I first want to say I am by no means an expert on this. These are just some studying tips that really helped me with the SSAT. In general, I recommend you get either the book or online study guides that the official SSAT page offers. Even if you don’t buy a study guide you can take a free mini version of the SSAT online and it will help you to identify your weaknesses.
~Quantitive Section~
For me, math was not and still is not my thing. In my eighth grade year when I was applying to boarding schools, I was taking geometry. Really the test has more algebraic concepts than geometry concepts, so don’t get stressed if geometry is not your thing.
Tips:
-Take some practice tests and figure out where your weak areas are. Focus more on improving these areas. Watch videos online to help you and if your teachers are willing to you can always get help after school.
-It’s all about hard work. As Euclid said, “There is no royal road to geometry.” Just keep working at it and eventually you will get it.
I’m sorry I don’t have any more tips for the quantitive section because I don’t really know any way to get better at math besides just good old fashion studying.
~Reading~
Personally, the reading came really easy. I think I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how difficult it was for them, so I’ll try my best to explain the easiest way to answer the questions.
Tips:
-Reading the question is more important than reading the passage (I’m saying this very objectively–READING THE PASSAGE IS VERY IMPORTANT!). What I’m trying to get across is that the question tells you what to do. Unless it tells you to infer the answer will be in the passage.
-Understand the vocabulary. I will elaborate more on this for the verbal section, but this applies here a lot, too. I think a lot of people find this section difficult because they don’t understand what their reading and even if they do they think too deeply about the questions.
~Verbal~
This was my favorite part of the test. Originally, I hated this part because some of the words were just ridiculously challenging and I didn’t see how I would ever be able to understand all of them. Once I found a system that worked for me I found even studying weirdly fun. I spent 14 hours one day just studying terms.
Tips:
-A while ago I found this great study guide on Quizlet (all credit to the person who made it). It seriously works so well! Just a warning there is around 500 terms on here (which isn’t as bad as some other ones). Here’s the link: https://quizlet.com/8062978/learn . I have it in learn mode which is Quizlet’s new studying method (It works really well!). I can’t even begin to get into how amazing this is. I absolutely love it!
-For analogies focus on the correlation between the words. I feel like that is pretty obvious, but when I talked to my friends who were also applying they really had no idea what an analogy is. They kinda just guessed.
Honestly, just using that study guide I left the link for up above will help with so much. I seriously recommend it. I kinda doubt it did, but I really hope this helped. 