look at every missed question as an opportunity to improve.
Everything you need to know on the SAT is either in the test itself or just a quick Google search away. What’s more, the SAT will not only tell you why the right answer is right, but why the wrong answers are wrong when you review the test. If there are words in the explanation you don’t know, like “antecedent” or “binomial,” then look those words up too!
So, have you ever fixed a hole in a bike tire? When I was a kid and rode bikes all day long, I would get holes in the tires. I would take the inner tire part out and systematically put it in a bucket of water until I saw an air gurgle. When I found the air gurgle, I found my hole! I would then patch it up!
Think of missed questions on a practice test as the same thing! Once you find the hole in your academic understanding, patch it up!
The SAT has an incredible way of showing you the holes in your academic knowledge. Once I had a student who was taking calculus as a junior. When we were reviewing her missed questions, I noticed she converted a fraction to a decimal and then did the work. Once she found her answer in decimal form, she had to convert it back to a fraction because the answers were fractions. I asked her, “wait, why didn’t you just keep it as a fraction ? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”
She answered “I don’t know how to do fractions. This is how I get by.”
I said, “you’re in calculus though.”
She said, “yeah, and I do pretty well most of the time. I am a pretty good guesser so if I have to use fractions I just make an educated guess. I usually end up with an A minus or a B plus, but that’s ok.”
I was floored! I realized how much raw intelligence she had to have in order to develop her workarounds. I asked her “ok, so you learn how to do operations with fractions in 5th grade… What happened?” She told me she was shy, had been bullied, and the teacher was really dismissive of her!
Now, would you ride your bike knowing there was a hole in the tire? No! The same thing applies to practice tests. Patch up the hole before you take another practice test!
I asked her to put a pause on taking practice tests and to learn fractions. I gave her a lesson and then I gave her practice worksheets. It was probably a little bit embarrassing for her to use elementary school worksheets, but a week later she told me she got it, it wasn’t as hard as she thought it was, and it just made sense!
Her next practice test had a SIGNIFICANTLY higher math score because she let the last test direct her as to what she should study! It wasn't just that she got the fraction problems right; she also had more time for the other problems because she had a better process!
Still, I do understand that students still run out of tests. If you have run out of practice tests, these are the resources I would recommend you use.
First, use the SAT question bank and Khan Academy. They are both official resources that offer more than the Bluebook tests.
If you have to use unofficial resources, there are plenty of free ones online. There is no need to pay for practice questions.
The first one I use is Math Aids. This site will generate new worksheets for a particular concept. This is the website I used to help my calculus student remediate her fraction operations. Use this website if you need more than a review of a concept.
The second one I have my students use is CrackPSAT. For some reason, this site seems to be more functional than Crack SAT. I always heavily warn students, though, of the limitations of unofficial resources.
Finally, if it's been a few months, just take the official tests again. I take most of the tests I have my students take and so I have been taking practice tests for 10 years now. If it's been a few months since I took a test, I have forgotten the right answer and need to work through it again!
To learn how official College Board material can help your child master the SAT, let's talk!
#5 Underestimating the importance of Critical Thinking
Did you notice that if you look at my advice a certain way, it seems like I am contradicting myself?
My first point was to not trust sources that tell you what you want to hear, then I said you shouldn’t listen to sources that tell you what you don’t want to hear! Then I said to use official resources, but I also said to not use them up too fast! I provided context and rationale, but if you just looked at this article as a series of 5 bullet points, it might be confusing. I did this on purpose!
The SAT loves to exploit black and white thinking and bait expectations!
They might use the slope intercept form of the line, but the slope might be represented by “b” and the y-intercept might be represented by “m.”
Many of the reading comprehension or grammar questions talk about something typical but then talk about an exception. Here’s a great example of just that taken from the paper SAT 1.
You might get a question that asks you what a women’s suffrage activist has in common with another activist who thinks women shouldn’t vote. You might want to answer “they have nothing in common,” but the right answer is “they both believe women have a role in society.”
This is NOT to say that there might be more than 1 right answer or all the answers are wrong (there will always be 1 right answer and 3 wrong answers). It's just that often the right answer is the one that is not wrong.
So what should you do instead?
When you are working through your tests, get comfortable considering nuance and absolutes.
Work on understanding the subtle differences between transition words/phrases and conjunctions. Understanding the difference between “nor” and “or” and “however” and “still,” for example, will not only help you with transition word questions but also with complicated reading comprehension questions and math word problems (both of which are full of transition words and conjunctions).
Absolutes are not always wrong. Instead of thinking in absolute terms about absolutes, just notice them. I love it when I see an absolute in an answer because I can easily rule it right or wrong. If the answer says “all,” then something in the passage has to say “all” as well. If the passage says “most,” then even if all the other words are right, the answer that uses “all” is wrong.
Absolutes do rule things out, but at the same time they rule things in. If a question says the answer is an integer, then I can absolutely rule out decimals and rule in integers! My job just got so much easier!
In summary
When starting on your SAT prep journey, whether you self study or work with a tutor, keep the following five things in mind!
There are no secret tips and tricks or overpriced tutors that will magically deliver a high SAT score.
SAT scores are not immutable and can be improved with work.
Unofficial resources should only be used as a supplement to official resources.
Missed questions on official resources are indicators of what a student should study.
The SAT asks complicated questions that require critical thinking, so students should develop their critical thinking skills.
