by George Zhou

Created on: September 19, 2010

Across the nation in every state, there sits millions of intelligent high school students. Many of them hold grand dreams of their college life and their future professional careers. However, a key to reaching college and getting a good career is the SAT, created by The College Board. Due to the enormous competition that had sprouted up recently, colleges needed to pick out the best (and sometimes, the best of the best) to make up their incoming student body. To figure out which applicants had the best proficiency in academics, they administered the SAT test to all that wished to enter. Therefore, the importance of the SAT cannot be underestimated and preparation is never too early.

The easiest way to prepare for the SAT is to simply take a SAT prep course. These courses should be easily available at your high school or college preparation companies like Kaplan. Doing this is great if you lack motivation to study. Paying a small fee and getting an instructor can boost your score quite a bit. However, there are downsides. These prep courses are only useful to teach you the basics and boost your score up to above average. If you're planning on going to a high competition school like one of the Ivy Leagues, then you'll have to do some of your own practice and studying. Also, some parts of the SAT can only be mastered through long term practice and dedication.

So, the first step in preparing for the SAT is to learn the format. The SAT is a 3 hour and 45 minute test, and a test that long is definitely hard. It is then divided into three sections called Critical Reading, Writing, and Math. Each section has a total score of 800 is you manage to get all the questions right (the writing section includes a mandatory essay which is scored from a 1 to a 12; this essay score is mixed into your multiple choice writing section score with a chart). This means the full score of the SAT is 2400, your goal when you take the test.

Now we'll tackle the SAT section by section. First, how would you do well on Critical Reading? The critical reading section is split into passage reading and sentence completion questions. So how do you do well on passage reading? The simple answer is to read more. Of course you go with certain strategies but the simplest most straightforward way to do well on this section is to have a high reading level. To attain that, you must read a great deal of high level literature. The passages on the SAT are not easy and reading simple novels absolutely cannot

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