What is Test Prep all about?

Sometimes I’m asked about the tips and tricks I teach to students to help them improve their ACT and SAT scores. I can offer a few tips, but I don’t actually have a guide - Tricks to Test Success. The reality is that effective test prep is about content and strategies. I work with students reviewing and re-teaching, and sometimes teaching a new concept or two. We also work on effective time management and look at how to use the question to guide the choice of answer.

Content: Teaching and Re-teaching

Students often need to recall concepts that they learned a few years ago but haven’t been using recently. Answering questions based on evidence found in the text is a skill that is required for the tests but may be something that students forget about if they’re not using the skill every day. Geometry may be a distant memory for juniors who took that class in 9th grade. And some grammatical constructions, or trigonometric identities, or interpretations of complex graphs may be things that some students never learned. What is needed is teaching and re-teaching.

Strategies

Are there test-taking strategies? Definitely! Students have to know how to make the best use of their time and knowledge in a highly stressful, timed-test environment. I work with students to determine how to use their time most productively – making sure that they have time to answer every question they’re confident that they know. We work on using the wording of questions to guide answer choices. We also look at ways to eliminate wrong answers.

Students can certainly improve their scores. But there is no shortcut, no list of tricks to better scores. It’s ultimately about students working to know the content and to practice the strategies.