Whether you’re brand new to SAT, or want to learn advanced strategies, this is your hub for SAT knowledge and mastery.
In SAT, just like in life, the only way to get better is to focus on your weaknesses and mistakes. Real improvement comes from obsessing over your errors and scrutinizing your mistakes or weak areas until they cease to exist.
The article will deep dive into the 10 most important formulae, concepts and strategies that you need to know to ace the SAT Math section.
The following are the most important points to remember when tackling the SAT Writing + Language Section
The article will deep dive into the 10 most important points, concepts and strategies that you need to know to ace the SAT Reading section.
This chapter will introduce a repeatable framework that will make SAT essay writing easy and ensure you get a great score.
The previous chapters laid out the rhetorical elements to identify in a prompt, but how do these elements get translated from the prompt to your sat essay? In this chapter, we’ll discuss how you should fill out each body paragraph.
Reasoning is the connective tissue that holds an argument together. It's the “thinking” — the logic, the analysis — that develops the argument and ties the claim and evidence together.
Stylistic and persuasive elements are in a way opposite to the evidence based elements discussed in the last chapter. They are NON-FACT based statements that the author uses to prove his thesis. They often appeal to your emotions.
The first of the three points that the SAT wants you to write about is identifying the evidence the author uses in his essay to prove his thesis.
The most important task for a student on the SAT essay is to understand the author’s purpose in writing the essay. The purpose in fancier words is called the thesis of the essay.
The SAT essay is optional. It is graded out of 24 points. Your score will show up next to your “1600” score, but it won’t actually affect it in any way.
We have discussed how to write an ACT essay and respond to the prompts. Now, it’s the time to help you write the essay better using varied sentence structures and correct grammar usage.
It's important to understand the graphs and charts often used in statistics based questions before we explain the core concepts tested on the SAT Math section.
PROBABILITY is the likelihood that something will happen. It is a number between 0 and 1 and can be written as a per cent. When you asked about something's probability, you are asking, "How likely is it?" A larger number means there is a greater likelihood that the event will happen.
About 35% of your total SAT Math Test will be made up of word problems. Though the actual math topics can vary, it is important to develop a consistent process for answering them.
There are usually 1-2 questions on complex numbers on every SAT Test. If you know what complex numbers are, these questions are pretty straightforward.
A TRANSFORMATION is a change of position or size of a figure. When we transform a figure, we create a new figure that is related to the original.
The term quadratic comes from the Latin word quadratus meaning square because the variable gets squared (e.g., \(x^{2}\) ). It is also called an equation of degree 2 because of the 2 superscripts on the x.
Students struggle with function-based questions on the SAT. This chapter will give you all the information and solved examples you need to get the function questions correct
The Absolute Value of a number is its distance from zero (on the number line). Thus, an absolute value is always positive. We indicate absolute value by putting two bars around the number.
COORDINATE GEOMETRY is the study of geometry on a plane using a coordinate system. This plane is called a COORDINATE PLANE, which has scales of measurement along the x and y-axes.
SOLID GEOMETRY questions on the SAT Math section are some of the hardest questions you will see on the SAT Math section.
The polygons tested on the SAT are usually the following quadrilaterals: trapezoids, parallelograms, and special parallelograms, such as rhombuses, rectangles, and squares.
Circle questions on the SAT are straightforward and formula driven. The following chapters will list all the formulas you need to know to answer the circle questions on the SAT Math section.
The word TRIGONOMETRY is Greek; tri means three, gon means angle and meter means to measure. Combining all these three words, we get, “three angle measure”. The logic behind this is that trigonometry involves the measurements inside a triangle, which has three angles.
The SAT is absolutely obsessed with triangle-based problems, and as a result, the SAT Math section includes many questions on the SAT Math section. The following set of formulas will help eradicate your trouble once and for all.
There are only a couple of Lines and Angles questions tested on the SAT Math section. The questions are usually easy and should not pose a challenge to you.
There are a few additional algebra topics often tested on the SAT. Expect each of the following to show up at least once on each SAT Math Test.
A polynomial is an algebraic expression comprised of more than two terms, usually of like bases and different powers. Polynomials frequently include integer terms as well.
Linear equations are equations in which all variables have an exponent of 1 and whose graph is a line.
The beauty of inequalities on the SAT is that they allow you to do all of the same things that you can with equations:
For some reason, the SAT is absolutely obsessed with percentage problems, and as a result, many students have trouble. The following set of formulas will help eradicate your trouble once and for all.
Math fundamentals deal with number properties, their classifications and basic operations on numbers.
Some strategies are so powerful that they can singlehandedly increase your SAT Math Test score by more than 100 points. At AP Guru, we absolutely recommend students use these three strategies time and again.
You’re allowed to use a calculator on Section 4 of the SAT, but remember to use it as a tool, not as a crutch.
The SAT Math Test contains one 55-minute section with 38 questions (calculators ok) and one 25-minute section with 20 questions (calculators not permitted).
