Private SAT® Tutoring

• Total time: 2 hours and 14 minutes
• Total number of questions: 98

Structure of the test:

1. Verbal section 1: 32 minutes (27 questions)
2. Verbal section 2: 32 minutes (27 questions)
3. Break: 10 minutes
4. Math section 1: 35 minutes (22 questions)
5. Math section 2: 35 minutes (22 questions)

The test adapts to a student’s performance on the first Verbal and first Math section to give them a more appropriately difficult second Verbal and Math section.

For instance, if a student is getting the hardest questions correct on the first Verbal section, then why give them easy questions on the second section that will largely be a waste of the student’s time? There’s no reason to do so. Conversely, if a student is getting all the hardest questions wrong on the first Verbal section, then there is no reason to keep giving them more very hard Verbal questions on the next Verbal section. By adapting to a student’s performance on the first section and thereby eliminating unnecessary questions for the student to complete, the adaptive SAT is shorter but just as accurate.

To recap, if a student does well on the first Verbal section, they will get a second Verbal section with medium/hard questions. If a student does not do so well on the first Verbal section, they will get a second Verbal section with easy/medium questions.

The same goes for Math.

• First, establish a baseline by taking a real past SAT (we also recommend taking a real past ACT as well to determine which test fits you best). You can take an official practice test here (we recommend taking practice test #4 as the first test because the scoring on that test better represents the scoring on the real digital SAT). Or, reach out to us, and we can schedule you to take a practice test with us.
• Now that you have a baseline score, you need to evaluate how far you are from your score goal. The farther you are, the more work you will need to put in to hit your score goal — but the work you put in will also help you excel in college as well (see here). Here’s the work you need to put in:
  • Take real practice tests (both to identify weaknesses but also to practice test-taking stamina)
  • Not only go over the questions you got wrong on the practice tests but look up how to do those topics and do additional questions on those topics so that you eliminate any weaknesses on the tested topics (our tutors, for instance, identify the topic of any questions missed and give students additional questions on those topics from the real past tests so that students will get any questions on those topics correct the next time they see them).
• Take the real test multiple times. Most students get nervous the first time they take any test, so almost all students will score better after taking the SAT a few times (and there is natural variability in scores — see here — so re-taking the SAT increases a student’s chances of a higher score, particularly of a higher superscore).

• Get calculator programs that will solve distance, midpoint, slope, the quadratic formula, etc for you so that you spend less time on these questions and so that you do not make a silly mistake in your calculations. (We have a suite of calculator programs that are custom made to help students on the SAT.)
• Learn the “tricks” to the exam. The fastest way to do so is to work with a tutor who knows the strategies to help beat the test. But, if you practice long enough, you might figure out those tricks too, such as knowing that the word “being” in an answer choice on the grammar section (the “Writing Section”) of the SAT almost guarantees that the answer is incorrect.
• Discover the optimal ways to approach different question types. For example, on the “Reading Section,” students should never look at the answer choices before looking back to the passage for a “vocabulary in context” question because the meaning of the word in context will always have a different meaning than the standard definition of the given word. Looking at the answer choices first will just throw a student off. So students should go straight to the context, treat the given word as a “blank” in the sentence, make up their own definition for the “blank” based on the context, and then compare this definition to the answer choices. This approach almost guarantees that they will get all “vocabulary in context” questions correct.

• Algebra: particularly functions, manipulating equations, quadratics, and equations of lines (lots of questions on equations of lines).
• Algebra 2: particularly exponents, radicals, probability, polynomials, and imaginary numbers.
• Geometry: particularly triangles, perimeter and area of rectangles and circles, volume of cylinders, and equations of circles in an x,y coordinate plane.
• Trigonometry: only a few questions, particularly converting degrees to radians and vice versa.