Most people take a rather informal, intuitive approach to verbal questions. This is often described as "using your ear": simply reading the answer choices and trying them out in your mind's ear, seeing which one sounds best. And here, dear reader, there lie...
The College Board rolled out the new Digital SAT in the United States in March of this year; the next administration is right around the corner at the beginning of October. Putting together what we've seen on the new practice tests and what we've heard from...
In this post, we'll be digging into some of the science of language as it applies to verbal questions. Our examples are drawn from official practice questions released by the College Board for the new Digital SAT, but the issues discussed here apply equally...
As part of maintaining expertise and gaining insight into what our students experience, I went to a local high school and took an official ACT on October 28. In this post, I'd like to share some thoughts about the experience. Some Personal Notes on the...
There is A LOT of confusion out there about how much emphasis high schoolers should place on preparing for and taking the SAT or ACT, and unfortunately, this confusion creates much needless anxiety. Even the colleges themselves are not very clear about how...
In the name of science, we went to the source and tinkered with the new Digital SAT practice tests released by the College Board. Our goal was to find out exactly what's going on under the hood to determine scoring on this new test. In this post, we'll lay...
At Reason Test Prep, we emphasize that problem solving gets easier when we can make things more concrete and tangible rather than abstract. People are better -- faster, more accurate, and more confident -- at reasoning about things they're familiar with. So...
Consider Both Tests Before Starting Gone are the days when schools accepted only the SAT or the ACT. Nowadays all colleges accept both tests and have no preference for which test scores students submit. And while it is true that many students score similarly...
The test optional movement is an ever-changing landscape with colleges changing and updating policies all the time. As of this writing (March 2023), some colleges have announced an extension of test optional policies (for example, Harvard has extended...
Parents and students alike are often unsure when to begin preparing for the SAT or ACT. Like most things in life there is no simple answer to this question and it depends somewhat on the student and his or her circumstances. We’ll go into much more detail in...
Despite popular misconception, the SAT and ACT are actually much more similar than they are different. Both tests are essentially reasoning tests and both tests are based off of a very similar content base, so our approach to tutoring both tests is...
So you wake up the morning of your big test and staring at you is a plate full of runny eggs. Do you eat them? Of course not! Ok, that is a pretty easy call. But what should you eat then? Well, this is really a bigger question because it also involves what...
If you read the some of the test prep books on the market on how to ace the ACT Science, you’ll notice a strategy they all share in common: don’t read first. The basic idea is that you should read the questions first, and then let them guide you to the...
In this post I would like to discuss something more general that I had actually planned to bring up in a later post, but the recent publication of an opinion piece in the NY Times by writer Frank Bruni has compelled me to discuss the issue now (Bruni’s piece...
For anyone new to the posts in this series feel free to go back to the first post to get a little background about what is going on here….. Below is the link for the article that was the subject of the 4th installment of the series:...
Below is the link to the next article in the installment. This one is pretty hard in my opinion, but it is also pretty short so it should make for a fairly quick exercise. Happy reading!!!...
So this is the first post in a series of posts aimed at helping both my students and any other interested readers learn to read more critically. For a more in depth discussion of my motivation here and why this skill is so important, both on the SAT and in...
This is an analysis of the passage that I introduced in the previous post (SAT Reading Comprehension Exercises – Passage 1). Please see that post for more information about the purpose of this exercise. The article being referenced is:...
This is the second post in my Reading Critically series. The article that follows is a bit longer than the first (its hard to find articles that are as short as SAT passages), but it is a pretty interesting piece. I will pose the questions below, but first a...
This is the second post in my Reading Critically series. The article that follows is a bit longer than the first (its hard to find articles that are as short as SAT passages), but it is a pretty interesting piece. I will pose the questions below, but first a...
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