Standardized Tests (SAT & ACT)
Decided to give a stab at this project again.
The SATs and ACTs
Which tests to take
When to take
How to prepare
Are my scores good enough?
I'm starting out on this topic again, perhaps at a more traditional time. At January it's far past the college application deadline for most all the major colleges, so this will arrive far too late to be of any use for current high school seniors, but it's also just the right time that high school juniors should really start thinking and planning out their standardized tests.
First of all, for those of you who don't know, many college applications require, or at least highly encourage, the submission of standardized test scores. These tests students must take on their own, and there are two main tests (of which only one is needed): the well-known SAT administered by CollegeBoard, and the lesser-known but equivalent ACT test. They're fairly similar to all of the standardized tests that K-12 students have taken throughout school, and tests on all the traditional math, reading comprehension, and writing subjects, and the SAT has additional specific subject tests (the SAT II's) which can also be taken.
How important are these standardized tests? Media and students and parents and test-prep companies will have you believe (and buy endlessly buy into rumors and ramblings) that tests are the end all to college admissions - you HAVE to get a good score or else you won't stand a chance of getting into the college of your choice. Not being a college admissions officer, I won't pretend or speculate to know what they actually think, but from my own experiences with college applications and admissions, here are a few of the biggest points I've observed:
Vast paranoia from parents and test companies are unwarranted: Around the standardized test season, parents go completely crazy and obsess on test scores. Maybe my experience was also an effect of being the first-born child, and beyond that the first in my generation to go to university-level college. But despite being, from all accounts at school and state testing, a fairly proficient student, my parents did the same as most, signing me up for prep courses at the library, buying SAT study books and CD's, and trying to get me enrolled into the test-prep courses prepared by companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review and the like. The end result: perfectly good scores, and no effects before and after various test preparation, all the worry unwarranted.
Inferred from empirical data: scores don't matter: As I said before, I can't pretend to know how admission offices, and even then your mileage would vary as my conclusions would only be based on the few universities I have experience applying to. Around the college application time at my year, we had students with all sorts of test scores and grades, but by the time admission decisions actually rolled in around spring, all of those had been shot to hell - students that were all but locked in with the best kinds of grades failed to get into their first choice college, only to find out that they had been accepted into other, arguably more prestigious and harder-to-get-into universities. Students that had mediocre grades but other-worldly SAT scores failed to get in anywhere. And other students with mediocre grades and mediocre scores got into exactly where they wanted. The best example I observed, because it had the most controlled variables, was the applications of two nearly equivalent, spec-sheet-wise, students to the same fairly exclusive university, to the same general field of major. Both submitted virtually equal SAT scores, although the grades of one student were vastly superior to the other (both were well into the 4.0+ GPA range, so this may not have mattered - my speculation), and their list of accomplishments from the university's eyes would be equally impressive (the student with better grades probably had much more sheer individual and academic achievement to his credit, the student with worse grades probably had more group-centric and leadership-centric activities on his resume). Yet at the end of the day, the student with the worse grades was the one who ended up getting accepted. My conclusion (taken within context of my arguably narrow field of data) is that scores (and even grades) play a fairly minor role in college admissions, and within certain ranges or even after fulfilling certain benchmarks have no effect at all. The conclusion is speculation that I'm not confident in, but it's the premise I use for my next, most important point...
Too much effort on test scores will hurt your chances: The greatest potential pitfall from an obsession over test scores is forgetting that it's only a small part of a much much larger applications process. There are still your grades, your extracurricular achievements, and perhaps the most important, your personal essays, if for no other reason than the fact that you have the greatest control over it. That's the unfortunate effect of too much effort devoted to prepping test scores - there was a period that I was spending my Saturdays commuting all the way to Chinatown and Downtown San Francisco and various other libraries so I could go to the test preparation courses there, and taking time off when I got home to work on practice tests from my book rather than doing something more productive, like say homework (or writing more blog entries!). It was worse for other friends, who had even stricter regimens because they were enrolled into paid Kaplan courses and the like. It's a note that parents need to listen to as well - students, especially in their junior and senior years, already have more than enough going on, and don't need another thing like test preparation to worry about, especially when it comes with the weight and pressure of being a do-or-die measure of their chances at college. The undue attention spent, and the stress that comes with it, disrupts the regular pace of school, the regular pace of the college applications process, and life in general. Ultimately the vast amount of time poured into test preparation is a vast amount of time poured into only a portion (and arguably a small portion) of the college applications process - their is still time and effort that needs to be spent on upkeeping senior-year grades, planning out a resume of achievements and recommendation letters, and personal essays which can not be left up to the last minute to prepare for and write.
