（语音）如何准备SAT考试以及应付高中时期的挑战

    Hi everyone! My name is Sherry, and right now I’m a junior at Troy High School in southern California. First of all I would like to thank the organizers at Boston High School Education for inviting me to present this talk and also everyone who is listening today. I’m very excited and grateful for the chance to talk to you all about my experience with the SAT and high school academics.

    To give you some background, I took the SAT test in October 2015 as a high school sophomore. It was my only time taking it, and I didn’t goto any SAT review courses before the test. I probably spent around 55 hours taking 8 practice tests and reviewing for the SAT. I ended up getting a 2390 out of 2400 – with an 800 in math, 790 in critical reading, and 800 in writing with a 11 out of 12 for the essay. This was the old SAT, which is not available anymore. I took the redesigned PSAT in 10th and 11thgrade, which is basically the redesigned SAT without the essay. I scored a 1510out of 1520 with an NMSQT Selection Index of 226 both times. As for my academics I’ve completed the AP courses and exams for Biology, Computer ScienceA, Calculus BC, English Language and Composition, World History, and European History. Right now in my junior year I’m taking AP courses in Chemistry, Physics 2, Spanish Language, and US History, as well as IB courses in ComputerScience SL, English SL, and Math HL. So today I plan to share more about how Igot myself ready for the SAT as well as high school academics from a student’s perspective.

    Looking back I have basically been “ preparing” for the SAT since I was very small. I realize now that having a good foundation in Englishand Math is really important for both the SAT and high school academics. With agood foundation you don’t need to rely as much on cramming or SAT boot camps,and it will make your high school classes easier and more manageable. So nowI’ll get more into how I prepared for the SAT.

    First of all, what is the SAT? The SAT is a standardized test that most high schoolers take in their junior and senior years. It issupposed to measure intellectual potential and success in college.

    You might have heard something about there being an old andnew SAT. The old SAT is the one I took – it featured critical reading, writing,and math sections, with a required essay. According to the CollegeBoard website it had emphasis on general reasoning skills, emphasis on vocabulary, often inlimited contexts, and complex scoring – there was a deduction for incorrectanswers to reduce guessing. The essay was like an argumentative essay where students had to take a position on an issue and support their claim with evidence from things they read or experienced.

    On the other hand, the new SAT has sections on evidence-based reading and writing, which includes a reading test and a writing and language test, math, and an optional essay. According to the College Board website it focuses on the knowledge, skills, and understandings that research has identified as most important for college and career readiness and success,greater emphasis on the meaning of words in extended contexts and on how wordchoice shapes meaning, tone, and impact; and there’s no penalty for guessing.The essay is optional and it tests your analysis skills. So it’s more similarto literary analysis papers you may write for English class. It’s graded on ascale of 1600, and you can get at most 800 points for evidence-based readingand writing and math. You’ll receive 3 scores for the SAT essay – one forreading, one for analysis, and one for writing – ranging from 2-8 points.

    So the main changes are: the essay is an analysis essay, thevocabulary and writing section is more based off your ability to use contextclues rather than your memorization skills, the math is a bit harder, and thescoring is different. There is no penalty for guessing.

    I’ll start with the reading portion of the evidence-basedreading and writing section – basically, the best way to prepare for this is byreading a lot. I think it’s extremely important to read a variety of things.Like, from my personal experience, when I was small I loved to read fiction. Butof course fiction is not going to be the only thing on the SAT. The SAT oftenhas passages that many students find very boring – like scientific studies orpassages from very old novels or historical papers, so that’s why it’simportant to read all kinds of things – things like non-fiction or classics. Luckilyfor me I have always loved to read, and in eighth and ninth grade I becamereally interested in non-fiction and biographies. Right now on my bookshelf Ihave young adult fiction, some adult fiction, poetry, autobiographies, biographies, non-fiction books about sociology and math and art and music; Ihave a book of essays, and I also have classics and my favorite books from whenI was younger. I really think that the variety of what I read and also how muchI read helped me to naturally prepare for the reading section of the SAT.

    Also, if you can, ordering publications is a great way to havea variety of things to read. In elementary school I used to subscribe to Cricket which is a literary magazine forchildren, and Muse which is a scienceand arts magazine for children. I also used to read Newsweek in middle school. Now I subscribe to TIME for current events and RollingStone also for current events as well as music news, since music is one ofmy biggest hobbies.

    The Internet is also a great place to find reading material,especially for current events. It also encourages you to think criticallybecause you need to decide what is credible and what is not credible. Ipersonally like the Internet because it offers you something outside of yourdirect world and allows you to see other perspectives.

