The way you get better at something is with deliberate, difficult practice, and deep inquiry. When I was in high school preparing for the SAT I found this was t

The way you get better at something is with deliberate, difficult practice, and deep inquiry. When I was in high school preparing for the SAT I found this was the opposite of how most test prep worked. I found one book--called something like SAT 1600, which was the max at the time--that talked about how test makers try to assess you, and how questions are constructed. The drill questions were very hard and came with an explanation of how the questions worked. Taking a practice test before and after the book my score went up by over 100 points. It got to the point where I could usually answer a math problem by guessing what the answer "should" be, based on how the question was built, and then just work backwards to verify the answer. But most test prep was boring drills together with strategies like "use the process of elimination." Yeah, duh. That sort of brain-switched-off busywork is the common pattern in test prep and, more broadly, American education.