THE INSIDE-OUT METHOD™

(Final version with grammar fixes you approved)

I’m Lydia Terry, owner of Ampersand Prep and the designer of the Cognitive Agency Approach to Test Prep. I’ve been helping students with the SAT* for over a decade, and somewhere along the way I realized something obvious: most students do not need more “tips and tricks.” They need a way to think. They need a system that works even when the passage is boring, the vocabulary is weird, or their brain is tired.

My book, The Good Student’s Toolkit for Bad Tests / SAT Edition Volume 1, is coming out soon, but I wanted to share one of its most-requested tools ahead of time. The Inside-Out Method is the Cognitive Agency strategy for SAT Reading. It is built for high scorers, but it is genuinely helpful for anyone who wants a clear, repeatable way to answer reading comprehension questions.

Who It’s For

The Inside-Out Method grew out of the same frustrations I saw year after year: bright students staring at a passage with no idea where to begin, losing track of what the question was asking, or reading the same sentence six times and absorbing nothing.

I built this method for the student who wants something better, not a hack or a shortcut, but a way to stay oriented and in control. It gives you a starting point, a clear task, and a way to stay focused instead of drifting.

While the Cognitive Agency Approach works with the ACT too, this particular method is engineered for one-prompt, one-question SAT reading comprehension.

So if you want to raise your reading score and show colleges what you are capable of, this is for you.

Philosophy

At its core, the Inside-Out Method is about Cognitive Agency, which is like giving students main character energy in their test prep. The Inside-Out Method is the reading comprehension part of that. It is based on three principles. They are simple, but they inform the entire method.

The SAT’s perspective is the only one that matters.
Whenever you are assigned a reading, whether by the SAT, a teacher, or a book club, the assigner knows why they included it. You can get a sense of that by looking at the questions. It is not about your opinion. That may seem obvious, but many students look into their own thoughts instead of the passage.

The SAT has to write three wrong answers.
If you try to pick what feels right, confirmation bias will push you toward tempting distractors. Focusing on what is wrong helps you catch subtle errors, such as the difference between “most” and “all.”

The SAT wants you to get things wrong.
They need to separate students. They do this by making wrong answers sound right. Once you understand this, the process gets much easier.

Step 1: Imperativize and Referentivize the Stem

Before I explain the mechanics of Step 1, I want to tell you a quick story.

A student once came to me right before her SAT. She had been self-studying for months. She had taken every Bluebook test she could find and worked through grammar books on her own. She had done everything she could think of and was still about fifty points away from her goal score. Her parents booked a single session to see if I could give her some last-minute direction.

We pulled up a reading question. I started talking through the stem in a very plain, matter-of-fact way, exactly the way my brain runs it.

“Ok. I need to support the researcher. Good. Who is the researcher? Dr. Evil. Great. What is his hypothesis? Something about a control group. What is the control group? Sharks without lasers. And what is he claiming? That sharks with lasers are happier than sharks without lasers. So support Dr. Evil’s hypothesis that sharks without lasers are happier than sharks with lasers.”

She stared at me.
“Wait. That’s it? You are not outlining the passage or looking for deeper meaning?”

I said, “No. I want points.”

She paused, then said, “Ok. I think I don’t need tutoring anymore. Thank you for your time.”

That was it. Fifteen minutes. She went home. A month later her mom emailed me. She earned a perfect score.

In high school, outlining passages and finding deeper meaning is rewarded. In college and in the real world, it is much more about completing the task.

You start by turning the question into instruction. Turn the verb into the command form, also called the imperative mood. When you referentivize, you bring into the question the pieces of the passage that matter most. The question stops being a riddle and becomes a task.

When you imperativize and referentivize, you finally have a starting point. For SAT questions, that alone solves half the battle.

Step 1 Slide Deck:
https://ampersandprep.com/insideoutstep1

Step 2: Rule Out Answers That Cannot Satisfy the Task

Here is another example of something I see all the time.

A student and I are looking at a question with two graphs. One graph shows a country that took part in World War II and now has far more women than men. The other graph shows a country that did not participate and has almost the same number of men and women. The stem says:

Use data from the graph to support the researcher’s claim that gender balance is more prominent in countries that were not part of the Allied or Axis powers.

The student immediately wants to pick an answer that explains why the numbers look that way. They talk about war casualties and historical factors. They want to show they understand the story behind the data.

I stop them.
“Wait. What is the task?”

They read it again.
“Use data from the graph to support the claim.”

Only two answers could support the claim. One answer explained why the difference occurred. That was the one that distracted my student. Another used the data correctly but did not support the claim. One used the wrong data entirely but would have supported the claim if the data had been true. Only one answer used the correct data to support the claim.

Before we moved on, I noticed something important. My student spent time working through answers that could not possibly earn points. She followed the logic of distractors that had no chance of being right. That is wasted cognitive load.

Step 2 is triage. It is the moment when you decide which answers deserve attention.

Some advice online tries to skip reading entirely by memorizing wrong-answer patterns. Parts of that logic overlap with what I teach, but this is an intermediary step, not the destination. Some questions eliminate themselves. Many do not.

Step 2 Slide Deck:
https://ampersandprep.com/insideoutstep2

Step 3: Read with Purpose

If I think of one of the most boring things I could read, it would be an article about how to fix a drain. I did that once. I fixed the drain. I was proud of myself, but I never want to do it again.

