3 Essential SAT Tips and Strategies

After over 40 years of helping students get the scores they want on the SAT , here's the most important thing to remember about the test: It doesn't measure intelligence or predict future success.

The test measures one thing, and one thing only—how good you are at taking the SAT. 

That makes it possible to improve your score—without memorizing your entire Algebra II textbook! You just need to learn how the SAT works. 

Here are three simple SAT tips from our proven test-cracking methodology.

SAT Study Tips

1. Look for wrong answers instead of right answers.

Don't know the right answer? It happens. But if you know which choices are definitely wrong, you will significantly improve your chances of getting the question right. Determining which answers are wrong is called Process of Elimination. Since you aren't penalized for wrong answers on the SAT, you should always guess, even if this means choosing an answer at random.

Here’s how Process of Elimination works. Each question has 4 possible answer choices. Eliminate even one possibility, and you have a 1 in 3 chance of guessing correctly.  Let's say there are 9 questions, you eliminate 1 choice from each, and then guess among each question's remaining choices. Statistically, you will guess correctly 3 times and incorrectly 6 times. You just earned 3 raw points!

2. Know your Personal Order of Difficulty.

SAT Math questions are arranged in order of difficulty so that the easier problems come before the harder ones.

SAT Reading and Writing questions are first grouped by question type and then follow an order of difficulty within each question type.

However, difficulty is a statistic. An "easy" question is one that most test-takers answer correctly, and a "hard" question is one that most test-takers answer incorrectly. However, you are not most test-takers!   What is easy for most test-takers may be hard for you and what's hard for most test-takers may be easy for you.

Therefore, it's still important to identify the questions that YOU find easy or hard. Remember, you're not scored on  how many questions you do . You're scored on  how many questions you answer correctly. So slow down on the questions you personally find to be easy or medium in difficulty so you can pick up the most points. Just make sure you guess on the rest!

Video: Watch tips about the Digital SAT format here!

3. Use the tools available.

The testing application provides you with several tools to help you get the most out of your work.

• A highlighter tool to mark key parts of questions and passages on the Reading and Writing section
• An annotation tool to type notes to go with anything you highlight
• An answer eliminator to show the cross-out for any answer choices you know are wrong
• A “Mark for Review” button to flag any questions that were a little harder than you thought so you can come back to them later
• An on-screen calculator to help you with computations in the Math section
• An on-screen Reference Sheet so that you don’t have to memorize all those geometry formulas

Also, even though the test is digital, you have one tool available to you that’s not digital: scratch paper. Use your scratch paper for any notes and calculations that the digital tools are sufficient to help you with.

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