Summer is here for many Bay Area families, and for those with kids entering high school or even middle school, now can be a great time to get a head start on SAT practice. OK, sure, it's also a good time for water slides, beaches, friends, and all the things that make summer wonderful, but an hour or two spent getting familiar with test question format now can give your student an extra boost when it comes time for the real thing. It is this tutor's opinion that the PSAT is being given far too late to identify weaknesses and make appreciable differences in many students' scores.
With increasing pressure to take APs and make good grades while being a stellar athlete or drama superstar, it becomes harder with each year of high school for kids to devote the proper amount of time to SAT practice. And, that's what doing well on the SAT boils down to: pattern recognition. With each completed practice test, problem set, and sample essay question answered, your child will "have seen it before" on an actual exam and gain the confidence necessary to accurately and quickly answer "easy" problems while taking the proper amount of time to think about the tougher questions. Reading comprehension, especially, is a difficult subject area to improve on, and can take much dedicated practice to achieve consistent results (more on this in another post). When you and your child start to think of the SAT as a skill to be mastered, and not a barrier to success, "impossible" scores can be achieved!