10 Tips to Improve Your SAT Score
Hoping to improve your SAT score to increase your chances of acceptance to your dream school? We’ll go over 10 tried and true ways to help you reach your SAT goal score. If you’ve already taken the SAT and aren’t 100% satisfied with your score, don’t sweat it. Most students end up taking the test more than once. And with good reason: the College Board found that 63% of students in the class of 2018 increased their score by taking the SAT a second time. So, here are our expert tips for increasing your SAT score. In an ideal world, as soon as you’re done taking the SAT and your materials have been collected by the test proctor, you begin to write as much down as you remember from the test. Take notes on what confused you, questions that you found difficult, and concepts or sections that were harder than you anticipated. These notes will help to guide your future studying and, along with your score report, will become an important tool in understanding where to improve. But don’t worry, if your test is over and you didn’t write anything down afterwards, it isn’t too late. Set aside some time to think carefully about the test that you took, and see if you can recall any of the specifics from above. Do you remember a question that was so hard you didn’t even know where to start? Do you remember which sections of the test felt easy and which felt difficult? Were there sections that seemed completely foreign? It’s never too late to think back to the test and recall as much as you can. There is a ton of valuable information in your score report. Your inclination is probably to glance at your total score and individual test scores, and then toss it aside to celebrate or mope depending on your results, but make sure you don’t toss it too far. Once you’ve recovered from the initial excitement, take a few moments to review it. In particular, pay attention to your subscores. These include a score ranging from 1-15 for each of the following categories: Try to identify areas in which your performance could be improved. Your goal is to get as specific as possible. Move from “I want to improve my SAT score” to “I want to improve my Math SAT” to “I want to improve my Problem Solving and Data Analysis skills” to really target your studying. For an overview of your score report, read SAT Score Range: How to Break Down Your Score. A good way to determine how much work is in front of you is to set a target score. Your target score should take several factors into account. First, you’ll need to consider where you’re starting from. The good news is, the lower your score, the more room there is for improvement. However, improvement won’t come without hard work. You will need to set a target that maximizes your potential while remaining realistic. Generally, if you have a score below 500, an improvement of 200 points is a feasible target. For higher scores, you can aim to improve between 100 and 150 points. The other factor to consider when setting a target score is the list of schools to which you intend to apply. You should take into account the middle 50% score ranges of admitted students at those schools when setting your goal score. The middle 50% indicates where 50% of accepted students scored. Take Princeton’s middle 50% range of 1460-1590: this means 25% of students scored below 1460, 50% scored between 1460 and 1590, and 25% of students scored above 1570. To be most competitive, you should aim to be in the upper end of the range, or even above it. At the very least, you should try to fall within the range. Here are the middle 50% ranges at the top 20 universities in the US: While your score report will indicate which content areas are most in need of improvement, they will not reveal the specific kinds of error to which you’re most susceptible. The easiest way to reveal this is by taking a practice test and evaluating its results carefully. If your score on your practice test is dramatically higher than your score on the actual SAT, you probably fell victim to test anxiety. There are many ways to conquer this, but the good news is that test anxiety generally diminishes on its own with subsequent testing experiences. The more you take the SAT, the more familiar you’ll be with the format, and the less you will be affected by test anxiety. For more about test anxiety, read the CollegeVine post 10 Ways to Overcome Test Taking Anxiety. If your score is similar on the practice test, you will need to evaluate your mistakes. Generally, these fall into three categories: Once you know which mistakes you make most, you will be able to start tackling the underlying causes behind them. As the saying goes, there’s safety in numbers, and a study group is no exception. Having regular study dates with a consistent group of classmates can be a great way to set goals, share strategies, and hold one another accountable. You can check with your high school, local library, or even a local community college to find a study group. If you can’t locate an existing study group, it’s also possible to form your own. In fact, the College Board has compiled a guide for Starting an SAT Study Group that includes a checklist for getting started and some general tips.
