College Entrance Exams: Preparation
What's the secret to preparing for the college entrance exams?
The top secret to preparing for any college entrance exams is to start your preparation several months in advance. I would suggest about four months before your first college test date. Slow and steady really does win the race. Now as part of your college test prep, you want to have two components. You want to have a content component to your preparation, in which you're reviewing the rules of grammar, the vocabulary that you may need, the basic math concepts that the test is going to test you on. In addition, you want to have a component that deals with test strategies. How to use your time effectively, when to guess and when to leave questions blank. I think also as part of the college test preparation, you'll want to take several timed practice tests, so that you're used to sitting for an extended period of time.
What are the best college entrance exam preparation materials?
The College Board, which administers the SAT, and the ACT organization publish a great deal of helpful material for college exams. What I would suggest doing is buying the official study guide for the SAT, which is published by the College Board, and the official prep guide for the ACT, which is published by the ACT along with Petersen Publishing. Those contain complete practice tests that you'd want to take under timed conditions. In addition, both the website www.collegeboard.com and www.ACT.org contain an abundance of practice questions and helpful strategies that you may want to look up and check for yourself in preparation for college entrance exams.
What is the "PSAT"?
The PSAT is basically a shorter version of the SAT, that many juniors take in the fall of junior year. The PSAT is a practice test. College admission offices don't see the scores, but the scores that you receive on the PSAT do give you a sense of how you might do on the actual SAT, and they can tell you which areas you may want to improve upon in order to get the best SAT score possible.
How does the PSAT differ from the SAT?
The major difference between the PSAT and the SAT is the PSAT doesn't count for college admissions. It really is a practice test. Another major difference between the two tests is that the PSAT doesn't have an essay. Your writing score is just the result of the multiple choice questions that you're given on the writing section. Another difference between the SAT and the PSAT is that the PSAT is used as a qualifying test for the National Merit Scholarship as well as for some other national scholarships that are available out there.
How can I learn vocabulary for college entrance exams?
The long term answer to increasing and improving your vocabulary for your college entrance exams is to read. Read a lot. Read newspapers, news magazines and books that are written at a fairly elevated level. Then when you get to words that you don't recognize, look them up and put them on a list. Short term, there are many good college entrance exam prep books and flash cards that have a lot of good vocabulary words and effective strategies for learning them. Also, some students like to familiarize themselves with familiar Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes, as those roots often appear in many English words. This way you will learn vocabulary for college entrance exams.
Should I consider attending a college entrance exam "prep course"?
Commercial prep classes and private tutors certainly can be helpful, but they're really not essential. What any commercial class or private tutor is doing is essentially demystifying and explaining the test, breaking it down into its component parts, reviewing certain useful strategies and administering practice tests. That's something that a well-motivated student can do on his or her own.
What mistakes should I avoid when preparing for a college entrance exam?
The most common mistake students make in preparing for these standardized admissions tests is that they don't prepare. They figure they can just go in and wing it and that would represent their best ability possible. Well that's not really true. You really do need to prepare for college entrance exams so that you're at least comfortable with the format and directions on them. Another common mistake the students make is that they try to prepare in too short a time period. In other words, they try to cram all their prep into one or two weeks. Well, that's really not going to work. If anything, it's only going to increase the anxiety the students feel about college entrance exams. Conversely, I've found that some students prepare for too long a period. I would say you never want to prepare more than eight or nine months in advance of the target date. Really, preparing for these standardized tests is like training for a marathon. There's an appropriate amount of prep work that you want to do, leading to the target test date. More is not effective. In fact, it actually results in scores that would be lower than I would have expected.
