How I Improved My SAT Score by 300+ Points: 5 Life-Saving Study Tips, Practice Books You NEED to Use

hey guys it's jillian and today i'm going to be talking to you guys about how i self-study for the sat the steps that i took some tips i have for you guys and the all-time best books that i used to study that helped me raise my score from an 11 90 to a 15 10. before i get into the tips that i want to share with you guys and the books i recommend i wanted to give a little bit more information about my journey because i know that it's such a hard process and i feel like it would be really good for you guys to know what i went through to find the right thing for me and how you can find the way that works best for you so i took my first sat practice test at the end of my sophomore year and i ended up getting an 1190 and right off the bat i knew that i could do better because i didn't really study for that i just knew i still had a lot to learn because when you go through junior year you also most likely go through more math that you need to know for the test so that's also a good thing to keep in mind as you're studying i ended up signing up for a test prep class over the summer and honestly i didn't really find it that helpful i think it was really good at teaching me the basics of the test and maybe how it was formatted but it honestly wasn't that good at teaching me the real strategies for being such a well-known organization for test prep after going to that test prep class every week for the entire summer i ended up only improving my score by 10 points so after an entire summer of going to that test prep class we got to take a couple more practice tests and i remember getting a couple of scores that were actually lower than my original score which i was not very happy about because i was starting my junior year and that is when i need to take all my tests so i knew i really needed to crack down on the studying that test prep class was obviously just not working for me so i needed to find something else to do so i decided to start self-studying at home and it honestly worked so much better for me so after studying for the rest of summer and a little bit into my junior year i took my first sat and ended up getting a 1360 after studying myself and i was honestly pretty happy about this but i knew that i could do better and i really wanted to do better so i decided to really study hard during my junior year for the sat and i ended up taking it again in march and i got a 1510 which i was blown away by i was not expecting it but i was super happy with that score so that is the score that i used so that was just a really quick recap of my journey through the sat and i know it's a grueling process but hopefully these tips that i'm about to share with you will make it a little bit easier so here are the five steps that i took when i was studying for the sat by myself and the books that i used and the books will all be in the description below so definitely go look at those if you want to purchase them yourself and get started okay so the very first thing that i really want to tell you guys is to just take as many practice tests as you can obviously when i was doing the test prep class it really wasn't helping much for me and i realized it's because i didn't get to actually take the test we were mostly just doing practice questions and they were just kind of in like question clumps and that just really wasn't working for me because i needed to get that rhythm of really going through the questions and just doing them all at once because that's what the real test is like and you don't want to get used to doing all of these little questions by themselves because you really need to get used to the fact that they're all going to be in a row so that being said my next step is to not time yourself when you're first studying for it and i think this kind of seems counterintuitive because i just said that you have to get used to doing them under a time crunch but the thing is if you don't know how to do the problems and really approach the problems with the right mindset and the right techniques you'll never know how to do them under a time crunch especially so what i would do when i first started self studying for the sat is i would just go through an entire practice test not timed so when i first started studying for the sat i would just go through an entire practice test without timing it so then later i could go back and see which questions i got wrong because then it's really just a measure solely on whether you know how to do the problem or not if you time it it's more of like a can you do the problem and also can you make it under this time and it just puts more pressure on you and you may mess up on questions that you know how to do and then it's not really an accurate assessment of what you do know how to do versus what you don't know how to do and that's really what you want to figure out when you're self-studying for the sat and within this step i have a little extra tip so let's say you have those five practice tests and you take maybe like the first three not timed and you feel like you've kind of gotten the hang of a lot of the skills that you need in let's say the math section then maybe for those last two sections you want to try to time yourself maybe even give yourself like five extra minutes or three extra minutes or something like that and that will actually really help you get closer to that time limit while also still building on your skills and at the end of your studying before you take a real test just make sure to maybe sit and go through an entire test while you are timed because even though it's really good to get your skills down without the timing the timing still is important and sometimes it is a time crunch so you want to make sure that you really can't make it in that time so then when you're taking the test you don't kind of like freak out because you're like running out of time and you just didn't practice the time so the next step that i took was really just to not take the entire test with all the sections at once i know i said to take as many practice tests as possible but you definitely don't want to get yourself bogged down by taking every single section in a row because that is basically studying for five hours after that you're just going to be mentally exhausted and you really won't retain the information that you want to retain instead what i suggest is focusing on one subject for an entire day of studying so if you're planning on studying for maybe like three or four hours in a day focus that entire time on one subject such as math or reading or english by focusing on this one section at a time it makes it easier to not get mentally exhausted by continuously switching between different skills that you use in your brain so what i did for that is i had books actually that had multiple practice tests in which i will share in a second that you can actually just