Operation “Soaring Eagle” : The SAT – Math

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This post shall try to cover some practical advice for attempting the Math sections you’ll encounter in the SAT. Do not expect to find syllabus related articles, practice questions or anything of the likes. Instead, this shall be a short post (along with some useful comments, I’m sure) about how to best go about preparing for the Math sections.

As a rule of thumb, the math you’ll encounter in the SAT is going to be extremely easy. Irrespective of what board of education you’ve studied under, by the time you give the SAT i.e. junior year/11th or senior year/12th, you will have covered all of the topics that the SAT covers. In fact, the only real challenge the Math sections present is that you really do need to ace each and every math question in the paper to get a 800 in Math. Although this may seem a daunting prospect at first, remind yourself that you already know all the concepts you’ll need to crack the Math section. It is just a matter of practice, practice and more practice.

There are 2 kinds of questions that you will encounter in the Math sections: standard MCQ questions where you will have to choose the correct answer from a given set of possible answers, and grid-in questions, which require you to calculate an answer and input it into the OMR sheet. The answers can vary from .001 to 9999, with some obvious limitations, as there are only 4 fillable circles per grid-in answer. For example, 42.42 cannot be an answer to a question, as it requires 5 circles to fill in, but you are expected to round it down to 42.4 and input that as an answer. As an added bonus, there is no negative marking for these grid-in questions, which means you really should try and attempt each and every one of them.

As with the Reading section, you should have found yourself a good book to act as a question bank at the very least, if not a concept guide. You should really give a few diagnostic sections to get an idea of whether there are any deficiencies in your math concepts as far as the SAT is concerned. However, since the SAT only quizzes you on basic geometry, algebra, statistics, probability and arithmetic, this really shouldn’t be an issue. However, if you still feel that you’re under-confident in an area, spend a while brushing up on that area before heading back to practice.

Some books have topic-specific practice sections after each topic. Give those as well – they’ll give you an idea of if you’ve actually mastered practical application of that topic or not. Once you’re reasonably satisfied with your performance in those practice sessions, you just need to move onto the regular practice sections and just keep at them. Really, there it no other substitute other than practice, and loads of it. You’ll find that your speed and accuracy will steadily keep rising as you practice more and more.

I’ve noticed that the some people who approach me still harbor fear for the Math section. More often that not, it’s people who’ve not even seen the section. There’s an inherent lack of confidence combined with 3 apparently scary letters – S.A.T. Well, all I’ve got to tell these guys is that there’s little you an

Note : The SAT allows all test-takers to use a calculator, as long as it meets some requirements, as outlined on the CollegeBoard website. However, this does not mean that you should use a calculator for each and every question. In fact, a calculator will be of little practical use when attempting algebra questions. In addition, it’s important to use the calculator judiciously, even for questions where its use is valid. Sometimes you may find yourself taking longer to calculate the answer on the gadget than in your brain.

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