Now that we've gotten my commentary out of the way, there are many of you who won't be convinced, and even those who are still want to prepare as best as possible, so here it is. Before I begin, some context to better gauge how appropriately my experiences and observations apply to you:
I went to high school at what is probably an above-average to good public high school in California, and was in the top level of students that was enrolled almost exclusively into the AP courses (my school was AP-exclusive with entrance exams, so it isn't like the AP classes some other schools have where any and all students are free to enroll in AP courses). From the annual state testing, I've been a consistently good test taker, so perhaps my observations about the need for test preparation don't apply to most people (although I've tried to write my commentary from an objective and all-encompassing viewpoint). I did some test preparation, the free test prep programs made available at the libraries and such, as well as the various Princeton Review type test books, although I doubt I ever took any of them seriously. I ended up taking the following tests:
SAT I Reasoning Test (old 1600 test)
SAT I Reasoning Test (current 2400 test)
SAT II Physics Test, twice
SAT II World History Test
SAT II Writing Test (before this was incorporated into the current SAT I Reasoning Test)
SAT II Math II Test
SAT II US History Test
And did what most would consider very well on them. I applied to a few colleges, the upper-tier UC's (
The first question that most students will have is which test to take. There are two major tests, the ACT and SAT, with the SAT being the more well-known one. The ACT is a unabashed in desperately trying to draw attention in this, as can be seen in their Frequently Asked Question: What is the difference between the ACT and SAT?
The ACT is an achievement test, measuring what a student has learned in school. The SAT is more of an aptitude test, testing reasoning and verbal abilities.
The ACT has up to 5 components: English, Mathematics,
The College Board introduced a new version in 2005, with a mandatory writing test. ACT continues to offer its well-established test, plus an optional writing test. You take the ACT Writing Test only if required by the college(s) you're applying to.
The SAT has a correction for guessing. That is, they take off for wrong answers. The ACT is scored based on the number correct with no correction for guessing.
ACT lets the student decide what set of scores they want sent. The College Board's policy is to send all scores.
The ACT has an interest inventory that allows students to evaluate their interests in various career options.
Colleges say they regard the ACT and SAT tests the same, and any school that accepts SAT scores will also accept ACT scores, and there's nothing stopping you from taking both, if you'd like, although submitting both would be redundant. For those students taking both, if you want to see how ACT and SAT scores compare, the Princeton Review site has a comparison, although I don't know exactly how they base their data:
I've never taken the ACT tests, but on the surface they seem to be much less comprehensive than the full set of SAT tests - sections like the ACT "Science" seem to be more of a reading graphs and data 'math applications' test than any real kind of science, while the SAT II subject tests offer very comprehensive and specific tests on subjects like physics, biology, chemistry, as well as english tests and history tests and math tests and language tests for a number of languages. You can see the full list here: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/about/SATII.html
The ACT test is likely equivalent to the SAT I Reasoning test, and depending on the type of college you're applying to that may be all you need. If you're applying to a more specialized school or a more specific major, however, I would imagine that SAT IIs that test specifically for science skills or foreign language skills, for example, might give those colleges a better assessment of students.
As for other differences, the SAT I Reasoning test is far more grueling and long than the ACT test is - it can go on for 5 hours, while the ACT quotes their test at around 4 hours (including the optional writing test, which you should take), and there are different score reporting policies - SAT automatically sends all scores (even if you retake a test) to all colleges, while ACT lets you pick and choose which scores to send to which university.
Ultimately, the decision is a fairly trivial one, and I might suggest the SAT if only because the entire system, with its SAT II subject tests, tests students much more comprehensively than ACT does. In the end, the decision probably won't matter - you won't miraculously flourish by switching over to one test after you've done miserably on another, and colleges regard both SAT and ACT the same.
