2012-05-30 09:00:56
Did you have that dream again? The one where you wake up and you’re taking the SAT on Saturday? Bad news: it wasn’t a dream. Now, you’re probably realizing that your months and months of putting off studying for the exam “until the spring” was a bad idea and starting to panic. Try to relax a little bit… we’re here to help. What follows is a quick guide for how to cram for the SAT in two days.
As a sidebar, keep in mind that cramming is never a good strategy. We would never advise you to do this (in fact, on Sunday, we advised you not to do this!) outside of these exigent circumstances. All cramming can really help you do is mitigate the damage done by not studying in the first place. Sorry to sound like your mother, but it’s true.
With our “I told ya so” out of the way, let’s start cramming. You’ll need the following tools: a practice SAT test, a timer, a calculator, pencils, and paper.
Two Days Out
When you get home from school, eat something nutritious (your brain needs food/energy for you to be able to cram), and sit down in a quiet study space. Turn off your phone and other distractions.
You don’t have time to take a full-length exam, so do a short one. Do a 25-minute-long section of math, reading, and writing from your practice exam. The order doesn’t matter, so long as you do one of each, with timing. When you’re finished, check your answers. Look back in the sections at all the questions you got wrong, and write down the content area it covered on your piece of paper. For example, if the question involved a mismatched pronoun, you’d write down “pronouns” on your sheet. Do this for all your wrong answers. What you’ve created is a list of topics to look up. Obviously, it’s not a complete list, but it’s a good list of things you’ll need to know for the test (and it shouldn’t include anything you already know!).
Now, look up each of those topics online by searching for “SAT + that topic” (example: “SAT + Averages”). Read over whatever you find, and make sure to do any practice problems you find on your search too.
After you’ve exhausted your search topics, look up a list of the 100 most common SAT words. Print it out, and start committing them to memory (you’ll probably know quite a few of them to begin with, so just focus on the ones you don’t know). To memorize them, make flashcards that include a definition and an example sentence of each word (example: for “deleterious,” you would write the definition (“harmful”) and a sentence such as “Drinking poison can have deleterious effects on your health.”). Once the flashcards are done, put them aside.
Take a break from studying. Eat something, get some water, and stretch out. Now, go back to studying. Look for sample essay topics online. Write a thesis for three of them, and brainstorm a couple pieces of evidence that you can universally apply to as many of the prompts you see as possible (historic events and books are best). Hope that you get a similar topic on Saturday so that you don’t have to think of new evidence!
Go to sleep early, and while laying in bed, cycle through your vocabulary flashcards. Sleep a full night.
One Day Out
All your hard work is behind you. Get home from school, eat a snack, and go back to studying. Start by reviewing your vocabulary flashcards one more time. Then, go back to your practice test, and run through sections 8, 9, and 10. Look over questions you got wrong.
Finally, look up any math formulas you don’t know (and need), and write them down on one study sheet. Finish studying no later than 12 hours before your test. After that twelve-hour window starts, studying is no longer beneficial, and your brain will start deleting information. So, quit while you’re ahead.
Relax the rest of the night. Right before going to sleep, look over your math notes and vocab flash cards one last time. Get plenty of sleep.
On the morning of the test, look over the cards and math notes while eating breakfast. Walk into your test center with more confidence than you otherwise would’ve have had.
Two final notes:
1) Studying can be more fun and more beneficial with others, so look for a friend, teacher, parent, or tutor to help you out.
2) This strategy can apply to the ACT too, but don’t do full sections. Instead, do the last 15 questions of an English section, the last 20 of a math section, the last 20 of a reading section, and the last two passages of a science section. Also, skip the vocabulary. Everything else, though, do.
Good luck!