Slashdot Mirror
SAT Advice for a Foreign Student?
An anonymous reader asks: "I am a student from the UK who is currently in the process of applying to a university in the US. This means that I need to take the SAT Reasoning Test. I have read study guides and seen sample questions, but the more I look around the more I seem to be seeing general 'study skills' information aimed primarily at explaining how to learn rather than what to learn, which results in a lot of pages to work through for seemingly little data. What would help me immensely is any kind of resource aimed at an audience unfamiliar with the tests. Does anyone have a link to a list of exactly what I am expected to know and in what detail I need to know it, as well as anything else that can help me prepare for the exams?"
You speak English and are apparently somewhat intelligent (while the American eductation system in general sucks ass, if you're bothering to come here from abroad, I'm going to assume you're going to go to one of the better schools.), so you'll do fine. Besides, you can always take it again.
In case, you wonder, it just has general logic, reading, math, and scientific deduction questions. The only thing to worry about are the analogies, but they're easier on the actual test than they are on the practice tests. Anyway, this test is nothing that any high school freshman in the US shouldn't be able to do at least half-way decently, which means an average high school student of any other industrialized nation should pass with flying colors. If it tells you anything, I flunked out of college three semesters in a row and got a 2.0 GPA in high school and yet I got a 1492 composite (out of 1600) on the SAT I.
If you're still worried, order one of those SAT I practice trainers from Amazon.
is to do your undergrad in the UK(where tuition is insanely cheap comparatively and for undergrad the quality is about the same) and then do grad work in the US(where outside of Cambridge and Oxford, the quality is generally better). Just my 2 cents.
Monstar L
I took my SAT's in 2004, which was the last year of the old 2 section, 1600 format. Let me first of all say, that while I understand the necessity of the "standardized test", I don't think the old SAT was all that good of an evaluator; I'd imagine the new one probably isn't much better.
Assuming you've received a decent high school education, you probably know how to do pretty much anything they're going to throw at you. I don't think studying specific topics is going to do you any good. What you do need is a good working knowledge of the test. You need to be used to the way that questions are posed, and you need to be able to quickly identify what you need to do to respond.
The ridiculous SAT-prep culture in the US bothers me to no end, I think it's just one big feeding frenzy on student-parent pride and insecurity, so I never bought any books or took any SAT classes. What I did was just take it twice. The first time I went in completely cold, having basically no idea about the test other than its length and that there was a math and verbal section. I fully intended this to be nothing more than a dry run, and thus didn't have those scores sent anywhere. This got me familiar with the test format and testing conditions. That way, when I took it the next time, I could concentrate fully on answering the questions.
This exact approach may not be ideal for you, but I can't underestimate the importance of familiarizing yourself with the exam enough so that you can focus exclusively on responding. Just being familiar with what was happening boosted my score 150 pts. (1450 -> 1600)
Seriously.
Go to Orkut or something.
I am from India, and one of the reasons there are so many GRE/SAT cracking students there is focussed coaching. There are specialized coaching academies etc., etc.,
Its a big business.
A GRE score of 99 is common. No wonder you see so many Indian students there.
So ask them. They will be more clued.
Check out the books from India on sites like firstandsecond.com which have the type of questions.
These fellows register for SAT/GRE. Send 10-15 people with each person to memorize 5-10 questions.
So you actually have last 5 years papers etc., etc.,
These books cost something like 5-10 Euro atmost.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I agree with the spirit of this post, but frankly there are a lot of incorrect points.
First, you need more than "9th grade math" or "8th grade education"; among other topics there's geometry (10th grade for most kids) and some probability/data analysis. (You're correct though that vocab is critically important.)
Second, it's not really a reasoning test in the way that, for example, an IQ test is. It *does* test math and language skills, albeit in a rather shallow and limited way. It also tests *specific* skills, such as identifying the tone of a literary passage or using the formula for the circumference of a circle, not just "basic knowledge".