    So I’ve talked about all the different ways you can findhelpful reading material, but not how you can test yourself on how well youcomprehended the material – which is what the SAT does. I am not sure how it isat all schools but elementary and middle schools usually have some kind ofreading comprehension testing program. What we had at my elementary and middleschool was AR, or Accelerated Reading. After every library book we read wewould take a short reading comprehension quiz on the computer, and that wasreally helpful for me in developing reading comprehension skills before highschool. If you have them at your school these programs are great to takeadvantage of – I read a lot more than the required amount of books when I didAR and as a result I could take more AR tests and practice more. I wouldsometimes read one or two books a day because I had the time, and then take ARtests during recess in the library the next day, and borrow more books.

    Reading a lot in elementary and middle school, and takingadvantage of the extra time I had, really improved my reading speed, myvocabulary, and also my reading comprehension. This came in really handy inhigh school, especially when I began to take AP courses. One thing I noticedwhen I started taking AP courses was that the text in the textbooks was muchsmaller than in middle school. And another thing that really makes AP coursesso rigorous is how much you have to read. A lot of students will skip thereadings because there’s not a lot of ways for teachers to enforce it, but I’vefound that reading everything that the teacher assigns you is really helpfuland gives you a lot more knowledge and understanding, especially for AP historycourses. So my reading skills that I developed when I was small really benefitme now that I’m in high school.

    Now for the writing section - grammar is one of the biggestparts of this section. Grammar is basically learning and remembering a set ofrules, so knowing all the grammar rules by middle school is really helpful. Readinga lot also helps for grammar – especially news articles. Articles frompublications will always have correct grammar, and just exposing yourself togood grammar and structure through published news articles will also help yourecognize grammar mistakes in other places. Having a solid foundation ingrammar helps both your writing later on and any grammar you might learn inhigh school. (For example, I wasn’t even taught grammar after 9thgrade because we were already expected to know it.)

    As for the essay, the best way to prepare for it is to justpractice. So this means putting effort into the essays, especially the analysisones you are assigned at school, and improving based on your teacher’sfeedback. Also I wanted to say that sometimesmiddle school will teach you different rules or have different expectations forwriting than high school – make sure you use what you learn in high school. Themain thing they teach you in writing class, I think, is to be concise, logical,and to support everything with evidence (especially in analysis essays). Andthe most important piece of advice for analysis essays is to not summarize.

    The essay score is based off reading, which is how well youunderstood the passage, analysis, which is when you make your own claims aboutwhat makes the writing in the passage effective and then support your claimswith evidence, and finally writing, which is structure and grammar. Yourreading comprehension skills should help you with the reading part of the essayscore. For analysis, the literary analysis papers that you write in high schoolcan help you. Analysis is often the hardest part so I’ll give some tips whichyou also may have heard from your teachers. First, it’s probably beneficial tomemorize a few common rhetorical devices, like appeal to emotion or appeal tologic, or extended metaphors, that you may be able to talk about in your essay.Second, it’s also important to recognize the overall theme of the work, likewhat the author is trying to say, and then showing how the rhetorical devicessupport and effectively portray that theme. Identifying the theme first willhelp to discourage you from writing about minor and insignificant rhetoricaldevices – like there might be one simile that you want to talk about, but if itdoesn’t contribute to the theme, it is probably not a good idea to talk aboutthat in your essay. And finally, for the writing section of your score, yourstructure must be logical. In other words, your paragraphs should be in alogical order, and then make sure to follow grammar conventions. Personally Ihad very good English teachers in 8th and 9th grade andthey really helped me improve as a writer.

    So math is the last section that I will talk about. The mostimportant thing in preparing for math is to learn and understand all theconcepts very thoroughly and keep on practicing throughout elementary andmiddle school. This will help you to develop a solid foundation, which willbenefit you in your high school math classes, as well as the SAT. It will also help you in your highschool science classes, especially chemistry and physics, because a lot ofthose are calculation-based and require basic algebra. A good foundation willhelp you to perform basic calculations very quickly and accurately.

    If you have a good foundation, the SAT problems should berelatively easy, and the thing that you’d have to focus on would be not makingany careless mistakes. Personally, my elementary and middle school’s AM (accelerated math) program helped me todevelop a good foundation. The process for AM was that you first took adiagnostic test. Then the diagnostic test would identify concepts that youhadn’t mastered yet. AM would then generate lots of practice problems on thoseconcepts that you hadn’t mastered, and you’d do practice until the teacherdecided you were ready for a test. The test ensured that you really did masterall the concepts from your practice, and if you still missed the old concepts,you had to do more practice on them. So the key to building a good foundationin math is to keep practicing the concepts that you haven’t fully understood before moving on to the more difficult ones.

