Top 10 SAT & ACT Tips and Tricks!

Students often come to me needing to improve their SAT/ACT score to get into their top choice school. Many students can feel nervous about sitting through such a lengthy exam and forget their basics! These tiny tips and tricks will up EVERY student improve their math scores on both the SAT and ACT. To subscribe to more tiny tips click here!

1.   There is no substitute for good, basic algebra and geometry knowledge. If you don’t know the sound a letter makes, how can you read a sentence? If you don’t know basic math rules, how can you solve a simple equation?

2.Practice only from “official materials” from CollegeBoard.org or ACT.org. 

3.Practice ALL of the official problems until you can do ALL of them easily and correctly.  Only after that, should you entertain using other materials. 

4.Back solving or plugging answers choices back to see which one is correct, almost always wastes too much time.  Learn how to solve the the problem “straight up”.

5.You must be able to complete each problem under a minute.  Most problems take about 30 seconds. 

6.Always glance at you answer choices before completing the problem.  For example, if your answers choices are in terms of pi, don’t bother multiplying by pi. 

7.Make sure you answer the problem completely.  Always quickly reread the question to make sure you gave the correct answer. 

8.Eliminate answer choices first, only if it can be done quickly and easily. For example, you cannot get a real solution if you take the square root of a negative number. 

9.Choose the best (and fastest) way to solve a problem.  This is the HARDEST thing to do.  It will come with practice. 

10. 10.If a problem is drawn to scale, sometimes you can make a reasonable guess if you are totally lost.