I’m retaking my SAT soon (abt a week and a half) and wanted to know if anybody had any advice for the math section in regards to raising my score. For reference, my math was 690 (RW 800, total 1490 - took it in May) and I’m shooting for at least 700-730. I plan on superscoring so that I can have a 1500+ total. My problem areas were problem solving / data analysis and geometry / trig. I got perfect scores on the algebra and advanced math sections.
I’m going through the Khan Academy but I ran through all of the practice tests the first time I took it so I don’t have any of those left.
The college panda math book is very well regarded. You can also try the free SAT boot camp through Schoolhouse.world - it’s synchronous online small group peer tutoring.
Sounds like you have a great start and very attainable goals. Your score suggests that you are likely already getting the difficult “adaptive” test on the SAT, so grading may also be somewhat more lenient based on that.
By data analysis, I think we’re talking about statistics? Having a very comfortable understanding of median, mode and mean is a great starting point. Then thinking about how adding an outlier value might change those values is also nice. For more challenging questions on statistics, sometimes there are questions about standard deviation. Without getting too wonky about the definition of SD, it might help to intuit / understand that adding a single extreme value can disproportionately shift the SD as SD is calculated as the square of the difference from the mean. Even if that last sentence is wonky, just know that adding a single extremely high or low value relative to the mean may possibly shift the SD a lot, especially if there are not that many values in the set.
As far as Problem Solving, some of the more difficult problems stand out because they test understanding of the concept of slope (or correlation). Basically that slope represents the relationship between two variables as the independent variable (x) changes. It’s good to have an intuition that positive slope goes from lower left to upper right and negative slope goes the other way. Another common concept is that lines with the same slope can either have an "infinite number of solutions (if they are in fact the same line) or be “parallel” or "not intersect. That’s just SAT lingo for “same slope”. Other difficult problems will require you to calculate the slope and then go back and calculate the y-intercept or constant. The testmaker trick is to have some students forget the last step. Other annoying tricks are to have you write “2m” rather than “m” (the slope) again introducing another step of calculation that some rushed or nervous students will miss. There may be an opportunity in Desmos to check your answer for some problem solving questions by using the graphing function.
Geo / Trig tends to focus on ideas of similar triangles, similar angles, supplementary and complementary angles. A mastery of SOHCAHTOA (the basic geometrical definition of trig identities) is usually as much trig as is tested. Trig problems may be awash with extraneous numbers and angles that are not relevant to the solution. Often drawing the triangle to a reasonable scale depicting the length of the sides can act as a double check of your answer to make sure it is sensible given what the triangle looks like.
Generally for the math section, the timing can be different from the language arts / English. Given your good grasp of algebra and other sections, you may find that you have a lot of time remaining at the end of the section. If this is the case, you have more freedom to really drill down on the “tricky” problems that you are more likely to get wrong and spend more time on them either after completing the section or even as you work your way through the test. This would depend highly on your individual time management experience, but one of the tricky things about the SAT is that problems are definitely not designed all to take even remotely the same amount of time. Testmakers use this to manufacture “errors” by adding extra steps as above.
As far as knowing your task, you’re probably looking for 2-4 additional correct answers on the exam. My guess is that you’ll do great!
https://www.youtube.com/@Tutorllini Watch his videos and join his facebook. His math walkthroughs are incredible. He has started this digital math videos way before the College Board started to give students in the US the digital tests. My daughter benefited from watching these videos. He also gives online lessons if needed.
