The Eagle's Nest

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Dear Babs,

I’m tak­ing the SATs in two weeks and I haven’t stud­ied yet! What should I do? I’m wor­ried that it will hurt my col­lege ad­mis­sions chances if I don’t do well. Any ad­vice for cram­ming for the SATs?

—Scared SAT-​​less

Dear Scared,

I see that you have fallen vic­tim to the dreaded “Procrastination-​​itis.” Luck­ily, there is a cure. Get off your butt! With two weeks to go, you don’t have any time to spend wor­ry­ing about the SATs; you need to be study­ing for the SATs.

Did that help? No? Well, the first thing you will want to do (if you haven’t al­ready) is buy your­self a prep book. The good thing about an SAT prep book is that it gives you all the hints and tricks. The SATs are a stan­dard­ized test, and so there are some stan­dard tricks you can use to shave min­utes off your test and add points to your SAT scores. Be­fore you even be­gin your SAT re­search, take a timed prac­tice test cold. Why? It will let you know what level you are at now _​ and how much work needs to be done in or­der to achieve your SAT goals.

Then start go­ing through the lessons. Pay at­ten­tion to SAT tips and tricks for math prob­lems, the fastest way to elim­i­nate false an­swers, and ad­vice on whether to skip the ques­tion or make an ed­u­cated guess. The idea is to work smarter, not harder. You can’t teach your­self three years of math in two weeks, but you can mem­o­rize ba­sic for­mu­las and geo­met­ric prob­lems, so that when you come across them you’ll know ex­actly what you’re deal­ing with. Like­wise, don’t try to learn every word in the dic­tio­nary, just learn 20 of­ten seen hard SAT words, and maybe bone up on your gram­mar rules. Flash cards are a dorky but proven way to mem­o­rize lots of in­for­ma­tion. Some stores sell SAT flash cards, or you might want to make your own from the SAT prep book to help them sink in even more.

Fi­nally, as much as you can in the next two weeks, prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice tak­ing the test TIMED. Recre­ate the set­tings that you will find when it’s time for the real deal: clear your desk, turn off your phone and set a timer. Each time you take a prac­tice test, go over the ques­tions you got wrong. Was it be­cause you didn’t read the in­struc­tions? Guessed when you should have skipped? Al­ways stum­ble on the read­ing com­pre­hen­sion? Fo­cus most of your ef­forts on those soft spots, so that next time you take the prac­tice test you can mea­sure your improvement.

If you can buckle down and re­ally prac­tice, your cram ses­sions should pay off with im­proved SAT scores.

Got a ques­tion for Babs? E-​​mail her at dearbabs@campuscompare.com, or log on to read more at www​.cam​pus​com​pare​.com.

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Dear Babs appears every Thursday on The Eagle's Nest