Third, preparation provably helps, often leading to multiple-hundred point increases. The test is engineered to trick students, and knowing these traps (there aren't that many), and taking practice tests (to establish comfort with the layout of the exam, and to avoid wasting time reading the directions which never change) can boost your score significantly.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
I agree with both parent and grandparent posts. I graduated high school in France, only to move to the US 3 weeks later, and having to go through yet another senior year of high school. Took the SATs unprepared. Assuming the UK high schools are decent, which they should be, you don't need to study anything extra, you already know much of what you're going to have to deal with. I took the test not knowing how it was graded, nor much of what was going to happen on it, and ended up at 1250, because my written english basically sucked (gotten better since!), but I was fresh off the boat from a country where the language isn't the same. Now, watch out, because some words have radically different meanings in this country.
That's just a friendly reminder that it wasn't just tea leaves we dunked in Boston, but also most grammar books!
Knowing how the test works is all you need to know, the rest your instructors have done a very fine job of hammering down to your brain, usually.
So don't worry about what to study, just know HOW THE TEST WORKS! That's what matters.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
"First, you need more than "9th grade math" or "8th grade education"; among other topics there's geometry (10th grade for most kids) and some probability/data analysis."
For a lot of people, Algebra I is 8th grade. For the vast majority of the rest, it's 9th grade. You may see a small number of very basic geo/trig based questions, but they're generally dirt-simple if you read the question properly. Give a 20-minute overview of geo/trig to a 9th grader and they'll have no problems as long as they understand the question. Now I've watched a high school teacher take an Algebra I SAT question and turn in into a high-end calculus problem. She got the right answer doing some very time-consuming math that would send most high schoolers running for the hills, but was completely confused as to why such an incredibly difficult question would be put on the SAT. Someone else then pointed out that if she'd read the question more carefully, she'd have noticed critical information sitting right there that narrowed the answer down immediately for anyone with a basic Algebra background.
And that's where they get you on those damned things: trying to answer the question you can't answer instead of answering the question they actually asked. The AP exams are no different in that regard.
"Second, it's not really a reasoning test in the way that, for example, an IQ test is."
It's not an IQ test; it's a logic test. At least when I took it, the SAT I was labeled precisely that: "SAT I: Logic Test". That's what gets the totally unprepared kids. They come into it thinking they're taking a math and vocabulary test. No, you're taking a test-taking test. The underlying assumption is that if they just asked you the questions in their most basic form, you'd have no problem getting a near-perfect score every time.
"It *does* test math and language skills, albeit in a rather shallow and limited way."
It does in the sense that without those basic math skills and without the vocabulary, the questions become impossible. You may as well be looking to a first-grader to do logs. That kid could be a towering intellectual giant with superb reasoning abilities and an immense learning capacity, but if he doesn't know what the heck a log is, all that intellect is utterly useless. If you don't know how to do the math required for the most basic form of the question and you don't have a clue what the words mean, then it becomes impossible to work with them at all.
"It also tests *specific* skills, such as identifying the tone of a literary passage or using the formula for the circumference of a circle"
I would argue that identifying the tone of a passage is one of those things where you can work on it in a prep course, but it still comes down to logic ability. The passages are there primarily to dump a bunch of useless garbage into your head, coupled with a few pieces of key information. The questions must then be unraveled, the data processed, and the key pieces identified and reassembled in such a way that the question becomes answerable. I do believe this is one area where prep courses can help students with this, but not so much by enhancing their logic as teaching them the basic methodology to apply to yield usable information. That goes hand-in-hand with instruction within the prep course on how to approach and unravel the questions themselves.
As far as using a formula, that's essentially the foundation of all math. Everything from addition on up is simply applying formulae. The fact that they give you formulae right on the test itself shows they don't care whether you know (pi)r^2 so much as whether you can then use it to yield correct results for their mangled question.
"Third, preparation provably helps, often leading to multiple-hundred point increases."
The preparation classes, more than anything else from my understanding, help with SAT scores. Typically, a student can expect to raise their score by a hundred points or so. Score
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."