Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

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>I never took any prep course. I always was of the mindset that the only value they provided was forced practice. I never bought that they taught secrets of test taking.

...

>Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20.

Did the Kaplan book not have "secrets" of test taking? Mine did, and one of them was actually useful:

When you have an "analogy" question, where they give you an A:B, and then ask which of the five choices have the same analogy.

What do you do if you don't know the meaning of both A and B?

Well, of the five choices, you will find two that are identical as far as analogies go. As an example, if you have two choices:

cat:kitten

dog:puppy

You know neither of these two can be the answer because there would be no reason to pick one over the other.

Then you'll have another choice with absolutely no relationship (e.g. pen:donkey). You can eliminate that immediately. So now you're down to two choices. Pick one randomly.

But yeah - overall I didn't learn any other big secrets - other than the obvious one of working backwards from the answers for many quantitative problems (don't solve an equation for x - just start plugging them in!).

Hi. I think that the quotations around the secrets is totally warranted. I was trying to state that I always thought that the "secrets" that many test prep courses tried to sell to parents/students were just question design, and not actually some behind the scenes insight.

Do you really disagree with that? That's what a lot of the marketing seems to be focused on. I felt like question exposure alone got me those same insights, and in fact, the official SAT book rather explicitly lists those things out.

Most people don't read the annoying small text that accompanies the books that spells out a lot of those strategies. Instead they'd rather pay someone a lot of money to tell that to them :)

I myself did not take any SAT prep courses, so I can't disagree. My point was that some small tricks do exist, and most test takers are not aware of them. Knowing those tricks will give you a slight advantage.

For me, those prep courses would likely be a poor value. However, I likely am not in the demographic who would benefit most from them. There are plenty of people out there who haven't learned how to learn from a book, and so having someone teach them will result in better scores. I would have thought such people will likely struggle in college, yet my grad school had quite a few of them. I guess they found a way to compensate.

The trick I mentioned was not in the official SAT book.

I didn't do any prep for the SAT or ACT. Later I considered taking the GRE and read a prep book that had tips like above. I was astounded how much easier it made the verbal questions.

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