I must confess. I have been teaching English for over twenty-five years. However, I wasn’t so inept at math, and I’ve truly enjoyed teaching it to high juniors and seniors when I help them prepare for the SAT and ACT.

 The Princeton Review makes some excellent points in their preparation guides. They say that if you get half of the answers right on a test in your math class, you have just made a 50, and everyone is mad at you. Your teacher, your parents and you.

But if you get half of the problems right on the math section, you will score a 600 and everyone is happy. Unless your parents are astrophysicists who graduated from MIT.

The Princeton Review also makes the point that the easy questions appear at the beginning of each section. The middle section has moderately difficult questions, and the last third has questions that are deceptive and difficult.

Therefore, the strategy of rushing though the test in an effort to answer all of the problems is not a good strategy. I tell my students that the easy problems are like softballs in their hitting zone, and they need to take advantage of them. They also may have to slow down to not make a careless error.

 The central message of my tutoring is that a large part of doing your best on the SAT is to learn how to manage time. The makers of the SAT want you to be pressured and to make mistakes you wouldn’t ordinarily make. The central job of the test-makers is to help colleges make a distinction between Student A and Student B. So don't be the one that panics. Manage your time properly.

I have also learned that juniors and seniors will take higher level math courses that address concepts not covered on the SAT. They’ll be taking trigonometry and calculus. During the practice tests I give them, they will miss percentage, average, or algebra problems, simply because they haven’t seen any of these question in years.

These are the softball questions that have to be hit out of the park. Therefore, to perform well on this test, the student must master his or her pre-algebra and algebra concepts. Also, if you look carefully at the geometry questions, you’ll notice that they are algebra problems in disguise. 

I’ll write more on this topic on a future hub.