Skip Some Questions
There's a strategy to succeed on the SAT that you've never learned in school.
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The SAT isn’t like a school test. This is one of the key things about the SAT, and its true for a whole host of reasons. For starters, the SAT doesn’t ask you to show what you know. In school, you’ll learn about the Periodic Table of the Elements, the Bill of Rights, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Your tests in school are about these subjects.
The SAT is about skills. Yes, knowing a common math formula or some grammar rule helps, but the test provides a formula sheet and never directly asks you to define a grammar rule. Can you work through a math problem? Can you find what the correct English phrasing is? Can you do it all on a time crunch? That’s the SAT.
There’s another major difference between any school test and the SAT. The goal for a school test is to get as many questions correct as you can. By getting 100% on a school test, you have shown you have full command of the material being tested. You know the subject. Making sure you know the subject is the key aim of high school instruction. Not everyone will get there, but that’s the aim for all high school tests.
Less than one percent of SAT takers get a perfect score. The test is specifically designed to arrange students along a bell curve. 50% of students will have a 1000 or below, which makes it the median score. And that median score is what students receive if they get roughly 50% of the questions correct. Most SAT takers will miss many more questions on the SAT than they ever would on a school test. Wrapping your head around this fact is one of the secret testing strategies.
Let’s look at a 1250 score. That’s not a perfect score, but a very good score. A 1250 is the 82nd percentile, meaning anyone with a 1250 scored better than 4 out of 5 test-takers. A 1250 is the median SAT score for the incoming classes at Baylor University, Butler University, DePauw University, Duquesne University, Iowa State University, Louisiana State University, Temple University, and the University of Oregon. (You can find this in Section C9 on the linked Common Data Sets, if you’d like to explore yourself.) 1250 also makes a student competitive for admittance and scholarships at a wide range of schools. It’s a good score that has helped students get into selective schools.
And a test-taker missing about 16 of 66 Reading & Writing Questions and about 13 of 54 Math questions will receive a 1250. Well, the College Board’s “Scoring Paper SAT Practice Test” PDFs, which accompany paper Practice Tests and are the best guide to how many correct answers get certain scores, show score ranges. These are also for non-adaptive tests, which makes them based on a slightly different scoring process. They also are inconsistent. Depending on the Practice Test, the exact “Raw Score” (i.e. the number of correct answers) translates to a different section score range. These are official statements about scoring from the Test-maker.
What the Scoring documents say are that a student who misses a quarter of the questions on the SAT will be in line for an 82nd percentile score. On a school test, that’s a 75–or a solid C. If you went into a history or science test thinking you could miss one of every five or six questions and still have room for error, you’d be asking for trouble. This can be a smart move on the SAT. Just know what your goal score is and what your margin for error is going in. See a question that might as well be in an ancient language that has yet to be deciphered? Leave it be.
There is one other hugely important thing about leaving some questions on the SAT. DO NOT LEAVE THEM BLANK. An unanswered question on the SAT is a wrong answer. You should always put down some answer choice. You’ll see various kinds of advice about choosing an answer when you are making a complete guess on a multiple-choice question. Some people say “Choose a letter of the day” or “Always pick C” or “Select A and move on.” The bigger point is leave an answer for every question.
But feel free to do that a few times. The SAT is built to have you miss a few questions and still get a good score.