The SAT is an effective means of artificially distinguishing between people. The speed requirement produces a nice distribution of scores and the blissfully gullible colleges can then accept someone with a 750 and reject someone with a 650 even though the score difference tells them almost nothing (flipping a coin would spoil the illusion). If you happen to be the creator of the statistically beautiful distribution you state categorically that the test is actually NOT a speed test and do your best to keep a straight face.
Not that the SAT is entirely meaningless. The problem-solving on the math part of the test is directly related to what you see in a college-level introductory science or math course. So if you have studied algebra and geometry and you score above 600, you will probably be able to handle introductory math, chemistry, or physics in college. If you don't break 500, stay away from these classes. If you are either a natural test-taker or you are serious about your SAT training and you break 700, smile broadly and take your score to the gullible colleges. If you are not going to take science and math courses, your score on the math part of the SAT is irrelevant once you get your acceptance letter.
The relevance of the verbal part is a harder question. The verbal test would ideally predict a student's ability to understand scholarly work and write readable, thoughtful essays in college courses. But the ability to speed-read passages and answer ETS-style questions is obviously not directly relevant to any college course. Being able to write a high-scoring ETS essay may likewise be largely useless in college. We really don't know. CrushTheTest is interested in observations, ideally from college professors, about the relevance, if any, of the verbal part of the SAT to college work.
There is some interesting research showing that a person's SAT score can be partially predicted by a personality test. The researchers used the Myers-Briggs test and found good correlations between personality profile and SAT score. This kind of research gives you an idea of just how easy it might be to increase your score.
Which brings us to Stanley Kaplan. It was Kaplan who proved that large score increases resulting from training were possible. The test-makers (ETS) didn't like it. Training won't help they said. They wanted to believe their test was more than any test could possibly be so they blew off reality, called Kaplan a charlatan, and stuck their heads in the sand. Many years later, the more stubborn ETS officials were dead, Kaplan was a millionaire, and the premier testing organization had quietly reversed itself and was busily marketing its very own prep materials! (No sense letting Kaplan make all the money.) It's too much even for ETS to sell prep materials for an "aptitude" test so now they say the letters S-A-T don't stand for anything! The technically correct way to refer to the SAT is to say "The test formerly known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, formerly known as the test you can't train for, now known as the test you'd be crazy not to train for."
The test-makers won't like it (they're still ostriches), but it is our opinion, here at CrushTheTest, that anyone who starts off getting above 600 on a few practice tests should aim for an 800. Genius is not required. Remember, all the questions have to be answerable in under two minutes, so there are no truly difficult questions. The mystique of the 800 is just that, a mystique. But it will help you get into college.
Which brings us to those wonderful bureaucrats, the college admissions officers. The well-known limitations of the SAT do not prevent most of them from worshipping the test. The more slippery ones utter platitudes containing the phrase ". . . there are many factors . . ." and go on to make a not-so-honest effort to convince people that the SAT is certainly not being used to arbitrarily cull the admissions pool. They forget that regular people aren't as gullible as college administrators. A few colleges have made the SAT optional; the others are still mouthing their platitudes even though no one is listening.
Since you have to play the game, you might as well win. Your training should focus on 1) speed, 2) accuracy, and 3) question recognition ability. These superficial skills will get you the score you need. Once that's done, you can concentrate on developing real, serious, useful skills at the college of your choice.
Speed is developed by highly motivated and disciplined practice. You don't need a prep course for this. We recommend using the practice sections in the The Official SAT Study Guide written by the Educational Testing Service. This material should be reserved exclusively for "dress rehearsal" FOR REAL timed practice. And you should take your score on each section very seriously.
For the math section, if you need a 700+, you can hone your accuracy using the CrushTheTest practice questions. Our training technique is perhaps a bit brutal but is also just what you need. The vicious CrushTheTest computer program insists that you get 10 out of 10 on each section. You are not told which ones you got wrong or even how many you got wrong and you are thereby forced to develop what we call "extreme accuracy." Extreme accuracy isn't taught in school. No one tells you that just being probably right isn't enough, that you have to KNOW you are right when you are right. As you try again and again on a CrushTheTest section, you will begin to develop this skill. If you can get into the "BE SURE" mindset, you will CrushTheTest.
Question recognition is important because, as you know, the test is all about speed. You must IMMEDIATELY characterize a question by type and get on the short route to the answer. CrushTheTest math questions are organized in eight main categories: algebra, geometry, units, statistics, numbers, reading, logic, and sequences. Each category has 1-4 subcategories so you can concentrate on each particular kind of question asked on the SAT.
Remember, no standardized test can tell you how smart you are. Even if you get 800's on the SAT, it doesn't mean you will cure cancer or create the successor to the transistor or figure out how the physical constants of the universe were set to their present values. If you actually are a genius, you are not going to find it out by answering large numbers of cute little tricky questions in a short time. The day you walk out of your last introductory science/math course is the day your SAT score becomes meaningless. Unfortunately, many people remember their score for decades and still feel strongly about it until the day they die. This is a bizarre result of the system we've created; it's nothing but a fantastic illusion.
There is a lot of criticism of college admission procedures in the article above. To be fair, we feel we should offer an alternative to the current policies. Some colleges have simply made the test optional. That way students who want to use the test to prove themselves can, while students who don't want to spend weeks prepping for the stupid test can prove themselves in other ways. Colleges that still wish to require the SAT should set a minimum score that you need to be eligible for admission and not use the test for anything else. So if the minumum for highly competitive college X is 600 on each section, it wouldn't matter whether you had a 610 or an 800. Of course, the college would still have more applicants than places so they would have to find other ways to narrow their field. There are other ways but they are not quite as convenient as the SAT. Colleges that worship every point on the SAT are a lot like those classic bad managers in the business world who can't figure out how to hire capable people and end up hiring according to whether or not the job applicant knows how to use some particular piece of software. The SAT, like knowledge of some XYZ software, tells you only a little about a person's real capabilities; its main value is in saving admissions officers a lot of time and effort. -- CTT