There are tons of free study materials available to help with SAT studying and preparation, but knowing where to look for high-quality materials is important. Many study guides have been self-published online by students with not much more experience than you. Instead, you should look for professionally produced materials that are based on a wealth of industry insights. No matter how much content knowledge you study, you need to know the format of the test and how it assesses this knowledge in order to be successful. Find study materials that include SAT-specific strategies and tips. The best place to start is Khan Academy. This is the official College Board SAT practice partner, and it’s totally free. The website contains a wealth of materials from practice tests to strategy sharing. By creating a free online account, you can receive personalized, interactive practice that is tailored to your specific SAT needs. In addition, you can download the Official SAT Study Guide from the College Board. There are also many free study guides available online. CollegeVine provides the following SAT study guides and resources: You can also download our free SAT guide and free SAT checklist. We also have these YouTube videos: You might perceive SAT tutors as a privilege that not everyone can afford, but there are options out there to suit almost any budget. Sometimes, an SAT tutor can simply be a mentor, teacher, or guidance counselor who has helped to coach other students through the SAT in the past. Ask around at your school or public library to find if there is anyone with this sort of experience and expertise who might be willing to help you. You can also find paid tutoring services available locally, or online. Individual tutoring plans can save time and money by using the exact amount of prep needed to help you achieve your goal SAT score. If cost is a concern for you, you may be able to find pro bono tutoring services in your area, or apply for a scholarship with a larger tutoring company. Alternatively, some local tutoring companies also offer pro bono tutoring services to students who qualify. You can search for opportunities near you by conducting an online query with the terms “pro bono SAT tutor” and your city name. You can also enroll in a free SAT prep class, though nothing does beat personalized instruction! If you don’t want to leave the comforts of your home, there are even online SAT prep classes, and some are even free. The SAT consists, in large part, of abstract skills that can be quite difficult to study in isolation. That being said, there is a pool of content knowledge necessary for success on the test, and if content knowledge was a weakness on your practice or diagnostic SAT, you should be certain that you’re reinforcing it before you take the test again. If you need advice on where to start, we recommend learning the material that lends itself best to rote memorization. In particular, you should be familiar with the math skills and conventions of standard English that are required on the test. The math skills will include the following content areas: Standard English Conventions on the SAT include: To read more about the Standard English Conventions required on the SAT, see Chapter 12 of the Official SAT Study Guide. No matter how difficult any question on the SAT is, you will have a 50% chance of getting it right if you can eliminate two of the answer choices. It’s likely that all studying aside, you will probably encounter during the course of the test at least one or two questions on which you will need to make your best guess. Capitalize on these opportunities to earn an extra point or two by making the smartest guess possible. If you really have no clue about how to solve a problem, try working backwards from the answers. See if there are any answer choices that you can immediately rule out. Even if there are not, try to plug some answers into the question to see if any can be eliminated that way. Think of it this way: A completely random guess of the four answer choices has a 25% chance of being correct. If you can eliminate one more answer choice, you suddenly have a 33.3% chance of guessing correctly. And if you can eliminate yet another choice, you’ll be up to a 50% chance of guessing correctly. Those aren’t bad odds for not knowing the answer to a question. If you have absolutely no idea at all, use the “Answer of the Day” strategy: just pick a random letter, like “B,” and consistently put that down for questions where you can’t eliminate any answers. You’ll have a 25% chance of getting these questions correct if you guess the same answer each time. We say this in pretty much all of our SAT advice posts, but the reason we repeat it so frequently is because the SAT is one of those tests where the best preparation is the test itself. Second to that, practice tests are the most fool-proof preparation there is for a test that measures almost as much test-taking strategy as it does content and skill. Start by taking untimed practice tests, one section at a time. Identify your weaknesses and work to improve in those areas. Gradually, as your skills grow, begin to take each section of the test with time constraints. And finally, take a few complete practice tests under testing conditions as similar to test day as possible. You can find seven official SAT practice tests available at Khan Academy. We also have 3 free, exclusive SAT practice tests that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. While the prospect of improving your SAT score can definitely seem daunting at first, it’s reassuring to know that most students take the SAT more than once, and the majority of them experience the most significant score improvements between their first and second SAT. In fact, the lower your score to start with, the greater the chance that you’ll achieve significant improvements on your next test. Want to know how your SAT score/ACT score impacts your chances of acceptance to your dream schools? Our free Chancing Engine will not only help you predict your odds, but also let you know how you stack up against other applicants, and which aspects of your profile to improve. Sign up for your free CollegeVine account today to gain access to our Chancing Engine and get a jumpstart on your college strategy!
How to Improve Your SAT Score: 10 Expert Tips
1. Next SAT Prep Starts the Second the Prior Test Ends
2. Interpret Your Score Report
3. Set a Target Score
School Name
US News Ranking
Middle 50% SAT
Princeton
1
1460-1590
Harvard
2
1460-1580
Columbia
3
1480-1560
MIT
3
1520-1580
UChicago
3
1500-1560
Yale
3
1450-1560
Stanford
7
1420-1570
Duke
8
1500-1560
Penn
8
1460-1550
Johns Hopkins
10
1480-1550
Northwestern
10
1450-1540
Caltech
12
1530-1570
Dartmouth
12
1440-1560
Brown
14
1420-1550
Cornell
16
1400-1560
Rice
16
1470-1560
Notre Dame
18
1410-1540
UCLA
19
1290-1510
WashU in St. Louis
19
1480-1550
4. Figure Out Which Mistakes You Make Most
5. Join a Study Group
6. Capitalize on Free Study Materials
7. Get Help
8. Learn the Material That’s Easiest to Memorize
9. Employ the Process of Elimination
10. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE