<p>The excellent recap by an accomplished student who improved 790 points without an outside tutor prompts my thread about Whether Prep Guides “Beyond the SAT” are worthy for SAT study.</p>
<p>If kept in perspective (that you won;t feel down by a bad score in a difficult practice test; and that your extra time is only incrementally more productive) then “outside the lines” prep materials make sense. The LSAT for SAT Critical Reading, and Chung for SAT Math fall into this “harder-than-the-SAT” category. A few of our students use these in addition to the materials my firm gives them.</p>
<p>But I always want students to exhaust all or almost all College Board material first. My firm gives students access to 23 SAT and up to 8 more PSATs (these PSATs are deficient in simulating the hardest SAT math questions, but are good for CR and grammar.). Rarely do students tackle more than half of these materials.</p>
<p>I have directly or indirectly helped over 8000 students to college via SAT and ACT prep and I believe fewer than 20 have used all the College Bord materials they had access to. </p>
<p>So for the student who might be in that rare “hard-core” category, going beyond makes sense. And I suspect a decent percentage of those reading this post (CC is already inhabited by highly motivated students) are into this rarefied air. </p>
<p>I conclude with one testing with which i DISagree: the original poster re-did old tests he had seen early in his study. This cannot yield a realistic score. The brain that saw a reading passage or a math problem 5 months earlier has SOME recognition of it. The wrong answer choices on a re-done test are not as tempting as they are in an unseen test.</p>
<p>So when my students re-use a prior test, it’s without regard to timing, and without regard to score. It’s to MASTER every problem that previously beat them. Lean why the right answer IS right, and why tempting-but-wrong answers ARE wrong. That still propels SAT success.</p>
<p>I will respond to the above with a less nuanced answer. While I understand that some might find it useful to dig deeper into a LAST test, I am not sure that the results are worth the efforts. When it comes to “harder than the SAT” books such as Chung’s, I consider that precise one to be pure … junk! and this on the account of gross irrelevance and horrible and sloppy editing. To be clear, the entire set of tests created by Chung are worthless and misleading drivel, and his tips are mostly irrelevant and unclear. And that is charitable on my part! </p>
<p>There are very good reasons why students should practice with official tests and few reasons to believe that one should run out of the available tests. Practicing with harder tests or studying tests such as the LSAT, GRE, or GMAT has one downside in the form of direct relevance. Nobody should need to “learn” the contents, but many need to learn how to take those tests correctly, and learn the correct techniques to read and answer the questions.</p>
<p>My conclusions have not varied much in the past decade. They are still based on using official tests from TCB exclusively and developing a proactive approach to build blocks of knowledge over a lengthy period of time. Fwiw, the building blocks of knowledge are often found in years prior to the SAT, as many students are suffering from an incomplete instruction at the most basic level of geometry and algebra. </p>
<p>On a last note, I also do not believe much in having to sit through full length test after full length test. Given that most student have an official test to establish the starting point, it is not necessarily to devote much time on building stamina until the preparation is reaching its apex. I much prefer working on small sections and truly focus on mastering every small part of the SAT as opposed to sit through elements that present no challenges. The building the stamina part and working on shaving time are really the culminating efforts of a long term plan. </p>
<p>All in all, the key to success is learning to maintain focus and concentration. And keeping the focus on keeping the preparation as simple as possible. And that means to look beyond faddish techniques and forget about finding magical shortcuts. Just as the answer to the CR questions are ALWAYS within the four corners of the document in front of you, the answers are in … the official tests called SAT Reasoning Test, and not in the GMAT or LSAT! </p>