My SAT Story

No matter how much you prepare for test day, you can’t plan for everything. Take my SAT experience, for example.

First of all, I received an email from the Overlords of the SAT just a few days beforehand, informing me that the location of the test had been changed. I printed out the new ticket and set it on my desk—right next to the original.

On the day of the test, I woke up early to meet my ride, quickly grabbing the ticket from my desk. My friend Zach had suggested that a few of us should carpool together, partially to save gas, partially so we could talk about the test on the way home. Zach got lost on the way to my house and showed up 15 minutes late. After getting lost on the way to the next house as well, we arrived at the high school, barely in time for the test.

Fortunately for us, enough people had been confused by the change in location that the proctor decided to start late. While I waited in line to hand the proctor my ticket, I seethed against every object and person in the room. Everyone was stressed. Everyone was anxious. It was too early for this. Finally, I arrived at the front of the line—and, no surprise, it turns out I had the wrong ticket.

After a few tense moments of speculation, the proctor allowed me to take a seat. Even after everyone sat down, it took an extra 15 minutes for the exam to begin because the proctor couldn’t figure out how to fix the clock on the wall.

My point is this: even though nothing went according to plan, even though I was tired and frustrated and was ready to give up, I knew that I needed to shut off all the negative voices in my head and lock into the Test Zone. In the end, I did really well on the SAT, and I felt even better about my score knowing how hard it was.

There will always be bumps in the road to testing success. Always. There will always be a song stuck in your head, or a person coughing, or broken clock. If you prepare for the worst and refuse to be distracted, you will succeed no matter what.

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Eric Rosenbaum

SAT/ACT Instructor

Victory Step

The Dangers Of Multitasking

Conan O’Brian used to be the only person who could motivate me to work late at night. That is, television shows like his. I would switch the TV on right after cross country practice, and it would stay on until I finished my work and went to bed. As I grew older, I decided that late night television was too distracting, and instead motivated myself by listening to music, chatting with friends, or periodically stopping to surf the internet.

Like a lot of people my age, I thought that distractions focused me, or at least did no harm. They kept me from getting bored, kept me awake, and allowed me to accomplish twice as much in the same amount of time.

It turns out that multitasking is not as harmless as I once thought. Psychologists have long understood that multitasking limits your ability to concentrate. Multitasking takes a bite out of your complex reasoning skills, as well as your long-term and short-term memory. It causes you to spend a large chunk of your study time switching your attention from one place to another. Plus, it uses up the time you would otherwise spend on actual relaxation, which your brain desperately needs.

How often have you looked up from your work to realize that you have no idea who that patient is on Gray’s Anatomy, or that the album you were listening to started over a few minutes ago? If you can’t think about television while you work, you definitely can’t think about work while you watch television. And how much raw time would you say you spend in limbo, in the act of switching your attention from one place to another? It’s a good estimate to say that your brain takes five to ten seconds to completely switch back into homework mode from relaxation mode. If you switch back and forth a few times every minute, those seconds add up.

Not that you can’t use distractions to your advantage sometimes. Here are a few tips, from my own experience:

· Work with friends. You and your friends can distract each other via text message, but it’s a lot harder to help each other that way. When you are physically in a room with people, it is easier to tell when someone is “in the zone” and when they are in the mood to talk. Plus, asking questions is a way of getting something done while taking a break.

· Take a real break. If you feel like you have to stop or else you’ll scream, then just stop. Get a snack. Watch a full TV show, from the couch. Then, when you’re relaxed, pick up where you left off.

· Stagger your work. Work may be less onerous if you switch from one task to another every once in a while. Instead of reading your 100 page reading assignment and then starting your 20 physics problems, alternate 20 pages and four problems. Make sure to finish with the assignment you find the easiest or most enjoyable.

· Choose your music carefully. If you have to listen to music, make it something you have heard a million times before. It is also better to pick music without words.

· It’s OK to do just one thing. One of the reasons I like to multitask is that I feel guilty doing one thing at a time. Why just read a book, if I can read and watch a lecture, or read and talk to friends at the same time? Just remember: not being able to multitask efficiently doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you a person.

