Whenever we begin working with students on SAT or ACT preparation, we inevitably encounter a series of common misconceptions about standardized tests. Some of our favorites over the years have been that you should never test in January because it’s always the hardest one, the test includes concepts you’ve never learned before, and that the only students who earn perfect scores are complete geniuses. None of these are true of course (there is no verifiable data that any one version of the test is significantly more difficult than another; while the questions may be phrased differently from the one you encounter in class, both the SAT and ACT are testing you on concepts and skills you have indeed covered in your high school courses; we know plenty of people who have earned perfect scores, and we know very few true geniuses).
Today, we want to combat three of the most common testing myths we hear, and debunk them once and for all.
- The SAT is more difficult than the ACT, or vice versa. After practice tests, students who didn’t score where they wanted to usually want to solve this problem by switching to a different tests, operating on the mistaken assumption that the other one must be easier. While switching tests is indeed sometimes the best route to take, this is not because any one test is less challenging overall than the other. Rather, students should be assessing their strengths and weakness to determine which test may be less challenging, or more suitable, for their specific profile. The SAT tends to favor strong readers and critical thinkers, whereas the ACT is better suited for mathematical minds that thrive when working quickly through challenges.
- There’s little you can do to improve your score. We’ve had many students come to us after earning the same score on multiple practice tests or real tests in a row. In these situations, the first question that parents and students alike typically ask is, “Is it perhaps not possible to do any better?” This theory, of course, comes from testing organization’s insistence that students don’t really need to prepare for the tests because they cover material they’ve already learned. This, we believe, is nonsense. While it is true that scores will never improve if you continue to approach preparation in the same way, or not at all, this does not mean that it’s necessary to become stuck in a score rut. In these cases, students need to examine what their holdups are, and attack these issues in a targeted manner. If they consistently run out of time, they need pacing strategies. If they have trouble getting through the reading passages without losing focus, they need better strategies for gleaning information from fewer sentences. If they find themselves confused about where to start with particular math problems, they need to do content review of the topics that each test covers.
- When in doubt, choose C. We’ve always had students who have been told to never choose A when guessing, or to always choose B instead of C. We even had a student one time who used a complicated method with the second hand of the clock to choose her guessing letter. We’d like to once and for all lay the debate to rest, though: there is no one answer choose that appears more frequently than any other. We promise. If you still like C, then by all means choose that, but don’t feel like you have to. Our only rule for our students when completely guessing on questions is to always use the same guessing letter. This is not based on any myth, but does actually statistically give students the best chance of having the highest possible accuracy when guessing. Don’t trust us? Think about it. If all four (or five, if we’re on ACT math) answer choices have the same probability of being the answer (which they do), then statistically speaking if you choose the same guessing letter for four or five problems, you’re bound to get one of them correct. If you change your letter every time, however, you could very well end up missing all of them.
Go crazy and choose a new testing letter other than C. After you do that, get to work finding a way to choose your test and create a prep plan that isn’t based on myths.