Whichever test system you choose, the ACT itself or the SAT I Reasoning Test is a given. For the SAT system there are also the SAT II Subject Tests, if you're applying to a college that requires (or accepts it). Most colleges will take two or three of the subject tests, and the tests you want to take and submit depend on your intended major and your confidence in your abilities. Unless you're applying for a highly specific major or a specialized school (Aerospace Engineering at CalTech, for example, in which case you'd want to submit your Math II and Physics subject tests), which tests you choose isn't of utmost importance, so take the ones you're most confident in. In general, if you've done well with your high school class, you'll do fine on the test, the one exception possibly being the language tests - if you're a native speaker and can get a perfect 800, you'll be okay, but anyone else who doesn't reach perfection will quickly find themselves in the lower percentiles, even if they do manage scores in the 600s or 700s (out of 800). For those with specialized colleges and/or specific majors, in general it's a good idea to take the higher level Math II (which tests up to trigonometry/pre-calculus - the Math I tests only up to geometry) and the appropriate science test(s).
It's a good idea to get started with taking your tests early. As I mentioned before, you don't need to be barreling down the home stretch to complete your college admissions in November and still have your standardized tests to worry about, and generally your senior year, especially that first semester, is much busier than your junior year, despite what you'll hear about senioritis and slacking off. Another reason, though, is that it's generally good to have a "pre-test" before taking it for real.
In my experience, the best and perhaps only significant way you can improve on the test is having a pre-test. I've found that the problem with a lot of students, including myself, was that taking the test for the first time, they don't really know what to expect, and under the pressure and actual pace (slightly faster and definitely longer and more grueling than typical state tests) of the SATs, are a little bit shocked and unprepared, despite all their preparation. The second time around, a lot of the first-time jitters and nervousness are gone, and in general students do a lot better, for no other reason than knowing what to expect. Imagining the first test as a pre-test and knowing you can always take it a second time also takes a lot of the pressure off of needing to do well the first time around, which might enable students to do better just by itself.
All that said, the ideal time to take the tests is during the second semester of junior year, before the senior-year crunch and allowing enough time for a second try. The subject material on the SAT I Reasoning and ACT tests is all the same kind of grammar and reading comprehensions that students have experienced with state tests (so there's not much material you can learn from class), and the math material goes up to about an Algebra II level - all the material students need to know should be covered by the second semester of the class. From a subject material standpoint, students who are at an Algebra II level know all they need for either the SAT or ACT test. Students can start taking the test by the first January or February test date - whenever they feel ready.
But won't waiting longer and getting more practice help? It depends on what kind of practice (I'll address this in the next section), but generally yes, you should be prepared before you take the test. Knowing students though, signing up for the January test will mean the student starts preparing in December, but the only effect of signing up for June is that the student starts preparing in May, and in general there isn't anything the student needs to wait until the second semester of junior year to do. The one exception to this is the Writing portion of the test, which involves a timed-write essay. It's a territory that most students are unfamiliar with and unprepared for, but one that junior-year AP English Language classes drill intensively on to prepare for the AP test, something which can also end up helping on the SAT or ACT writing tests. In any case, you can always consider the first test a "pre-test" - you'll have plenty of opportunities to reprepare and retake the test.
The SAT II Subject tests are a different matter entirely, however - they're subject specific, and so it's best to wait until the end of the year when classes have finished covering all of the material. This typically means a May or June test date - there are different benefits and disadvantages to both, something also largely affected by the presence of AP tests in May. For non AP students, learning typically goes year-round; the subject material is still taught continuously through the months of May and June, and so it's likely best to take the tests in June. For AP students, the AP tests in May happen to coincide exactly with the SAT test date. This may be a good thing - students have usually been cramming up until this time, and all the material for the subject test will still be fresh in their mind and they'll be well-conditioned to take the tests. On the other hand, students could also be completely frazzled with APs, or still in the midst of studying for them. There are tradeoffs between either choice, and mostly it'll depend on what kind of student you are. If you have trouble preparing for things and never seem to have enough time, spacing the tests out and taking the SAT II's in June might be a good idea; on the other hand if you're the kind of student that prepares well and thrives under pressure then taking them at the same time as the AP's in May might be better.
I might not be the best commentator on this subject - as mentioned before I was never a student who was really big on test preparation, and did well on tests anyway. If anyone out there reading feels like writing a piece on test preparation or just dropping a few tips, feel free to email or comment here. Before I begin I'd also like to remind everyone about the aforementioned bit about how importance the standardized tests really are - I write this section because there will be some benefit in test preparation for most students, but don't come away with the delusion that test preparation is needed or even important.