--Eric Rosenbaum

SAT/ACT Instructor

Victory Step

Victory Step's Instructors are the Best!

There are three main qualities that Victory Step values in an instructor.

1) Investment in Students’ Success: By the end of our first tutoring or classroom session, Victory Step instructors know their students’ names, their personalities, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Our students are able to achieve because Victory Step's instructors are able to show their students that they believe in their success.

2) Energy and Charisma: Regardless of how intelligent our instructors are, how high we can score on the SAT, or how well we understand the material, we are able to convey the knowledge to students of all skill levels in an exciting, interesting, and effective way that captivates a class of high school students during any of our sessions.

3) Knowledge of the Subject: Victory Step offers the best SAT course available in Dallas! Our instructors demonstrate complete knowledge of the subject they are teaching. After all, we basically call ourselves the SAT gurus. Okay, not really. But, you get the point!

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Beating the Clock

Anyone who has taken the SAT knows that it tests your college readiness and critical thinking abilities through math, reading and writing. However, what you may not realize is that, even though it never shows up as a quantified score on the test, the SAT also tests your abilities to prioritize and manage your time. This part of the test, reflected to a degree in your overall score, is just as important as knowing the material for the test.

Should I start off the math section by answering the hard questions at the end, or the easy ones at beginning? Is it more important to put down an answer for all the questions, or should I work more on being right? Do I really only have 1 minute and 15 seconds for each math question? You may ask yourself these questions going into the exam, and even while you are in there, but the important thing to remember is that accuracy will always pay off on this test more than speed.

If you answer every question, but you answer half of them wrong, you only end up hurting yourself on this test. If you waste too much time on the four hard questions in the section and never get to the easy ones, then the questions you have answered have cost more than they have helped. While they may seem insignificant at the time, your overall score will come to reflect these split-second decisions just as much as your knowledge and skills.

Working against the clock in this way offers colleges a snapshot of your ability to prioritize between answering more questions and answering more right. It assesses your capacity to realize you’ve invested too much time on a question and must write it off as a sunk cost. While being able to prioritize on the test may not offer the most accurate picture of your ability to manage your time over a whole semester, these sorts of micro-decisions that you face nonetheless play a big part in your overall success as a student.

To conclude, you must always keep it in your mind that the SAT is as much about managing the short amount of time that you have to ensure the best chance of correctly answering as many questions as possible. It sounds impossible, but it’s all a matter of pacing yourself and realizing when you have spent too much time on a single question for it to help your score any further. While this part of the exam never shows up as a quantified score, it nonetheless plays a major part in the overall score you receive on any given test, so you must tackle it head-on like any other section of the test.

And remember to always do the math on the test, not on the clock.

--

Toni Whalen

SAT/ACT Instructor

www.victorysteponline.com

Introducing Yourself through Your Application Essay

When you meet someone and hold a conversation with him or her for the first time, what do you pay attention to? Do you focus only on statistical information, like age, height and other calculable data? Or do you focus on what he or she tells you personally about themselves, such as interests? To some extent, we all do both in any sort of introduction, whether we are conscious of it or not, and that even goes for colleges.

No matter how much data you give them, from your transcripts to your standardized test scores, colleges want to know more about you as a person, not just as a collection of numbers. Since college admissions boards can’t meet and interview every single one of their applicants, they instead use your application essay as your personal introduction to them. Because of this, you should look at your essay as a conversation with a person you hope to get to know better, the colleges you hope to attend.

The prompts colleges give for their application essays generally come in three flavors: broad, extremely broad, and frustratingly detailed. They can be as open-ended as asking about your goals in life and how you plan to achieve them, or sometimes they will ask you to draw upon a specific sort of personal experience, like a funny incident, and explain how it affected you. Other times, colleges are absurdly specific, giving you a quote from Aristotle and asking what it means and how you will apply it to your life and your studies. Since the topics you can discuss in an essay range so widely, it’s difficult to give specific advice on how to write such an essay. However, there are some general guidelines that hold true for every application essay you will ever write.

