How to Prep for the SAT During a Pandemic
The combination of distance learning in school, change in testing timelines due to cancelations, and preparing for an in-person test remotely can be a challenging endeavor, and there are some important shifts in your approach to preparation that we would recommend to set yourself up for success. For suggestions on prepping for the ACT during a pandemic, click here.
Plan around local test availability and reliability. While the ACT has hosted many official exam dates since the start of the pandemic, SAT has not yet been able to successfully host an official exam in San Diego County during COVID-19 restrictions. Many of our students have had success testing in Riverside County as well as at out-of-state testing centers. If you plan to take the SAT in the spring or summer of 2021, you may want to consider registering for an SAT outside of San Diego County and/or have a back up test date if your test site gets cancelled. If you are an SAT student in particular, it’s important to start prepping early and register for multiple test dates to ensure that you are able to sit for an exam prior to applying to colleges. Some individual schools have also started hosting their-school-only exams, in which students from that school may register and sit for the test at their own high school. You should plan to check local test site cancellations to see if there have been a disproportionate number of exams cancelled in your area.
Consider the occasional in-person tutoring session. There is something to be said for person-to-person interactions and the learning curve. You may find it is more helpful to have your tutor in front of you to show how to implement strategies, work together on a difficult problem, or just be fully engaged. If you tend to learn better in-person, a few in-person sessions may be the difference-maker in your overall progress for any standardized test.
Do additional practice work for Math. Math is the subject that usually takes the longest to improve of the sections on the SAT. Because of this, you will need to put in much more work to see the score gains you want. In addition to Mo Prep’s Math Question Repository and Missed Math practice, there are many Math-specific SAT books with practice problems that you can work through. Over the course of online learning, many studies have shown that students in California aren’t retaining Math competency at the level they would have in an in-person instruction school year. Because of this, we strongly recommend that students in the graduating classes of 2022 and later take a more focused approach to Math section. Because a majority of the Math content on the ACT is learned in your sophomore and junior years of high school, if you are in the classes of 2022 and 2023 you may be starting at a slight disadvantage if you have been learning Math remotely.
Review your mistakes in a separate notebook. This will allow you to hone in on exactly what you need to work on. The main difficulty of the SAT is the large disparity in difficulty and frequency of each question type, and we expect this to be an even bigger problem this year with so many additional tests created for additional exam dates because of the pandemic. Specifically, there are SAT questions in the Math and Writing sections that seem ‘abnormal.’ Because of this, you’re going to want to keep track of questions in a separate notebook that seem either much more difficult than average or confusingly worded. This will help you learn to identify and discern the meaning of these questions as well as get more comfortable translating the language that SAT uses.
Expose yourself to as much official SAT material as possible. Because of the aforementioned wide range of potential questions you may see on test day, you want to work in official SAT material as much as possible. While we recommend taking practice full-length exams for students preparing for the ACT, it’s not as necessary that you are able to take full-length practice tests for the SAT as much as it is that you are consistently working through official practice tests. That said, you should still plan to take two to three full-length practice tests prior to your official exam.
