<p>Hello, I currently only have a 750-780 for SAT 1 Math. Any proposed ways to get 800? I think what gets me is occasional careless mistakes and sometimes concepts not included in SAT 1 Math i.e in blue book practice 5 (Section 3 or 5), there was a question on the equation of a parabola with coordinates h,k. Didn’t know the formula was a(x-h)squared+k (NOT EVEN TAUGHT IN DR CHUNGS…)
Books I have (For math): Dr Chung, Kaplan Math work book
Please suggest some ways/strats to get that 800. </p>
<p>Check out my article “The Math Formulas You Should Memorize For the SAT.” An edited version of this article is posted on this forum. Just do a search. You’ll see that that formula is in there, as well as all the other important ones for getting an 800.</p>
<p>A 750-780 which is 98/99% is a very good SAT score, this means that you pretty much understand all of the concepts tested on the SAT math. An 800 on the SAT requires one to answer every single question correctly, and with one mistake the score drops to 780-790, and with two it drops to 750-760. This means one cannot afford to make a careless mistakes. </p>
<p>Getting 100% of the questions right requires an immense amount of focus and you have to read the questions very carefully. In general careless mistakes often happen on the medium difficulty questions, where one is bound to lower their guard. This means in the exam pay special attention to the middle level questions. I am assume by now you have a good sense of the distribution of the difficulty levels on the SAT tests, it is pretty standard and the variations from one test to another is minor. In general, one is unlikely to make careless mistakes on the hard questions(Level 5), because they generally test a relatively difficult idea, and the test writers are not relying on one misreading or misinterpreting a question. </p>
<p>I would advice you to take practice tests(Official Collegeboard SAT tests) under exact exam conditions, and really focus and read and interpret everything carefully. At your score level, you will likely have time left at the end of the exam, I would recommend you to go back and redo the ones where you felt a little bit shaky. Additionally, make sure you go through all of the Level 5 SAT math questions ever released by Collegeboard. There aren’t that many, typically there are 3 to 5 questions that are of Level 5 in each test, this would mean a grand total of approximately 200 or so questions. These are questions that would test something slightly new, and for an 800 you cannot afford to miss them. </p>
<p>Another good way to give good exercise to your brain is to do the AMC 8 and AMC 10 questions, many of these are beyond SAT, but they really force you to think and I personally believe that they can be very helpful in pushing you to score an 800. </p>
<p>^I agree, when I took the SAT I was already familiar with AMC8/10/12 exams. Didn’t prepare at all for SAT math, got 800.</p>
<p>Most of it is just making sure you don’t make any careless mistakes. I almost made one during an actual exam (correct answer was E: It cannot be determined…), one mistake can cost 10-20 points easily.</p>
<p>Getting a perfect on the math is a matter of not making careless mistakes. Just be extra careful when you take the test. I always like to go back with my extra time and actually check over the really easy problems because it hurts so much to get those ones wrong off a silly mistakes. One mistake could cost you as much as 40 points.</p>