There are two main schools of thought concerning test preparation, one being manic drilling and the other being mastering test-taking techniques. As a student, I personally never thought much of the test-taking techniques. By enrolling into test-prep courses and going through my SAT prep books, yes I did learn them, but during actual tests I rarely ever utilized any of the multiple-choice guessing or speed-reading or skipping an answer you didn't know techniques - most all of the time I just hammered my way through the questions, all in order, and most of the time finished in time and did fairly well. I'm not saying every student can do this, but my point is: training to master test techniques will gain you a few points at a time here and there, but training to become a better and more logical student in the subject material will allow you to actually master the test and rack up the points with confidence, rather than scraping them together with every test trick you know.
I don't know nearly enough about educational theory to start telling you how to be a better test taker or a better student, but here are a few things that I've used from my own experience:
Always Guess
Always, always answer the question. For the ACT, this isn't an issue - there are no penalties for wrong answers, so it won't hurt at all to answer every single one. For SATs, this gets trickier - the SAT assigns a penalty for wrong answers, this being a fractional -0.25 point for each wrong answer in 5-choice questions, while correct answers get +1 point. Even with random guessing, your expected value comes out to 0 (1 point * 0.2 chance of correct answer + -0.25 point * 0.8 chance of wrong answer), so statistically it will never hurt to randomly guess an answer, and with intuition students that eliminate obviously wrong answer choices will raise the expected value above 0, so in the real-world, educated-guessing will statistically benefit you (Another way to think of this is having 5 questions that you randomly guess. By chance, one will be correct, gaining +1 point, while the other four will be wrong, losing -0.25 * 4 = -1 point, resulting in a net score of 0 - neither gain nor loss). There is no "answer only if you can eliminate 1 answer choice" rubbish - answer every question, even if it's nothing but a guess.
One of the trickiest parts of standardized tests are the reading comprehension sections, where students are given a passage and a set of questions related to it. The following is the method I've always approached these sections, but as a warning I've since been told (by teachers and such) that what I've always done is an extremely risky approach, and not one that every student can do.
Typically for these sections, I never bother to read through the passage at all. Rather, I jump straight to the first question. Typically, these questions concentrate the meaning of one particular sentence or paragraph, and it usually lists the line numbers. After reading the question I go to the line numbers and read only that portion, and then answer the question accordingly, and then move on to the next question, and repeat. If the question isn't about a specific portion of the text, but is rather about the entire passage as a whole, I skip these questions and move on to the specific ones - typically by the end of the questions, I'll have read enough of the passage in pieces to get the overall idea, and then I'm able to answer the general questions, and if not I'll read a little to fill in the gaps that I skipped. The effect of this is a brutal efficiency in answering questions - reading the minimum needed of the passage, you've already answered the majority of the questions, and with good intuition and test experience with reading passages, you can piece together the rest fairly easily. You can typically finish well ahead of schedule (reading comprehension is typically a section where students run out of time), and have a lot of time to go back and review. There are a lot of potential pitfalls however, namely losing all apparent context which could hurt when answering specific questions, and is a definite disadvantage when answering general questions, so good intuition to piece together context from parts is needed to be successful in doing this.
Skip hard questions, and earmark problems
This is a fairly common one that everyone knows, but there are some nuances of skipping that are often overlooked. The first is to make sure you mark the problems by folding the corner of the page (so you don't waste time trying to find the problem you skipped), and make sure on the next problem you double-check where you're marking (so you don't get to the end of the test and realize that your answer sheet is off by one question all the way down). Some more subtle hints for calculations are circling and labeling the work you've done so far - it's almost useless to go back to a problem you skipped and find a mess of the work you've already done, and not know which values were for what (on the other hand, sometime scrapping all the work and getting a fresh start can be better - you have to be the judge of whether you were on the right track or not). The hardest thing to do is knowing when to move on. For myself, I usually hit this when I'm realizing that I'm telling myself, "C'mon, think think think..." - I've substituted the word *think* for actual thought on the problem, and that means I've come to a roadblock and lost my train of thought.
Find wrong answers, rather than right ones
Unless the answer is absurdly easy, a lot of the times they require reasoning out. In almost all cases, the easiest first step is often to reason out the wrong answers, rather than reason into the right one - you look for aspects that make the answer choice wrong (this doesn't even have the right units, this is a complete non sequitur, etc.), and through that get down to two or three or maybe even one correct answer, which makes reasoning into the right one much much easier.