skip around instead of like taking an entire practice test in a row i would just take them section by section which actually really helped out in the long run because you can really master the skills before moving on to the next section this actually kind of leads into my next tip it sounds a little weird but it's don't mark the right answers on the questions that you got wrong just mark an x instead and the reason that i did this is because i wanted to give myself a chance to guess the right answer when i go back and try to fix it so what i did is i would go and take an entire practice test and then i would compare it with the answer key and mark the ones that i got right right and mark the ones that i got wrong wrong and then after i did that i would go to all the wrong answers and i would try to solve it again so if it's like a math problem you just check your math go through it again and see if you can try to get a different answer than the one you got before and then if you get that one right then you know how to do it instead first is the alternate which is just marking the correct answer and then you're less likely to actually go back and try to figure out how you got it wrong and that is why so many people just don't improve on their math or reading or writing or any other score is because they just don't ever try to go back on their mistakes and see what they did wrong so by not marking the correct answer you actually give yourself the opportunity to go figure out what you did wrong by yourself before the answer key tells you what you did wrong and my last tip is to go into each test thinking it's going to be the last test that you are allowed to take and what i mean by this is that you shouldn't go into each test thinking that you have more and more chances because that's definitely what i did my first time when i got a 1360 and that is why i think that i really didn't do as well you could really see leading up to that test in like last night or even the couple days leading up to it but i wasn't taking it as seriously as i should be and i think it was because i knew that it was just october and i had the entire junior year to take that test so i just went into it like i didn't study as much the couple days before and i went to bed late the night before which don't do that that is really bad and you should go to bed early so the big idea from this step because i know this has kind of been a lot of rambling but the big idea is just to take it seriously when you're going into your test just have it in your mind no matter what month it is no matter how close you are to your time that you need to apply to college you need to think of this test as the only test you are going to take and if you want to think of it in a different way think of it in a sense of money you have to pay for these tests and if you are someone who wants to save money which i would assume are most people you have to pay for each test that you take so if you want to save money the faster you get the score that you want to take and the sooner you take it seriously the more money you're going to save because you won't have to take any more tests in the future all right so those were my main five steps that i took to get the score that i got to but what really really really is so important is the practice books that you use to take all of your practice tests because some of them are just not as good as others some of them just don't have the practice skills and the questions that you need to actually practice for your sat so here are the books that i used to practice for my sat that really boosted my score so much as you guys can tell so my number one book that i recommend to you guys is college board's official sat study guide and i probably use the 2018 or 2019 one you guys are gonna use the 2020 one because that is the latest updated one and this book is honestly just the best obviously it's by college board so they obviously make the test so they should have the best book but even though college board has kind of sucked this year honestly with all the ap tests this book really honestly just saved my score i would definitely recommend that you get this book so it is in the description down below with all the other books that i'm gonna recommend in this video because basically what it has is it has eight real tests and you can go through and take these tests so like i said in my example there were five but there's actually eight in this book which makes it even better because you have more chances to improve on your score and go back and see your mistakes and take more practice tests and get used to the format and improve your techniques and skills and everything like that so it's really great that you have so many practice tests in here basically what you can do is use all those steps go and take the practice test not timed and then timed and check it with the answer key and guess those wrong answers and turn them into right answers and the other great thing about this book is that not only does it have a test bank but it also has explanations that are in depth about each question that even if you get it right you can still read more about exactly how college board wants you to think about each of these questions and i really think that reading these questions and all of these test banks just really helps solidify in your mind how you should think about each question in the way that college board wants you to think about it so if anything if you're on a budget and you only can buy one single book this is the book that you want to buy because it has basically everything you need it has the practice test it has the answer key and it has that test bank that you can actually look at the answer explanations and see what college board wants you to think so i really really recommend that you get this book and it is in the description like i said before if you complete those eight practice tests and you actually want more practice tests to work on and more practice questions just to really master it here are a couple of other options that you can use so the first thing that i recommend is to look at the exact same study guide the official sat study guide by college board but instead of looking up the 2020 version look up the 2019 or 2018 version because those are honestly just as good those are probably the ones that i used and just use those to also practice with more practice tests because you know that those are trustworthy because they're by college board and they're obviously what people in the past have used to get their scores so you know that that is a great book to use as well it's just the less updated version because it's from the year before or if you want to try a different route there's also books by the princeton review which i also highly recommend because i used the princeton review to review for all of my ap tests which i can make another video on if you guys want some tips on how to review for the