It’s about time! The CollegeBoard, perhaps partly in response to my blog post complaining about the problem (RSS, SAT, OMG!), finally added RSS to the SAT Question of the Day!
Enjoy, folks. If you have any questions about taking advantage of this service to the fullest extent, read this post or get in touch. I’ll be happy to help you out.
Many of my younger friends have been asking me what I did to prepare for my SATs. Watching their eagerness, anger, and elation really brought back the non-too-distant memories of what it was like to grapple with the test. This post is my response to their anxiety.
Besides a review book, I never paid any person or service for help in preparing for the SAT. I’m frugal as it is, and paying for help when it comes to something like this felt dirty to me. However, looking back at my own experience, I fully recommend a paid service. The SAT is just too important not to fully prepare for. If my scores were higher, which I believe an intense paid service may have done, I may have gotten into my reach school. You never know.
In my case, I had a very passive study path for the test. One of the few things I did in preparing for my first spar with the exam was to familiarize myself with its setup; that’s where the review book from the Princeton Review came in handy. I learned about the types of questions and became familiar with the caliber of reading, writing, and mathematics questions given.
The most important component of anything I did for the SAT, though, was to use the CollegeBoard’s SAT Question of the Day service, every single day. Hands down, it’s the best way to prepare. Just do it.
One of more distinctive things I did in preparing for the test was carry around my Hipster PDA. The Hipster PDA is a stack of index cards held together with a binder clip, as invented by Merlin Mann, one of my heroes.
On one side, I kept my next actions list, which is similar to a to-do list. On the other side, I wrote down words I saw or heard in real life that I didn’t know. When I got home that day, I looked the word up and wrote its definition down on another card. On my bus rides and other commutes, I’d review all of the words I’d accumulated.
After following these steps, here were my scores:
Critical Reading: 680
Mathematics: 680
Writing: 730
Total (of 1600): 1360
Total (2400): 2090
At that point, I wanted to bring the two important sections’ scores up: critical reading and mathematics. For me, I was disappointed in my math score. I knew I could have done better, but I reasoned that the length of the test got to me. Critical reading was an uphill battle; it was the section I was weakest at, the one where I’ve always had the most problems.
Over the summer and into the early portion of my senior year, I did a few things. First, I watched the video podcasts from ePrep; they were useful for strategizing and were entertaining, too. I also started listening to This American Life, an entertaining and enlightening public radio program from Chicago Public Radio. Just like reading, something I definitely should have done more of, listening to public radio expands the mind. I read my usual summer amount, which admittedly isn’t much. However, I started listening to audiobooks, which fit much better into my lifestyle. Of course, I continued to take my SAT Question of the Day and write down words I didn’t know on my Hipster PDA.
What’s the takeaway here? I didn’t prepare for my second SAT. I just lived an intellectually healthy lifestyle by taking in useful information through podcasts, blogs, and audiobooks. The biggest component of that was not watching television; I recommend eliminating the stupidity box from your life. Although there is good, compelling content on TV, most of it is pure filth.
And for my elitism, what did I get? I brought up my scores quite a bit.
Critical Reading: 760
Mathematics: 750
Writing: 740
Total (of 1600): 1510
Total (2400): 2250
If I had to prepare for the test yet again, I’d spend almost all of my free time at FreeRice, the altruistic and mind-enriching vocabulary game.
Happy studying!
Originally, this post simply read:
750
That’s the score I read when I woke up this last Thursday morning at 5:05 a.m. and checked the CollegeBoard’s website. I was exhausted and sick, due to a terrible cold I’ve been dealing with, but had the presence of mind to make that simple post. Now, some analysis.
750 is 50 more points than I anticipated from my practice tests. I’m very pleased with the score, and have to again thank my friend Mike and my high school chemistry teacher for their help. They helped me study for a test that corresponded to a class I had not completed yet. It’s an interesting story, and I hope it has a happy ending…
This is only the beginning.
I believe that doing a little of something at a time is better than a lot of it at once. Of course, I occasionally don’t follow the idea. I sometimes cram for tests, prepare for meetings at the last minute, or complete projects the night before they’re due. One thing I do daily, however, is prepare for the SAT.
The CollegeBoard, which for now I will reserve judgement of, offers a service called “The Official SAT Question of the Day”. It’s exactly like it sounds, but I have a major criticism of it. It doesn’t use RSS for its questions.
RSS, Really Simple Syndication, allows one to “subscribe” to content on the web. That is, rather than a person manually checking for updates, one’s web browser, or an online service like Google Reader does it instead. Rather than checking 17 different sites daily, Google Reader tells me which ones have updates, saving me time. I even put a bookmarklet titled “Next” in my browser to quickly ‘shuffle‘ between my favorite sites.
CollegeBoard, put some RSS into your Question of the Day! It’d be so much more usable for people who pride themselves in online efficiency. You do support online efficiency, don’t you?
In the mail a few days ago, the CollegeBoard sent me my official score report from the SAT I took in June of 2007. I’d known my scores already, but the score summary contained some very interesting statistical information about the chances of my scores going up. And, since this blog was inspired by the Financial Aid Podcast, it’s about time I start blogging about something related to college admissions, right? Continue reading ‘Dissecting SAT Score Report’