The College Board’s directions for SAT Reading & Writing ask students to choose the “best” answer to each question. By what standard, then, is a student to judge which answer that is? This is the first issue I take up in the Method, my SAT Reading & Writing curriculum, and it comes first for three reasons.
First, many answers to the question are in circulation — in prep books, online forums, and videos on TikTok and YouTube. Second, most of those answers are wrong. Advice such as “the more detailed answers are usually correct” or “eliminate answers with extreme language” leads to stalled or even declining performance, especially at the high end of the scale, where most of my students are aiming. Third, the standard is foundational. Without the right one, consistent high scores stay out of reach, however much a student practices.
I’ve written about the right standards, and what holding the wrong ones costs, in “What the SAT Score Report Leaves Out.” My subject here is an obstacle to quick score gains that remains even after a student has been introduced to a sound standard: the role of doubt and belief in test preparation.
Students arrive with folk beliefs about the test.
One thing tutors and parents sometimes fail to account for in planning a preparation timeline is that students almost always come to test prep with a set of folk beliefs about how the test works. These beliefs are seldom false in every particular, but they are usually false in the main, their contours hazy, their application spotty. Students pick them up from friends, from Reddit threads, and from TikTok videos — sources that are often little more than rumor mills.
It would be a mistake to assume these beliefs give way on a student’s first contact with an SAT tutor. When I start with a new student, I’m joining a conversation as one voice among many. My task is to persuade. How long that takes varies from student to student, but it’s almost never immediate.
I make my case, and the student weighs it against what he has heard elsewhere. He does so with habits of mind common at his age: overweening confidence in his own grasp of how things work, doubt about how much adults actually know, wariness of institutional authority, and a readiness to trust peers, absolute claims, and hype. A careful account of SAT question design has to compete with flashy videos, many of them made by fellow students, promising three quick tips guaranteed to add 50 points.
The unfortunate irony is that the problem is worst among high-achieving students. They have the most exposure to folk beliefs about the test because they are the most likely to go looking for SAT advice online. These are also the students least willing to accept an idea on a tutor’s word alone.
Persuasion takes several rounds of proof.
What I have to persuade with is sound reasoning and the truth about how the test works. But the student has to be convinced, and conviction generally comes by way of trial and error.
A student typically starts by experimenting, applying a mix of my advice and the beliefs she arrived with. When it first turns out that the folk belief fails and my approach works, does she then drop the belief and commit to the method? Rarely. The first successes are suspected of being flukes — the tutor just got lucky.
Several rounds of proof are usually needed before the student is fully convinced and begins applying the method consistently. In the fastest cases, that takes several weeks; in others, several months. Whenever it happens, that moment of conversion is when score gains begin in earnest.
The delay is a matter of belief, not ability.
The time between the method’s first successes and the student’s commitment to it is not a measure of ability, nor of the method’s effectiveness. It is the time it takes for doubt to give way to conviction, and such a delay is inherent in preparing any student who arrives with folk beliefs about the test, which is to say nearly every student.
This is a reason test preparation takes longer than many parents expect, one that is often overlooked. Belief — trust in the method — consolidates only with time, and a student who starts late doesn’t bypass the experimentation phase just because the test is near. If you’re planning your student’s preparation, begin sooner rather than later.