Don’t be an average SAT student

Meet Your SAT Avatar

Or, How to Avoid the Average SAT Mistakes to Score High

Listen up — This might be the most important lesson you learn to prepare for the SAT. If you’ve taken a practice SAT, you noticed that the questions progress in difficulty, from easy, to pretty hard, to super hard. That’s no accident.

The ETS, aka the people who write the questions, have been very deliberate about ordering the SAT to get harder as it goes. Their tricky methods work. Every year, the ETS manages to trip-up the average, gullible, overconfident high school student. The average SAT student get about half the answers right, and earn an ordinary score. But that just lets the extraordinary students — the ones they couldn’t fool — stand out.

Lucky for you, all it takes is a little knowledge, strategy, and practice to become extraordinary and beat the test maker’s at their own game. You just have to learn how to NOT be average. For your first lesson, let’s take a closer look at the order of difficulty levels in the SAT.

Figuring out the average SAT student

From You Could Do this in Your Sleep, to No Chance in Hell: The Various Difficulty Levels of SAT questions

Easy for the average SAT student
What happens in the mind of an unsuspecting teen when at first the test is a piece of cake? He thinks, Hey, this isn’t so bad! I don’t know what I was so afraid of. The easy questions lure you in and make you feel secure so you let your guard down. Almost every student picks the right answers here because the test makers want them to. ETS purposely makes the right answers obvious, for now.

Medium for the average SAT student
Pretty soon, the questions get harder. They won’t tell you when it’s happening, but you’ll transition from easy to medium difficulty. The answers are much less obvious, and only half the students choose correctly. The wording of questions becomes more complex, and solutions may require several steps. Here, the unsuspecting teen can fall into two traps: 1) He continues to think the questions are easy and picks what seem like the obvious answers, or 2) He gets overwhelmed and wastes time working out the answer to every single question. He clearly didn’t learn the right strategies.

Hard
It gets worse. They whack you with the hardest section of the SAT when you’re running out of time and sweating in your chair. These questions use nuanced wording and elaborate scenarios, and the answers are never obvious. Very few students get them right; most squander their last minutes trying to solve a problem they’d need an hour to figure out.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it? That’s because it’s not. But don’t despair! That unsuspecting teen we just talked about? He’s about to become your best friend.

Meet Your Avatar: Average Andy
Think of him as someone who can go into the SAT minefield ahead of you and show you where NOT to step. Andy is predictable because he is average; We can project his thoughts and actions onto each section of the test, then use his mistakes as a roadmap to success. It might sound confusing now, but it’s simple to master. Let’s get inside Average Andy’s head…

Average Andy is no genius. He’s no idiot, either. He’s just average, and he always listens to his gut. Easy, medium, or hard, Andy chooses the answer that feels right. He behaves exactly the way the test makers want him to, and gets a dead average SAT score.

Average Andy always looks for the obvious answer. He reads the questions quickly and tries to answer them all, rushing through the easy questions so he spend lots of time on the hard ones. He gets most of the easy, half of the medium, and none of the hard questions correct. Ah, good ol’ predictable Andy.

WWAAD? (What Would Average Andy Do?)
Are you beginning to see why Average Andy is your ultimate study buddy?

Let’s start with what’s he doing right: On easy questions, Andy goes with his gut. He picks the right answers because they jump out at him. Do like Andy and pick the obvious answers at first. Trust your gut; you got this. Save your energy for the more complicated questions. That’s NOT the same thing as rushing, but we’ll get to that later.

Where does Average Andy go wrong? He keeps going with his gut, and his gut leads him astray. Mid-way through the SAT, Andy is only getting about half the answers right, which clues you in to your next strategy: On medium-difficulty questions, be wary of your gut. Double-check your first impulse. Look for the obviously wrong answers and eliminate them, then pick from what’s left. The SAT is a game of odds, and you’ll up yours with a little skepticism and a lot of elimination. It helps if you have seen these questions before. You will not go into the test blind. You will have seen a video course or read a book.

How about the hard questions? If Andy is still following his gut (Why, Andy? Why?!) and picking zero right answers, do the opposite. Find the answer that feels right and get rid of it; it’s sure to be a trap. For most of the difficult questions, you won’t work out the right answer. That’s okay, they’re meant to be that hard. Eliminate the obvious choice, guess, and move on.

I’ll say it again: On hard questions, eliminate the obvious choice, guess, and move on. (Note: If you are >650, then ignore that last sentence. Only skip hard questions if you are < 650. Seriously.)

Slow Down to Up Your Score
Aside from showing you when to trust your gut and when to ignore it, Andy reveals another very important test-taking strategy: Time Management. Average Andy makes the mistake of spending too much time on problems he has no hope of solving. You’ll dramatically improve your scores simply by identifying which questions you have a good chance of figuring out, and which will only lead you in circles. Guess more often, and devote your time to questions you actually have a shot at. It sounds counterintuitive, but slow down.

Now that you know about the various difficulty levels on the SAT, and you know what your buddy Andy would do on any given question, you also know how to make the best use of your time. Don’t get fooled into thinking tougher questions are worth more: whatever the difficulty, every correct answer is worth one point. Take time early on to ensure you rack up all the points you can in the easy and medium sections. When it comes to the hard stuff, guess smart and ration your time.

Cheat Sheet

That was a lot to take in, I know. That’s why I’m leaving you with this handy chart for quick reference as you practice. Use it to see what Average Andy would do and what you should do throughout the SAT.

And I won’t say good luck, ‘cause you don’t need it.

Difficulty Level	WWAAD?	vs.	What YOU Should do	Time it’s worth…
Easy	Pick the answer that feels right.		Pick the answer that feels right.	Enough time to be thorough.
Medium	Pick the answer that feels right.		Double-check your first impulse. Eliminate the wrong answers, pick from what’s left.	Most of your time. You have a good shot!
Hard	Pick the answer that feels right.	Eliminate the answers that just “feel right” Eliminate answers you’re certain are wrong Give it your best guess.		The time you have left.