The Secret to the SAT

Love it or hate it, the SAT is a monster almost every high schooler must slay. It's the most high-stakes test many students will take in their lifetimes, so it's common to stress and spend many hours preparing. Many will plow through dozens of practice tests and do drills for their weakest areas. But there's a counter-intuitive strategy that most students never try.

First, you must understand the nature of the SAT.

The SAT is a nationally standardized test, meaning it's designed to assess every high school student in the United States. To achieve this, the SAT has to account for the incredibly wide range of schools, some of which will offer advanced college-level calculus while others might only have math classes that go up to trigonometry. It would not be an accurate measure of student ability if the test included calculus questions in the math section because not everyone attends a school that offers calculus. So, how does the SAT account for this? It does not test for anything beyond the national minimum requirements for math and English. In other words, the SAT intentionally avoids very advanced content. However, the goal of the SAT is to separate students based on their abilities. It would be useless to college admissions offices if everyone scored between 1550 and 1600, but using only basic content would typically result in a relatively easy test with many high scores. So, how does the SAT still manage to separate students without using advanced content? It asks simple questions in tricky and confusing ways.

This is the secret to the SAT.

Here is how most students prepare for the SAT. They do an entire section (or module if digital), and then they review the questions they got wrong by reading the explanation for why the correct answer is correct. Once they feel like they understand, they'll move on. This is the default strategy because it works in school, where nearly all tests assess your mastery of the content. Your history teacher cares that you remember the nuanced causes of the Spanish-American war and isn't trying to trick you. But we've already established that the SAT is different. You don't get better at the SAT by learning the content because, in all likelihood, you already know all or most of the content. Instead, you get better by learning the tricks.

The tricks in a multiple choice test are not found in the correct answer; they are found in the wrong answers, which test-makers call "distractors" because they distract you by making you think you've found the correct answer. That's why the default strategy of reading the explanation for the correct answer is so limited. Instead, you want to carefully study the wrong answers, the distractors. To make the test more difficult, the SAT will choose distractors that would be correct under different circumstances. For example, if you missed the word "not" in the passage, one of the definitions might have been entirely accurate. These are the tricks mentioned earlier. You can also be sure that the makers of the SAT know full well where students tend to make the most mistakes and that each of those mistakes is a prime candidate to be a distractor on a future test.

But there is hope. The bag of tricks is not infinite. The SAT has a finite set of tricks that it uses again and again. Anyone who has taken a few practice tests will begin to notice that the same types of questions will come up again and again. This means it's just a matter of training your eye to notice and avoid them through deliberate practice.

Here’s how this method works.

Do the SAT section or module the same way you normally would. After you're done, use the answer key to mark all of the questions you got wrong. Now, instead of reading the explanations, you will write your own. For each distractor (i.e., incorrect choice), you're going to write an explanation of what would have made it correct. For example, if the math question is asking, "1 + 4 x 2 = ?" and one of the distractors was "10," you could explain that 10 would have been correct if there were parenthesis around the "1 + 4," and the trick was catching people who forgot about the order of operations. Repeat this for every distractor in every question for the entire section, and you will quickly begin to spot patterns in how the distractors work.

It might be tempting to take a shortcut and not entirely write out your explanations, but unless you have a photographic memory, writing each explanation is still the most effective means we've seen.

A final word of caution: the SAT's finite bag of tricks only applies to official SAT materials (i.e., test materials created by the College Board, the organization that makes and operates the SAT). For this reason, this strategy does not work if you're using test materials from other sources like Princeton Review, Kaplan, Barron's, etc. This is because the questions will use similar but different tricks. So, the only way to be sure you've fully covered the real tricks you might encounter on test day is to use official SAT materials to practice. The good news is that this method is a quality-over-quantity approach, so you won't need dozens of practice tests and can instead rely on the few official practice tests released by the College Board.

Mastering the SAT isn’t just about knowing the content—it’s about recognizing and outsmarting the test’s finite bag of tricks. If you’re tired of endless practice tests and want a smarter, more effective approach to improving your score, let’s chat, and we can unlock the strategies that make the difference on test day.