    I improved my accuracy on the SAT Math section by doing lotsof practice problems. Overall, practice problems, especially in the SAT format,are extremely helpful, whether your problem is that you make too many carelessmistakes, or that you aren’t used to the way the SAT asks math questions.

    So when should you take the SAT? Most people do it juniorand senior year. But I really encourage all of you to take some diagnostictests early on. You can take the PSAT during your freshman year, and I alsobelieve that lots of SAT review places allow you to take a free diagnosticexam. If your scores are pretty close to your goal, then you can probably takeit sophomore year with a little bit of studying and practice! If your scoresaren’t close to your goal, then you know what you still have to work on, andyou’ll have more insight into how you should study, since you already took adiagnostic test. For me, taking it sophomore year freed up my time to do otherthings during the summer (while other students were taking bootcamp classes). Instead,I took multivariable calculus and linear algebra at a local university and alsoworked briefly with a professor at that university and did some literaturereview in the subject of systems biology. I also spent a lot of time doingcommunity service.

    I wanted to end my talk with some additional notes on theSAT. First of all, SAT review courses ARE helpful – you get lots of practicematerial, and if you have trouble keeping to your own schedule, they will keepyou on track. If you can attend one and you feel that you would benefit fromit, you should. Also, some people have test anxiety and struggle withstandardized tests – I think that the best way to overcome this is to keeppracticing and mimic the testing situation yourself, as often as you can. Sowhenever you do a practice test yourself, set aside a four hour block of time, makesure you have a timer next to you, and you follow all the rules of the SAT, andtake it all at once.

If you are thinking about college apps, remember that theSAT score is not the only thing admissions officers look at. Of course, youshould do the best you can (many students have goals, such as “I want to getabove a 1450” (for the new SAT)) but remember to spend time on things that arenot just test-taking. You can take SAT multiple times if needed.

    Lastly, use the resources that CollegeBoard provides you!The first resource is the SAT blue book. This is a test prep book released bythe CollegeBoard and it contains official SAT practice tests. Another great resourceis the SAT app. It gives you an official practice problem every day, so justtaking a few minutes to answer that question and then understand why you werewrong or right gives you daily exposure to the format and style of SATquestions.

1^. How can you take both AP and IB courses? My understandingis that you can only choose one. Are you taking IB courses at school, andtaking AP courses by yourself?

A: My high school offers both programs and students are allowedto take AP and IB at the same time. Many of our classes at Troy are designed tobe a hybrid, so that someone taking the course can take both the AP and IB testat the end of the school year. For example, our AP Physics classes also doubleas IB courses. Personally, I did not choose to do the full IB diploma so Iwon’t actually be taking the IB tests for English, Computer Science, and Maththis year.

2^. Do you play video games? If so, how much time do youspend on it each week? If not, do you feel peer pressure?

A: No I don’t play video games, and I don’t think I feel peerpressure to play them even though I have friends who do play a lot and they’revery good at them. I’m actually not that good at video games, but I find lotsof other ways to relax – I listen to music, read, spend time on social media,or talk to my friends, and sometimes I write for fun.

3^.  You are taking AP courses very early. How did you takecourses over middle school in order to get this far?

A: I skipped pre-algebra in 6th grade and tookalgebra instead because I happened to be ready. This is because I did a lot ofAccelerated Math, which was a math practice program at our school, and ended upgetting ahead through that. I was also in the higher level English andLiterature classes. The Spanish that was taught at my middle school wasactually Spanish I so I skipped Spanish I when I got to high school. Other thanthat I took regular courses in history and science. Then I tested into TroyHigh School’s Troy Tech and IB program. Therefore I was offered 1 AP class inmy freshman year and 4 in my sophomore year.

4^.  How can you improve your SAT reading?

A: Doing lots of practice problems, especially ones in thestyle of the SAT, are extremely helpful. It helps you to get used to what kindof questions are being asked. If you do enough problems and review why you gotthem right and why you got them wrong, eventually you should get a sense ofwhat each question is asking for and what’s the most likely correct answer.Also reading a variety of things is very helpful, even things that you mightconsider boring, because that’s what’s going to be on the SAT. You need to becomfortable reading and understanding all different kinds of passages.

5^. You must be a very energetic person to accomplish so manythings in such short period. How many hours do you sleep each day on average?

A: I sleep 4-5 hours on weekdays and 7-8 hours on weekends. Onweekdays I take a 1-2 hour nap when I get home from school.