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Help SATs are coming! Can you tell what you did to study for it and what score you got from studying?

It’s almost mid July already and i really need help. Sat prep centers such as Princeton Review and Kaplan are very expensive. 12 days for 1000 dollars. How much do prep centers help you improve? Is it the same thing as studying on your own?

The prep classes do help, and I usually recommend them, but if you’re leery of the cost (and rightly so) I imagine that there’s nothing in the prep class that someone who’s been couldn’t relate to you w/out charge, or that you couldn’t get from studying. Don’t be afraid to study, or of the SAT itself! It won’t kill you, and even if you don’t do as well as you’d like, you can always try again. And it’s never the only thing that colleges look at!
Strategies:
Skim the questions before reading the passages, because then you know sort of what you’re looking for, and you don’t have to spend as much time re-reading to find the answers. But do actually read the passages; some people try to just read the questions then search for the answers, and that can lose valuable points with the trick answers they throw in there.
Figures in the math section, generally speaking, are drawn to scale (or at least proportional) even when they tell you they’re not. So if you can guess at and measure angles and relative lengths, if you need to, that can be close enough to get you an answer.
Things like that. Taking standardized tests is a lot about just knowing what’s on the test and how it’s formatted, and that’s what prep classes help you know. I’m not sure you don’t get the same knowledge by just TAKING THE REAL TEST once, and that’s what I recommend. But mainly: Relax!!! I’m sure you’ll do fine.
If you want the long list of tips, the fist-track prep guide:
Practice, practice, practice! Take lots of practice tests, that’s the best way! Make sure you time yourself, too, because one of the hardest things about these tests is the time limit, and your AWARENESS of the time limit. The first thing you do at a prep class is take a practice test, to see what you personally need to work on.
The best study/prep books you can get is the official one: _The Official SAT Study Guide_. It’s written by the actual producers of the test, and has real SAT questions for you to study with. If that doesn’t work for you (everyone’s different) I always recommend the Princeton Review book. I didn’t get their book for the SAT, but a few of my friends got good results with it and I always used them for reviewing for the AP tests I took. After that, I hear the Barron’s review books are really good.
The BEST practice you can get, however, is from taking the test itself. I keep telling people: early and often! It doesn’t hurt anything to take the test half a dozen different times, if you have the time and money to —I took the SAT four times and the ACT eight! Only the top score matters, and THE BEST way to do well on the test is to know exactly what you’re dealing with. Taking the test will get you accustomed to the test format—from the directions to the time limit—in a way that simply taking practice tests cannot.
These kinds of tests don’t really test your knowledge, or even how smart you are. They test how good you are AT THE TEST. So it is something that you do better on the more you try, even if you haven’t learned any more between test dates. Early and often! Or if you’re going into your senior year, take it in October and again in November; that’s a bit late, but you’ll probably do better with a second try, just because you know the test better. The key is KNOWING the test, and FEELING like you’re well prepared. The main help that prep classes give you, in my opinion, is the CONFIDENCE that you’re going to do better. It’s a psychological thing. Well, I’m telling you: You’ll do just fine! (lol, I know that’s a bit presumptuous and pretentious of me. But have confidence!)
There’s an SAT Question of the Day from College Board that I’ve been suggesting to everyone: http://apps.collegeboard.com/qotd/question.do Even if you don’t study intensively every day, you can still take a few minutes each day to answer a question, read the reasoning behind the answer, and think about the test.
The SAT is mostly straight forward: math and English (well– math, critical reading, and critical writing). In the math especially, you need to identify what you need work on, and specifically find information (in a review book or elsewhere) to help you with those subjects. Mostly, make sure you’re familiar with the concepts involved. The SAT covers very specific areas in math, and nothing else. It’s mostly Algebra and Geometry, but you don’t need to know equations as much as you just need to practice working problems, solving for x and finding angles and such. Also try to be really familiar with basic Trigonometry: sine, cosine, tangent. I always had to stop and think, “Wait, which is which?” I think those appear more on the ACT, though. Math was always my lowest score, because I hated it and didn’t study for it as much as I should have– I’m great at Calculus, but I hated and avoided the Geomerty. It’s about studying the right kind of math, so definitely go over the math info in a review book.
English: the best way to improve your critical reading/writing scores is to READ. A lot. The more you read, the better your grammar and vocabulary. The better your grammar and vocabulary, the better you’ll do on the test. I have 800 critical reading, 780 writing, and I read constantly. For an added bit of vocabulary, both www.webster.com and www.dictionary.com have a Word of the Day that you can get emailed to you. Failing that, practice, practice, practice! Try looking at Latin and Greek roots. Memorizing vocabulary is good, but it’s even better if you can see a word you don’t know and be able to figure out what it means from the roots. If you get a review book (Princeton’s Review is good, or Barron’s, or the one released by College Board) actually go over the grammar material and vocabulary in it, and make sure you’re familiar with the grammar rules. It will help.
I can’t say as much about the writing portion on the test. It’s newer, and I only took the ACT with writing once (or maybe twice), and the SAT twice. And I’ve always been really bad at timed writing. Like, horrible. I need at least an hour and a word processor to write anything well! The SAT writing section (the written part, that is; some of the “English” questions count toward your “critical writing” score) is only 25 minutes long (I think), but if you can set up a few well organized paragraphs and make sure you’ve made it clear where you’re headed, with a strong thesis, that’s good enough. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway. Make sure you put down your strongest points first, so even if you don’t finish, you’ve gotten best parts down. The writing is also harder to study for. Since you never know what sort of prompt you’re going to get, even taking practice tests isn’t always helpful. Still do the practice tests, though, and keep improving your vocabulary and grammar. Also, reading non-fiction and essays can help with this, just so you’re familiar the type of writing and the formats for essays, beyond what you read and write for school. And remember that the “writing” score out of 800 isn’t only based on your essay. I only got 8 out of 12 on my essay, which isn’t great, but I got all of the “writing” multiple choice questions right, so I ended up with a 780 on that section.