ap tests but i use the prints and review books all the time throughout my high school experience one of the benefits of the princeton review on which is also in the description is that it has 10 practice tests actually so that is two more than the college board one if you are looking to get a little bit more practice and it is also one dollar cheaper i think the other one is a little bit less than 20 and this one is a little bit less than 19. so it's really not a big difference but two practice tests is actually a lot more because it's a lot more opportunity to practice so if you're looking to go a little above and beyond this might be the book for you so just in case you do need a little bit more practice here are a couple of other books you can use to get really specific on the sections that you want to do and i just wanted to put a little disclaimer here before i recommend these books that i actually didn't personally use these books but i did use the brand which is barrens to study for other tests that i needed to prep for so i know that this brand is totally trustworthy and i completely recommend it so this first one is going to be baron's math workbook and it's going to have two full-length math section practice tests in there so if you want just a little bit more practice for math then i would go ahead and buy this book because it's very good if you want to just very specifically study the math section and not the other sections which is maybe more of like the future days when you're studying when you want to do more specific because you're already good on the other ones you don't want to waste your money when you can just purchase a book that has the very specific section that you want to work on so that is the math one that i recommend and the other one is going to be a reading one which is the other section i know a lot of people struggle with myself included so this one is also by behrens it's just the barons reading workbook and this one i also highly recommend for the same reasons as the math one if you just want a little bit more practice on the reading because i know for me i definitely struggled with the reading one and that led me to take a lot of practice tests in reading but then i left a lot of the english sections blank which was kind of a waste of money looking back because i just had all of these sat practice books that had the entire reading and math sections filled and then all the english sections were just blank so it could have honestly really helped me if i recognized that early on and bought books that were actually geared more towards what i needed to work on like i said before all these books that i mentioned will be in the description down below so definitely go check those out if you need a book to study for the sat and if you found this video helpful make sure to like and subscribe because you know doing that stuff really helps with the youtube algorithm and i really just want this video to get out to as many people as possible because i know it is such a hard process and you guys really might just need a little extra encouragement or boost to get through it and definitely these books are super helpful and i wanted to reach people who are maybe just a little bit lost in the process and need some guidance and definitely make sure to comment if you have any questions about sat prep or college applications or just anything like that any questions that you have because i always answer every single comment and i want to make sure that i can help you guys out with anything you need so that is my entire journey of how i studied for the sat i know it's kind of a whirlwind journey and it's really not fun but i know you guys will get through it and i just really want to wish you guys good luck if you are working towards your next sat test and i know that you guys will do an amazing job just good job on all the studying that you've done some people just really don't hear it often enough and i just want to be the person that tells you that you're doing a really good job just don't be too hard on yourself when you're studying because it is really such a hard process it's really all going to be okay in the end though i promise it won't be the end of the world if you don't get your score that you want because honestly i've learned that it really just doesn't matter that much once you get into the college application process but as you were going into it i know it definitely feels like a big deal at the time so just don't be too hard on yourself and i really hope you guys have a great day okay bye i wanted to give a quick disclaimer just about the sat and all standardized testing it really isn't a good measure of your education or your knowledge or just how smart you are it's really more of a matter of who's a good test taker or who can take the test in a certain amount of time or who can take all these hard problems and just guess correctly and some people just really get lucky and some don't and i think i fall somewhere in the middle which is where a lot of people fall as you go through this process you'll realize that all the studying and stuff you'll end up being the more successful person because you'll know how to work hard you're going to learn how to really play to your strengths and not everything is going to come perfect to you and that's just going to make you work harder honestly and that kid who gets everything perfect in school is just not going to have that work ethic and the same work ethic that you do that you've built up this whole time because you have had to study so i just wanted to give that message out there because i know i've definitely felt like that before where i'm like oh it's really unfair because that person in school can just slack off and not really work hard and do the perfect scores on every single test and now looking back i'm really glad that i wasn't like that and i'm not like that because i've learned that i really have to work hard for the scores that i want to but it makes me more proud of myself when i do get the scores that i want and it's made me have better work ethic and it's made me work harder in life so just a little message out there to anybody who has ever felt that way before all right i know you guys will do great and good luck on your next sat and good luck on all the studying all right bye have a great day you

Channel: Jillian Goldberg

Views: 434,067

Keywords: goldberg, jillian goldberg, how to get a 1500 on the sat, how to get a perfect score on the sat, how i got a 1500 on the sat, how to improve my sat score, how to study for the sat, what sat practice book should i buy, life saving sat study tips, my sat journey, best sat practice books, how to get a good score on the sat, sat practice tests, sat study skills, what books should i use to study for the sat, how can i improve my sat score, caps, sat study plan, best sat study tips, sat

Id: kSPcjmZdAuI

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020