SAT Summer Studying Resources
Free and paid resources to help you achieve your SAT summer goals
In my last post, I wrote up an 8-week study plan for the SAT. It describes what to do every day of every week:
But there are other resources you may want to use to supplement this plan. In this post, I’ll describe the best supplementary resources I’ve found, and how you should use them.
Third Party Practice Tests
There are only 7 official practice tests. If you think you’ll need more, these are the two products I recommend:
Test Innovators: You can buy up to 10 full-length tests. They also have a non-adaptive question bank.
Score Smart: You can buy up to 16 (soon to be 20?) full-length tests. You can also just purchase R/W or Math, if that’s what you need to work on.
I would replace some of the official tests in my plan with these third party tests, and then extend the plan. For example, you might take 5 weeks of the plan and extend it to 10, with every other week consisting of one of these tests.
I should note that neither company is paying me to recommend them — they are just the ones I use with my own students.
Math Analysis
Educator Question Bank
The College Board has a free tool that generates PDFs consisting of high-quality questions. But be careful — some of these items appear in their official practice tests. They’ve added a box you can click that removes those official questions. I would use this if you need extra practice in a particular area. Their names are a little weird (“Form, Structure, and Sense”?), but you can find good material in there.
Desmos
You want to be able to answer questions with and without Desmos. But, of course, that’s only possible if you know how to use Desmos. I’d mostly avoid using it on Mathchops (to work on the more traditional problem-solving methods), but make sure you’re very comfortable using it throughout the official practice tests. One piece of advice: only use it when you know how you’re going to use it. Don’t just say, “This looks hard…let me play with Desmos for a bit.” If you do, you may find yourself floundering five minutes later. Here’s a quick guide to using Desmos on the SAT:
Chat GPT (or other LLMs)
Chat GPT is an excellent free resource, but be careful with it. Think of it like a really smart kid who is super confident but may have only been half-listening to the question you asked. This is how I would use it during the review process:
1) NEVER, EVER, EVER USE IT DURING A MOCK TEST. These tests are super valuable and you are completely wasting them (and your time) by cheating. With that out of the way…
2) Take a screenshot of the question you missed.
3) Paste the screenshot into the chat field along with your question about it.
4) Scrutinize the explanation. Does it make sense?
5) Ask follow-up questions. You can try asking it to give you a similar question, but these are sometimes not very good.
Old SATs
These are a bit harder to find, but they are very useful for math. (I would not use any of the R/W material.) The math is a little different — not just the format, but also the balance of questions. But these old sections have a lot of great questions, and they are an excellent way to generate another kind of score prediction. When tests are new, it’s very important to have multiple score predictions. If you’re hitting your goal on official practice tests, third party tests, old SATs, and Mathchops/Grammarchops, you can feel pretty confident that you’ll hit your goal on the real thing too.
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