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I took my SAT scores from 90th percentile to 98th percentile by buying a book, doing a few sample problems every night for a couple of weeks, and reading the te
by ftlio 9y ago
I took my SAT scores from 90th percentile to 98th percentile by buying a book, doing a few sample problems every night for a couple of weeks, and reading the test taking tips in the back. Probably the most helpful tip was that all the math diagrams were drawn to scale.
The bigger benefit of all of this to me was the SATs as another example of how truly arbitrary the world seems to be, and how little extra effort is actually required to curb that arbitrariness towards your goals.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoSome of the improvement was probably age-related brain growth. I noticed in high school and college that as I got older, my performance on repeated math tests or contests mysteriously improved, even if I didn't do any practice in between. Math problems that seemed out of my reach suddenly became attainable. Some friends of mine noticed the same thing when I pointed it out to them.
- diminoten 9y agoEven taking it twice is a huge boost, I don't think most folks even realize you can/should. It's so arbitrary, I bet the majority of folks would improve on their second test, but the only people who try are the ones who know about it.
- sokoloff 9y agoI'm not even sure how many times I took the SAT (I think it was 4: at age 11, 12, and then twice in high school). I know I took the PSAT twice. Granted my parents were both in public education and so were more in tune with what was possible, but we were by no means rich (see also: both parents were in public education). I took it twice before age 13 in conjunction with https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/ https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/