Practice can not only get you to Carnegie Hall but can also earn you higher SAT scores.

But only a certain kind of practice – the kind where you:

• meticulously review your performance
• pinpoint your weaknesses
• assiduously learn how to fix them

In other words, just doing more Blue Book problems won’t magically teach you grammar rules or how to solve nested functions.

Deliberate practice

Take a practice test and have someone else circle the questions you answered incorrectly.

Go back and take a second look at the ones you missed.

Keep track of why you missed each question. (Here’s a tracking worksheet to help you track your mistakes.)

My students usually miss problems for one of these reasons:

1. Did you make a silly math error?

This week, one student’s silly errors – he incorrectly added 8+4, punched in the wrong numbers in the calculator on another problem, and mixed up the x and y axis on a third problem – cost him 50 points. There are no “silly” math errors. There are just careless errors that can add up to a major loss of points.

2. Did you misunderstand the question?

You need to slow down and read the questions more carefully.

3. Did you not understand how to solve the problem?

This is a content issue. What sorts of questions are you missing?  Right triangles? Probability? Write down those reasons in the tracking worksheet.

Look again

The word “review” literally means to see again (re – again, back; view – to see.) One of the secrets to doing well on the SAT is to spend twice as much time reviewing the test as you did taking it. You need to figure out which questions you are missing, why you are missing them, and what you need to do to answer them correctly.

My students and I use the tracking worksheet (and other reports) to carefully track every single mistake or unanswered question. This becomes a blueprint that shows us exactly what we need to focus on to improve their SAT scores.