Transitions are one of the most common and trickiest topics tested on the SAT Writing + Langauge and Language Test.
Add or delete questions ask whether you should add or delete a sentence within a passage. Most questions will therefore require you to consider the context of the surrounding sentences and/or paragraphs.
These questions ask you to identify whether a particular sentence is correctly placed within a paragraph, or whether a particular paragraph is correctly placed within a passage.
Command of Evidence questions on the SAT asks you to determine how the writer of the passage can best achieve a particular outcome or purpose.
Concision works on one very basic principle: it is incorrect to use 10 words to express an idea you could express using 5.
At this point, you probably feel good about mastering all the grammar rules included in the Writing and Language Test. That’s great, however, combining sentences questions still stump most of our AP Guru students. These are the hardest questions that the SAT Test can throw at you.
The SAT Writing and Language Test repeatedly tests the proper usage of verb tenses. Knowing when to use different verb tenses and forms will be extremely beneficial to you on this part of the test.
The SAT Writing & language section usually tests 2-3 questions on subject-verb agreement on every test. Here we tell you all you need to know about subject-verb agreements on the SAT.
A pronoun can often be used as a substitute for a noun in a sentence. Anytime a pronoun is used in a passage, that pronoun must have a clear antecedent; that is, it must directly connect to a noun or pronoun that was mentioned before it.
Parallelism is a very strange concept. Unlike commas, semicolons, pronouns, tenses, etc., parallelism isn’t applied to just a single area of grammar – it spans all aspects of the English language.
There are many pesky little grammar rules that you’ll be tested on as part of the SAT. Therefore, it’s important to not just know these grammar rules, but also how test questions are structured .
Though sentence structures are rarely tested on the SAT, you will need to understand them to accurately answer comma-based questions.
The comma is widely used in writing and is the most commonly tested concept on the SAT Writing and Language Test. Therefore, it’s extremely important to understand how to correctly use commas and when to avoid them.
Even though comma usage is the most prominent punctuation rule tested on the SAT, other punctuation such as semicolons, colons, dashes, and apostrophes are frequently tested as well.
Modifiers are words, phrases or clauses used to describe something in a sentence. They are often tested on the SAT in the form of comma usage.
The SAT Writing and Language Test is a passage-based test. There are four multi-paragraph passages and 44 questions to go with them. The makers of the SAT break this test down into two main sections: Usage and Mechanics and Rhetorical Skills.
The SAT test writers are amazingly skilled at writing tempting wrong answers, so it’s worth taking some time to understand the techniques they use to avoid falling for their traps.
No matter how unfamiliar the terminology may be, all the information you need to answer graph-related questions will be right in front of you. These questions are set up precisely so that you can figure them out without any outside knowledge.
Inference questions tend to be among the most challenging types of Reading Comprehension questions on the SAT. Instead of testing your understanding of what is in the text, inference questions test your understanding of what isn’t in the text.
Vocabulary-in-context questions are usually among the most straightforward questions on the Reading Test, as well as some of the least time-consuming.
Literal translation questions ask about the details of a passage. In contrast to your approach to general questions, to master literal translation problems, you will need to re-read and grasp details in the passage.
If there is one question you are certain to see on the SAT, it is about the main idea of a passage. The main idea is nothing but the primary purpose of the passage.
Every part of the SAT Reading Test contains one paired passage. Each passage has a different author and a different point of view, but both will always revolve around the same basic idea or event, even if it isn’t always immediately obvious how the two passages relate to one another.
The single most important strategy to get the SAT Reading questions correct is to plagirize the answers from the passages itself.
Reading comprehension is question driven. To be successful, you need to be an active reader – quickly consuming a passage’s main ideas and then saving time to locate relevant information within the passage to answer detail-oriented test questions.
The SAT Reading Test is tough for a lot of students, and embodies a central complaint many people have about this test: How can you pick just one right answer to a question about a passage?
Learn the 50+ grammar rules that the SAT tests on. This section covers both the basics, like punctuations and verb tenses and the advanced strategies required to answer even the hardest questions.
Learn specific strategies that you can use to answer all the rhetorical questions that are asked on the SAT Writing + Language section.
Learn concepts and strategies to ensure that you not only know how to approach an SAT reading passage but also attack all the 6 question types tested on the SAT Reading Test.
Learn the basics of SAT Math all in one place, including calculator usage, avoiding silly mistakes, number properties, and more.
Learn step by step methods that will directly produce answers to algebra and function questions. This section covers concepts and techniques to help you with some of the hardest concepts tested on the SAT like linear equations, quadratic expressions, and graphing functions.
Learn how to answer SAT geometry questions like a pro. See exactly how to answer geometry, coordinate plane and trigonometry based-questions.
Learn all about complex numbers word problems, probability, and statistics. Includes lots of pro tips to help you achieve mastery on each concept.
Learn the most important concepts tested in each section of the SAT. This section will help for a last-minute review before the SAT.
.svg)