General tips on taking the tests:
Always make sure you know exactly what you need to take: pencils with good erasers, a good calculator (I swear by my TI-83 Plus), your ID, and your admission ticket. The more prepared you FEEL, the better you’ll do.
TAKE FOOD! The first few times I took the SAT I was starving by the end. You have a break in the middle of the test during which you can eat. Take chewing gum or hard candy, too. I’m not sure if it’s true that gum helps you concentrate or that mint aids thinking, but I’ve always liked having something to chew or suck on while taking tests.
Try not to be nervous. Anxiety is what kills a lot of people on these tests, so you need to convince yourself that you’re well prepared for it. It sounds bizarre, but while you’re taking the test, try to separate yourself from what you’re doing a little bit and think about it objectively. It’s just a test!
DON’T read the instructions at the beginning of each section! I promise they don’t say anything important beyond what the proctor of the test will have already said, and you need that time.
What I always did, though it may not help everyone: start each section at the end. First, this gives you a very tangible goal; you might forget how many questions are in a section, but if start and the end you’re counting down, and you always know exactly how many questions you have left. Second, especially in the math section on both tests, it’s been proven that the harder questions are at the end, so doing the test backwards gets the hard ones out of the way, and you can GAIN confidence while you’re working, rather than losing it as you get to the harder ones.
And the basics: eliminate wrong choices. It helps some people to physically mark through the obviously wrong choices in narrowing down the answers. On the math questions, it’s sometimes faster to just plug in the answers to see which one’s right than to actually work through the formulas. Sleep well the night before, and if you’re someone who needs time to wake up, get up a little early so you’re fully awake by test time.
And that’s what you need to know. Take practice tests. HAVE CONFIDENCE! You’re better off than many people, just because you’re taking it seriously! A lot of people just blow off the SAT and ACT when it comes to it. That’s another thing: you might consider taking the ACT as well. If it’s going to stress you more, don’t do it. But a lot of people are just better at one or the other, and most schools will now look at either, so it can’t hurt.
I really hope this helps! And I congratulate you if you actually read all of that. Lol, sometimes I get carried away. Good luck!

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