Preparing for the S.A.T.

Sixteen year-old Laura is a sophomore in high-school. She has been a straight student through grade school, middle school and now, high school. Next year Laura will take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or S.A.T..Laura, like many students, feels the pressure to perform well. "My future is at stake," says Laura. "It's pretty daunting when you look at the whole picture."

The pressure to perform well on this test is leading many kids and parents to consider S.A.T. Prep Courses. Laura's mom, Beth Gary, questions the course's ability to yield better test results. "I will have to seriously think about whether I want to spend 800 dollars just to have her score raised 5 or 10 points," says Gary.

Many agencies which oversee the S.A.T. tests claim the prep courses on the average, provide modest gains. Karen Sippy of Kaplan Learning Centers, one of the many companys that teaches prep courses, disagrees. "A 120 point increase is the average increase in our students," says Sippy.

Many experts say some preparation for the S.A.T. will help students. But they warn parents and kids to have realistic expectations regarding test results. Molly Spier, a high-school teacher, says parents should remind their kids that S.A.T. test scores aren't the only thing that determines whether or not a child can go to college. "Their g.p.a. is involved; their standing in class; their involvement in clubs;their extra curricular activities; their athletics; their volunteerism in the community and the essays they write," says Spier. "So it's not everything. It's only one small portion."

"You can't let this number rule your life," says Laura. "The colleges could decide to let you in even with low S.A.T. scores because you also do extra-curricular activities and because you have good grades."

Preparing for the S.A.T.

Experts who prepare the S.A.T.'s offer these suggestions on taking the test:

1. If you are running out of time, look for easy questions to complete in the time remaining. Vocabulary-in-context questions ask test takers to identify the meaning of a particular word in a passage and can be answered quickly (Kaplan).
2. Try to predict the answer before you look at the choices. The obvious choice on difficult questions is usually wrong. Look a little further to find the right answer (Kaplan).
3. Usually, the correct answers to multiple choice reading comprehension questions are easily defended as factual statements or carefully worded opinions. Choices that use extreme words like only, always, never, all or none, are rarely if ever, correct. Unless they are proceeded by a qualifier life "not" in which case they are almost always correct (Robinson).
4. For questions containing analogies, if the tested pair consists of a noun and a verb, determine whether the noun does the action or receives the action. For example, "Excavate: Digger as Cultivate: Farmer." The correct answer must have this same relationship (Advantage).