Most important: Know your subject material, and DRILL
To most students, this may be the most unhelpful tip of all - yes, of course if I can understand the material then I'd do well, so why don't you tell me exactly how I can just be "better". Learning the subject material is a much bigger and more complex feat than simple "do this" instructions for test-taking techniques, but ultimately it's the only way most students can ever make any significant change in their scores. How many guesses can you get right, how many reading comprehension questions can you get to, how many skipped questions will you be able to get back to and actually work out correctly? For most students, knowing test tricks will at best gain a few points, but over an entire test and in the final score, this won't amount to much of anything - comprehending the material better or understanding the test structure is what allows better students to master tests, and is what makes the significant changes in scores.
For this reason, the two best things you can do is actually study the material, and take practice tests. For the SAT II Subject Tests (or even AP's), don't run through a Princeton Review book - go through your textbook, review, and work out problems from there. If you really are commited to doing well (a legitimate question - see above on how important the standardized tests really are), don't stop reviewing until you can do every single problem presented in the book to perfection, and don't, despite it being so easy, write off any questions as "Well that's not going to show up" or "Okay I get the concept, onto the next question".
For the SAT I Reasoning and ACT tests, there's less to do on the studying front - things like reading comprehension or grammar aren't exactly taught in high school (math is study-able, but this advice will help too). The best way to prepare for these is to simply drill over and over again with practice tests. This is just about the only part where those big test prep books come in handy, for two reasons: they're a large resource of the kind of questions on the standardized tests, and they allow you to practice in test situations. If they have them I might even recommend getting a book full of tests rather than the usual ones that offer test-taking tricks along with practice tests. When you're taking a practice test, unlike actually studying for subjects you're not exactly trying to learn any new material - rather, you're getting an idea of the kind of pace you need to work at, and even more importantly you're getting into the standardized test-taking mindset. Part of my ability to do well on tests has been educated guessing, not becuase it was the best answer I could come up with because I couldn't do the problem, but because I was familiar enough with standardized tests to have a good idea what would be the right answer. Through that I save time from calculating or reasoning out the whole thing, or I use it to make that last step of logic that I'd otherwise be unable to reason or calculate out. It's a skill that I can't quite explain and certainly can't teach, but can be learned just by having enough experience with standardized tests to recognize the forms and structures of individual answers, questions, and the test itself. This is possible and easy to recognize after experience because all answers, questions, and tests ultimately follow the same structure, a necessity by definition of standardized tests.
As for tips for drilling through tests, the best I can offer is to adhere rigidly to a test environment. That means hard time limits, and sticking to them - after that point you don't count the score and don't give yourself a good feeling that "Ohh, I'm getting 85% of them right" when you can't complete the test in time. This also means that leisurely working on problems while you're listening to the radio or on the computer or in between watching the TV isn't going to help - you're not practicing problems to learn the material, you're doing it to familiarize yourself with the test and a test environment, and that means dedicating your time solely to taking a practice test. Another tip, though not for everyone, is to start restricting your time further and further, maybe taking 5 or 10 minutes off of the time you're actually allowed. If you can do this, you'll find yourself much less rushed and much more in control when you're actually taking the test.
Perhaps the last question is knowing whether or not to retake a test. There's no universal answer, and if there was one it wouldn't depend on what the score was. If there's some way you didn't prepare the first time, then yes, chances are you can do better taking the test again, but only if you actually dedicate yourself to preparing that way this second time around (something not every student will do, even if given that second chance). If you had the first-test jitters, as mentioned above, then yes, chances are you'll be able to do better a second time around, although how much will depend on you knowing just how much nervousness actually affected you the first time. In most cases though, unless you're willing to do something radically different the second time around, your scores don't stand to improve significantly. It's not a bad thing, nor the end of the world - as I said at the beginning of this, the standardized tests are just a small, small, and to an extent non-consequential part of the college application process - a bad score won't wreck you, nor will a good score guarantee you. Do the best you can, but take preparation and reaction to the results in moderation - know when it's good enough and when it's time to stop investing all the effort into tests and focus on the other parts of the application process, or even the school year you still have going on, or even, well... life.
posted by Nathan Yan @ 2:28 PM
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