My Aliso Niguel SAT Prep Branch - Week 3: What Does the SAT Test?

One of the biggest myths out there about the SAT is that it is a direct measure of intelligence. While being super smart will help you on the test, intelligence and high test scores are not the same thing. In reality, the SAT is just testing you on one thing: how well prepared you are for the SAT.

I know that sounds silly, but consider this: students who spend time preparing themselves for the test consistently score better than those who do not. Does that mean that students who prepare were smarter to begin with? Of course not! In my class that just finished up this week, my students improved their score by an average of 307 points. That improvement wasn't because they got any smarter through the course of two and a half weeks. It was because they learned the important content, became familiar with the format, and discovered how to beat the tricks and traps on the test.

So what subjects does the SAT test you on? The short answer is reading, writing, and mathematics. That's it. There's no history or foreign languages or even science (unlike the ACT, which has a science reasoning section). So there's not too much to worry about in terms of content. Everything on the test is stuff that students have learned by the time they finish sophomore year of high school.

Let's break it down a little bit more to see what kinds of questions each section asks:

Reading

• Passage-based reading: This is your classic reading comprehension. The test will give you short, long, and double passages and then ask questions about things like the author's tone, the meaning of a certain line, or how a paragraph fits into the passage as a whole.
• Sentence completions: Here you are dealing with vocabulary. You have to fill in a blank with the word that best completes the sentence. While having a big vocabulary is great, for these questions it's more important to understand context and word roots.

Writing

• Improving sentences: The test will give you a sentence and then ask you how you can make it better.
• Identifying sentence errors: This is the same as above, except you don't have to fix the error, you just have to find it. These first two types of questions mostly test basic grammar that can be easily reviewed in a few hours.
• Improving paragraphs: There is one small section that gives a short passage and then asks questions on how to fix errors and make the passage more clear. For the most part it is very similar to the other two types of questions on the writing section.
• Write an essay: The SAT always starts with the essay section. It will give you a broad question and ask you to answer with your own opinion, using examples to back up your argument.

Math

• Arithmetic/ number logic: Unfortunately, the arithmetic questions on the SAT will be a little bit harder than 2+2=4. They test for things like number patterns, exponents, percentages, and averages.
• Algebra: The algebra on the test can go up to Algebra II, but you don't need to have taken Algebra II to do very well on this section. You'll mostly be dealing with things like systems of equations, FOILing, functions, and ratios.
• Geometry: The SAT loves triangles. There will be lots of triangle problems, along with questions on circles, slopes, and angles.

Hopefully most of this is pretty familiar to you if you're a high school student. What's important to remember is that it's not the content itself that makes the SAT difficult - it's the tricky ways in which they'll ask you about it. So reviewing the concepts while learning how to approach these types of questions most efficiently is the best way to prepare for the test. It's what I teach in my courses and what you should be looking for in any strong SAT prep program.

It's not too late to sign up for a SAT prep program this summer, so contact me at Neil_Aronson@ivyinsiders.com for more info.

Neil Aronson, an Aliso Niguel High School alum, is a rising junior at Tufts University (a little Ivy right outside of Boston) where he's studying International Relations and Entrepreneurial Leadership. This summer he is starting and running a test prep branch through Ivy Insiders, a program offered by Revolution Prep that selects students from top schools who have scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and sends them back to their communities to help kids from their hometown improve their scores. Check back here every Friday for more tips and help on the SAT.