Tuesday, September 05, 2006

4 Weeks; 4 Years; 4 Ever

College lasts four years, its impact lasts forever. Your college is not the most important thing in life, but it is very important. Your success and happiness in life is not dependent upon a college degree and there are many examples of successful people who did not attend college or did not finish. But these are few and far between.

Our economy is one of skilled labor and knowledge workers; a college degree is a job's entry ticket. (Along with employment comes money, with which you can buy food and shelter - you do want to live in doors and eat, don't you?)

Acceptence into almost every college and university in the U.S. requires that you take the SAT. It is the one thing that admissions officers can hold as a standard among the many diverse students begging to walk their hallways and fork over money.

So follow my logic in asking for just a little sacrifice over a short period of time that will have a lifelong impact. Take a look how you spend your time, activities, work, sports and studying. If you can devote a scheduled amount of time to preparing for the SAT, your score will improve.

In talking with a new student today, I asked, "What do you do on Sunday afternoon?" "Videogames," was the answer(I am sure with his AP classes there is some homework in there). I pointed out that if he simply took that same time over the next four weeks and did one SAT practice exam every week, his score would rise dramatically.

So I am challenging him:
Four weeks of hardcore study, that will result in four years at his chosen school with a result that will last forever.

To raise your score, the best thing to do is to write a schedule of work that requires sacrifice and committment. Having re-entered the SAT world, I think that the best program for success is for a junior to begin prep work in late July, early August before their junior year and then plan to take the test three times (it is offered six times), with Oct & Jan as must dates. These have the QAS program, which allows you to purchase your test booklet and actual answer responses for $15. If you do not get the score you are aiming for after these first two attempts, you have data on where to improve and can attack the next round of exams.

If you do just an hour or two of intense prep before the school year starts, you can maintain momentum through those hectic first few weeks. Yeah, I know it stinks to have to work on boring academic subjects in the summer, especially math and grammar. But four weeks of sacrifice has a forever impact.

Besides, most of the SAT math is stuff that you studied so long ago that you literally have to relearn somethings like slope intercept form of a line, geometry, parabolas and integers. Not to mention mastering the tricky wording and questions that are truly brain-teasing puzzles.

But if you are reading this now, it is too late for this type of prep. So we have to go to plan B and fit test prep into an already busy schedule.

Let's find some time in your schedule:
  1. Do you have an iPod/MP3? Get your hands on Flocabulary, Rock the SAT or Vocab Rock and listen to Vocab words when you have some time - even five or ten minutes. The perfect time is your commute to school and back. If you commute for a total of 10 to 15 minutes per day, do you realize that is an hour of studying?
  2. Record yourself. If you have a cassette recorder or can digitally record yourself - read the vocab list from any of the study guides, especially The Princeton Review. Then play it back during your commute, exercise or downtime. Go for a walk after dinner and get 20 minutes of vocab into your head.
  3. Flash cards. Get with a friend and do old fashioned flash cards; or (gasp) ask your parents to help you. I've met with tons of parents and am one myself - parents want you to do well and will help with flash cards for a few weeks (heck, they might learn something too).
  4. The SAT question of the day from the College Board - it is a must.
  5. The Official Study Guide - "the big blue pillow" (BBP) it is a must, get it, read it, do all the practice tests. All of them.
  6. Kaplan's kaptest.com has 1000 free questions on line - crunch out 15 to 20 questions a couple of times per week.
  7. Online, free, full-length, diagnostic SAT exams - there are several. Take them! One each week, if you can. There is nothing like being timed and getting feedback in terms of a score.
  8. Memorize the six triangles - play with their angles, lengths, areas & perimeters - you WILL be tested on them & it pays to have these cold.
  9. Memorize the movement of parabolas - these are easy questions that most students get wrong. There are only six possible answers to a parabola question: a (+ or -); b (+ or -) & c (+ or -). I'll write up a study sheet on parabolas.
  10. Memorize circles - Area, Circ., tangent, degrees, arc -- pull out 10 circle problems from the Big Blue Pillow and work through them with an eye for understanding the limited number of questions that the SAT asks on circles. You will see a circle.
  11. Memorize the Box Solutions for rate, work, mixture, d=rt, ratio's
  12. Practice percent of a percent
  13. Relax and have fun

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