This is funny because I love to read. I have probably read over a thousand books. I look for classics, even ones I do not enjoy, because I want to understand why other people love them. But I do not love reading how-to articles about tasks I do not need to do.

But when I needed to fix that drain, I soaked in every word. I read slowly and carefully. I read with purpose because I needed something specific.

Now imagine two friends told me how to fix the drain and one of them had to be right. I would care even more. Not because the topic became interesting, but because I had a problem to solve.

When you know why you are reading (Step 1) and what the answer could be (Step 2), the passage becomes more compelling. Not because it is interesting, but because it serves your purpose.

The slide deck contains tips that help you strengthen this skill. Notice the structure of the passage. Use punctuation as a tool. Simplify complex ideas. These improve with practice.

The most important thing you can do is read with the purpose of finding which of the remaining answers tells you how to fix the drain.

Step 3 Slide Deck:
https://ampersandprep.com/insideoutstep3

Step 4: Logic Out

Technically, every question on the SAT can be answered with Step 3. Most of the time, reading with purpose will give you what you need. There are times, though, when the logic gets tight, the passage gets dense, or the answers are too close. That is when you use Step 4.

I tell my math students something similar. When they are staring at a graph and have no idea what it wants, they make an x–y grid and work it out. They know how the Cartesian plane works. They do not need to know the exact shape of a cubic polynomial. They just grid it out.

We are doing the same thing here. I tried several versions of this until I found one that was simple, broad, and reliable. You can use it for any question type. It is flexible but structured enough to keep your thinking clean.

I recommend printing the sheets that go with this step. Use the first version while you are learning the Logic Out process. Then graduate to the second version. Once you understand how it works, use scratch paper so you are comfortable doing it on test day.

In Step 4, you work out the logic and see which answer choices follow the logic or at least do not contradict it. This happens often. The right answer is sometimes the biggest understatement you have ever seen. (that happens! Often the right answer is just a huge understatement. Yes, thank you SAT, the antidisestablishmentarian and the disestablishmentarian both like breathing.)

I do not have a cute story about this step. It is not a clever trick. It is a tool that works.

Step 4 Slide Deck:
https://ampersandprep.com/insideoutstep4

Printable Logic Out Sheets:
Full version:
https://storage.googleapis.com/msgsndr/B3Z2GaAwJ3p1XMfy9Siv/media/69154cbbfb51417fa2caf640.pdf
Scratch-paper version:
https://storage.googleapis.com/msgsndr/B3Z2GaAwJ3p1XMfy9Siv/media/69154cba2f13302a5e9bcbb0.pdf

GPT Prompt & A Word About AI

To practice the Inside Out Method, you can use Chatty:

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-691ac322e3408191970bd989a69b3003-chatty-the-sat-reading-tutor

I have been working on this for quite a while. Before I share it, I want to talk about AI for a moment. The world is changing, and this probably matters more to you than it does to me, a woman in her 40s. There are trends worth worrying about as more students rely on AI to write essays, read assignments, and even think for them. When I read about that, I feel the same little despair most people my age do. I also see opportunity for you.

If the majority of people are doing something, not doing it makes you stand out. When I heard that “kids these days” were not being taught cursive, I taught my son cursive. I do not have strong feelings about cursive itself, but it is exactly the kind of skill that might look good on a résumé one day precisely because it is rare. Not being basic is a choice. Learning to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch is a choice you should make every time you open it. You are the main character in your life.

The Chatty prompt uses actual questions from the SAT question bank. I wish I could have had the chatbot design the questions, but it does not do a very good job at that. I pulled from the PSAT question bank and excluded active questions so I would not spoil anything for you.

AI models are heavily trained on SAT content, and when left on their own they tend to give bland, run-of-the-mill advice. The Cognitive Agency Approach — and the Inside Out Method — are not run of the mill. Sometimes they will contradict the AI’s instincts. If that happens, point it out to Chatty. It is designed to acknowledge the contradiction and take note of it.

How to Use Chatty

Chatty has three modes.

The first is the instruction mode, the straightforward how-to.

The second is guided praxis. Chatty walks you through each skill type and gives pointers on that specific type of question. The Inside Out Method plays out a little differently for central idea questions than it does for cross-text questions. Chatty explains those differences.

The third is the upload mode. This is where you bring your own questions. I recommend using this mode after you have taken a Bluebook test and want to go over what you missed. Chatty does not accept PDFs, but you can copy and paste the text from one. For some reason, Chatty does not read PDFs very well and kept filling in the blanks.

Closing Thoughts

Mastering the Inside-Out Method takes practice. At first you may feel slower, but that is normal. You are retraining your brain to think deliberately. With repetition, the process speeds up, and you will be surprised by how confident you feel walking into the test. Use it consistently, and you will give yourself the best chance at the score you deserve, the scholarships you want, and the college you dream of.

My book, The Good Student’s Toolkit for Bad Tests / SAT Edition Volume 1, will be out soon. In it, you will find even more strategies that build on the Cognitive Agency Approach. Until then, I encourage you to try Chatty, practice with official College Board questions, and make this method second nature.

It will not be a silver bullet. Nothing ever is. If you would like to learn more about Ampersand Prep’s Cognitive Agency Approach, you can set up a strategy session with this link.

Best of luck, and remember that you are the main character in your life.

SAT® is a registered trademark of the College Board© and is not affiliated with or endorsing Ampersand Prep, the Cognitive Agency Approach™, or the Inside Out Method™.