By Miriam Holt,  Academic Advisor

General Test-Taking

A student’s performance starts out high and gets lower and lower as she or he moves from the beginning to the end of the test.  Alternatively, a student can’t focus on the test for 4 hours straight and gets mentally exhausted.

These students should make sure to get enough sleep, have enough to eat, and practice lengthening their attention span by, e.g. reading difficult books for several hours at a time and by taking practice tests under simulated testing conditions.

Bubbling errors: Students bubble an answer in the wrong row, possibly because of skipping a question and forgetting to leave a blank row in the answer sheet.

Students should bubble answers in groups of 5, or should finish all the problems on a page and then bubble in their answers all at once.  It saves a little bit of time, too.

Failing to complete a section

Students should not linger over questions in uncertainty, but rather answer as many answerable questions as possible, skimming over the difficult ones and coming back to them later if time allows, but meanwhile gathering all the points for right answers that can be easily gathered.

Common SAT Essay Errors

Common SAT Critical Reading Errors

Common SAT Passage-Based Sentence Errors

Common SAT Math Errors

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By Miriam Holt, Academic Advisor

Grammar/Writing: Sentence Correction

Confusing the object of a prepositional phrase for the subject of a sentence, and thus choosing the wrong verb

e.g. choosing “None of us are going,” instead of the correct version, “None of us is going.”
Students should learn to recognize prepositions and put brackets around prepositional phrases so that they can help themselves zero in on the true subject of the sentence.

Failing to consider a small word at the beginning of the sentence

Students should remember that just because a word shows up early in the sentence doesn’t mean it’s correct.  Always scrutinize prepositions and conjunctions which appear at the beginnings of sentences.

Failing to look for parallel structures

Students must become accustomed to requiring parallel structures in sentence construction on the SAT, even when we would not hold such strict requirements for other formal writing.  According to the SAT, this is incorrect: “To call her narrow-minded is like calling water wet,” but this is correct: “Calling her narrow-minded is like calling water wet.”)

Permitting a misplaced modifier

Students should make sure that dependent clauses with unspecified subjects are placed adjacent to their subjects in the sentence, e.g. “Carrying an umbrella, Carol didn’t mind the rain,” instead of “Carrying an umbrella, the rain didn’t bother Carol.”  Technically, the second implies that it was the rain who was carrying an umbrella.

Choosing the wrong pronoun #1: pronoun case

Students should be clear on pronoun case and should learn the difference between a subject and a direct object.

Choosing the wrong pronoun #2: pronoun number

Students should resist the temptation to match words like “someone” or “anyone” or “everyone” with pronouns like “they” and “them”, because plural pronouns cannot substitute for singular nouns.  Instead, the student must choose singular pronouns such as “him”, “her”, “he”, “she”, and “one”.)

Permitting an illegal pronoun

Students should be sure pronouns only appear in sentences that also explicitly state which noun the pronoun replaces.  This is wrong: “He promised to cut taxes and improve services, but he failed to keep them,” but this is right: “He made promises to cut taxes and improve services, but he failed to keep them.”  “Promised” is not a noun and cannot be replaced with a pronoun, but “promises” is a noun, so it’s fine to use a pronoun to replace it.

Untrained ear

Some students can’t detect grammatical errors easily because they’ve never been trained to speak or write according to the rules of grammar which the SAT uses.

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By Miriam Holt, Academic Advisor

Math

Answering a question that the problem didn’t ask

This error is extremely common because the SAT often asks students to find values that are tangentially related to what a normal person would expect the answer to be,*and* the expected answer is nearly always included as one of the answer choices.  Students should always read the problem twice before beginning to work on it AND should read it a third time after doing the work and just before bubbling in the answer.  This is crucial.
Mental Lock: Students don’t know where to begin, so they waste time staring at the question.

As soon as a student reads a problem, that student should immediately begin writing down *anything*–any possibly-related formulae, any picture that could illustrate the problem, any table that could organize the data,  any equation that could describe a relationship between two variables–and then look at the written material and try to draw connections or conclusions.  Most SAT math problems require students to have a flash of insight, which is almost impossible without writing information down and then looking at it carefully.

Making careless errors like dropping a negative sign or adding instead of multiplying

Students should write everything down, avoiding relying heavily on mental math, and should check the problems at the end of the section if time allows.

Getting stuck #1

Students should remember to check the first page of every math section for useful formulae.  This page includes the Pythagorean Theorem.  The SAT math section LOVES the Pythagorean Theorem.  If it seems to be impossible to find the information a question asks for, it’s probably because a student forgot about this theorem.  Students should try looking for, or creating, right triangles in the picture.

Getting stuck #2

The SAT’s other favorite formula is the average formula: average of A and B is (a+b)/2.  If it seems impossible to find the information a problem asks for and the Pythagorean theorem isn’t helping, the student should try thinking about averages.

Getting Stuck #3

We naturally tend to begin with simpler pieces of information and move toward more complicated pieces, such as from the legs of a triangle to its hypotenuse, but sometimes the SAT requires students to move in the opposite direction.  If the radius of a circle is known and the circle is inscribed in a square whose area is unknown, the square’s area can be found by working backwards: the radius can be doubled to find diameter, and the diameter can be reinterpreted as the hypotenuse of a 45-45-90 right triangle whose leg lengths can be calculated.  Once calculated, they can be squared to find the area of the square.

Being generally rusty/clueless about arithmetic, algebra, and geometry

Students need to practice math skills regularly to be comfortable with the math tested by the SAT and to be able to solve the problems quickly.

Common SAT Essay Errors

Common SAT Critical Reading Errors

Common SAT Passage-Based Sentence Errors

SAT Tutoring | Home

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