First, since this is your personal introduction to the school, you want to “dress” to impress. If you were going to a face-to-face interview for a job, you would try to look clean, crisp and professional, and you want to do the same for your essay. That means you want to put your best writing forward for this essay, offering your best arguments and your strongest prose. Once you’re done writing, you must also take the time to revise it yourself and have another person look it over, just to ensure no pesky misplaced commas snuck into it.

Next, you always want to be honest in an essay. Although this does not mean confessing to every fault and flaw you have, you should always remember that outright lies have a tendency of catching up to you. So if you need to write an essay on a great hardship in your life, you don’t want to talk about how the death of your grandmother affected you so deeply if she’s still alive and playing golf three times a week. Remember that making up stories about genuine experiences will never have the same ring of truth, and you can always write more strongly and passionately about real personal experiences anyway.

Finally, as always, be yourself. If you’re the tomboy on the fencing team who builds sets for school plays, don’t try to make yourself out to be the cheerleading prom queen if that’s not you. The essay is the only part of your application where you get to showcase who you really are, so don’t try to make it up. That’s not what colleges want.

Remembering these simple guidelines can help you not only with the applications for undergraduate programs, but the myriad other essays you’ll have to write in the coming years for scholarships, grants, internships, and graduate and professional schools. This is a skill you’ll be using for the rest of your life!

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Victory Step

Why do we take this mind-numbingly boring exam (SAT) anyway??

When colleges and universities must make admissions decisions, the people making those decisions look primarily at a student’s GPA to determine whether the student would be a good fit academically for the school. But how can they know that two students from different schools with the same GPA actually perform equally well? Or that a student with a lower GPA perhaps would have done better if she had articipated in fewer extracurricular activities?

This is where an applicant’s supplementary materials, his essays, recommendations and standardized test scores, can speak for his ability. Because of this, colleges and universities often require the SAT or other standardized tests as an unbiased measure of a student’s academic ability and probable success in college.

First, the SAT offers a level playing field for applicants from different schools. As all students no doubt realize, comparing grades from two different classes can be like comparing apples and oranges. The subject, the class time, the teacher and course designation (such as an AP or honors class) can affect the difficulty of any class. Because of this, it’s not always accurate to compare students taking the same course at the same school but in different classes, and the inaccuracy only increase as students are compared from different schools, states and even countries. Therefore, the SAT and other standardized tests provide a means for schools to accurately compare students by controlling for these differences. While it’s not a perfect system, since good students often struggle with the SAT, it does give colleges a different measure by which to compare two students with the same GPA.

Second, the SAT gives a snapshot of a student’s college readiness in three major skill sets – math, reading and writing. While students will not necessarily focus on these in their studies, they each play a critical role in college and in life. Therefore, it behooves colleges to ensure that the math savant can write a good essay, and the budding historian can pass his required algebra course. Though SAT prep programs like Victory Step can aid a student in honing these skills for the test, a student’s entire academic career lays the foundations for each of these skills. While math, reading and writing are by no means the only skills necessary for success in college, they are strong indicators of whether a student can succeed in a university, given the rigorousness of its programs.

Finally, the SAT tests the critical thinking abilities necessary for all areas of study in college, from the liberal arts to astrophysics. Once accepted by Mensa and other high IQ societies as a qualifying exam, the SAT does indeed test a student’s ability to think through certain types of problems critically rather than simply regurgitating information. As any Victory Step graduate knows, the test keeps students on their feet by asking simple questions in a convoluted manner. They must think through every question to ensure that they are answering the correct question, not just the one their years of school have trained them to answer. Because of this, SAT results can portend success in any educational field, not just those directly tested.

Given this, it seems easy to see why colleges and universities turn to the SAT in making tough admissions decisions. It gives the admissions board another way of assessing students from widely varying backgrounds, and it demonstrates to some extent a student’s probability of success in college. While it is never the be-all and end-all factor in a college application, a good SAT score can bolster a student’s chances of acceptance into almost any university.