How Do You Translate Good Grades into a Good SAT Score?
There is a huge overlap between critical thinking skills and the SAT.
In schools, students learn strategies to solve specific problems and are tested on just those strategies.
The SAT is much less straightforward about what you need to do - and great students get flummoxed.
We have broken the test down into a set of concepts, each of which has a corresponding strategy that becomes a second nature for students to use to solve the problem.
Why Do Students Struggle on the SAT When They're Good in School?
Parents ask me all the time why their student is great at math in school but is struggling on the SAT. There is a disconnect between what the SAT is testing and what is taught in schools - but it is entirely possible to bridge that gap.
Testing in schools
When students take a test in school, they may walk in knowing “this is about the Pythagorean theorem.” High-achieving students will study the theorem inside and out, and will be prepared with strategies for every question on the test.
Testing on the SAT
However, those same great students walk into the SAT and become overwhelmed by the process of figuring out which strategies to apply to which problems. The SAT math section is a totally different test than math tests in school. Imagine that you have a bag of marbles that are red, green, yellow, and blue marbles. If you randomly pull out a marble, you have no way of knowing which color you’ll get - just like on the test, when you never know what concept question 1, 2, or 3 will be testing. However, you can be prepared to recognize red, green, yellow, and blue and have a corresponding strategy ready.
Call and response
So how do we bridge this gap? We teach our students to A) recognize the problem, using critical thinking skills, and B) have a call and response at hand for that problem. (We discuss analyzing the concepts on the SAT in this blog post.) Essentially, it’s like the old joke: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
By teaching our students a set group of concepts, the test becomes smaller and less scary. The call and response is just like it sounds - when a student sees a concept being called out on the test, they know exactly what their response should be and how to get started, and they breeze through.
What does success look like on the SAT?
As our students become more fluent in the strategies, they not only connect the knowledge they have to the test, but become faster, more accurate, less frustrated, and more confident.
