If you have a good solid background in math and have read plenty of literature and publications like the New York Times and the Economist, you will do well on the SAT.
I respectfully disagree. The timed aspect of the SAT (and ACT) make this statement somewhat superficial.
MANY kids do NOT do as well as they
should because of the timed aspect of the test. It's not that they are "slow" even-- just that they simply do not have time to
reason through test items-- period.
DD did MUCH better (like, a standard deviation better) on the ACT's math section than on the SAT's. Why? Well, it's complicated, but she was able to use her super-human reading speed to generate additional time for herself, and she used that time to use reasoning and to work through problems twice. She did the math section TWICE on the ACT, basically, during that hour. Even though the problems on the ACT included trigonometry which she's technically not yet completed and never had instruction in, she did fine because she had the reasoning time to spare.
On the SAT, being broken into two sections and being much more about particular single-method problems, she simply didn't have enough time to spare, and it shows. Give her double time and she can get a perfect 800 on any given day. Easier problems than the ACT, but she doesn't do as well on them.
She
has no disability that accounts for this-- it's just that under pressure she is far more prone to careless/dumb calculation-based errors. Forgetting signs, slipping a decimal place, etc. Those are far more painful on the SAT because of the test design.
Anyway-- I do think that some aspects of test prep probably work over the long haul. Hey-- we did it. But not "prep" so much as desensitization to that timed/formatting that was problematic for my DD in particular. She took about seven practice tests in the 10 weeks before the ACT.
I also think that some aspects of prep don't really work well, and that this explains nicely why the average point gain is rather pitiful when you look at what kind of difference test prep makes.
I think that the single most interesting angle on this type of testing is the ACT's science section-- which seems to measure mostly reading speed and cognitive ability.
Ironically, though, my DD's scores indicate to me that the tests skew wildly toward a mechanical rather than actual/fluent level of "literacy" particularly in written fluency, and that the math favors raw calculation speed above
everything else. So my DD's
actual ability and potential is, I think, misrepresented significantly by such a test. She is no writer-- and she sees seven different and all valid means of working many math problems. Yet her scores indicate the reverse should be the case.
