That big scary monster in the closet is the way most students think of the SAT. This ugly, it’s frightening, not quite sure what it is, and it can scare you, and your teachers have probably perpetuated the rumor, or your parents, or worst, your friends. So taking a look at, shedding some light on that monster who’s hiding under your bed. The SAT, well unlike the monster under your bed, it does really exist. It is a test, and you have to take it, if you’re planning to go to college. So, let’s look at where does this monster come from, and see if we can start making friends with it. The SAT is a piece of a puzzle and that puzzle is your college application. It’s not all that you need to be able to get in to college, it’s just a small piece of it, hopefully that will help you alleviate some of your fear, that it is going to make a break your world. The application process does include your grades and transcripts from school, test scores from the SAT. Test like essays that you might write and more information about your other achievements. So, this test, not quite as scary as it might sound, let’s find out a little bit more about what it looks like. Our next big question is, what does it test? And how much time do I have to accomplish it? This test is going to cover 3 categories, 10 sections, and take almost 4 and a half hours. The three categories that you’re gonna have in the SAT are reading, writing, and math. The critical reading and the math pieces of this test are both the same, there are three sections, those sections are broken down, you have two 25 minute sections of reading and a 20 minute section of reading. And you have two 25 minute section of math and a 20 minute section of math. Then the last piece is the writing, and the writing because writing includes now, there’s hand writing exam that they give you. It’s actually an essay test, no hand writing involve in terms of can you write or not write, it count can you get your thought across, coz it’s critical thinking piece. That’s gonna be one essay piece for 25 minutes, one grammar piece for 25 minutes, and a third grammar piece for 25 minutes. So, if you’ve been doing the math, or paying attention about what is on the SAT, those three categories and ten sections, you might be wondering where that section went. 3 reading, 3 writing, and 3 math make 9 sections. So where that 10 sections come from? This is the scary part of the test, there is one more 25 minute section on the test that is always included, and I like to call it slave labor, this is an experimental section. What they’re gonna do is give you one of the three categories, either reading, writing, or math and they’re sampling questions on you. You’ll learn how the SAT’s very predictable as we go on through this episode and this course, and this is how they make it so predictable. They’re gonna use you taking their questions and answering them to determine whether they’re easy, medium or hard. And they’re gonna use them on your future students, your friends, your younger siblings. So, there’s 25 minutes of slave labor involved in the SAT. All in all, what that sums up to is three hours and 45 minutes of filling in bubbles, and answering questions. Why did I say four and a half hours to begin with, because when you go to take the SAT that Saturday morning, you’re going to have to get there, find your classroom, sit down, and get organize, then they’re gonna give you instructions before each of the sections, making sure you know just how to fill in that bubble. And they’re also going to give you two, very generous, 5 minute breaks. So, in that four and a half hours, five minutes twice to do anything you need to do, stretch, bathroom, whatever it is, just wake up, get yourself refresh. So, it’s a big test, it’s a scary monster, marathon of a thing but as we begin to shed more light on it, you’ll see it’s not so bad. Which brings us as we talk about this bubble sheets that you have to fill in for the test, the dreaded bubbles, how does this test score is our last question. The way this test is scored is where most of the rumors come into play, you hear about things like you get point stress for signing your name, or it’s worth thousands of points, or they’ll penalize you if you can't get anything wrong, all these kinds of rumors, well, let’s get down to the bottom of that. Because, like our monster, actually existing, there’s a little bit of truth. And once you learn this piece, you’ll be able to relax and decide how your strategies gonna work best for you. This test is all multiple choice with 5 answer choices for every multiple choice question that exist, an A through E option, with a couple of little exceptions. The two exceptions to multiple choice are the essay, which is going to be hand written and ten whole math questions. Those tens are going to be student produce responses, and that’s this sort of this silly piece that you see in your bubble sheet and we’ll go into this in more depth later, but, you don’t actually choose A through E, you’re gonna choose whatever the correct answer is and fill it in, so, that is not a multiple choice piece. 10 out of everything, so, the good news is with the multiple choice, the answers are there on the test for you. Now what they do in the scoring, it’s unique is, they do give you a point for getting your answers correct, if you bubble in the right answer, you get that point just like at school. If you don’t answer it, obviously you can't earn any points if you’re not answering the question, so you get no points if you don’t answer it. But this test does penalize students who guess or who are lazy and don’t bother to think through their answers critically, very key to the test. So to penalize you they deduct one quarter of a raw point from your score if you bubble in the wrong answer, and that’s the thing that scare most students, not use getting penalize for getting the wrong answer. But one of the things to know is that the way these points add up is not that they are going to be 800 questions in a section, instead they’re going to count them in categories. When they go to do this, scoring for this test, the final results come out in a hundreds, you’ve heard the final score results from some of your friends and the top score on this test is 2400 points. But it gets broken down, there’s minimum of 200 points and a maximum of 800 points in any section of the test. 800 for reading, 800 for writing, and 800 for math, those raw points that we’re talking about get calculated base on a curve. So, to score a perfect score on the test, technically you need to answer most, or all of the problems right and if you leave any blank and everyone else leaves some blanks, technically you can score an 800 and still not have answered every question in the test. However, if you chose to answer every single question in correctly, which will be a challenge to do, they had to have a way to penalize you. So that’s where that base of 200 comes from, technically that would be a score of zero, because if you didn’t answer anything, you’d score no points and that’s that 200 you get for signing your name. Once you’ve started the test, they won't take your score below 200, so, it’s nice to know there’s a base line, you can't score a zero in this test. They’re no grades involve with the 200 to 800, and the way that they calculate the total score is to add up how you did in each of the three sections. And depending which college you wanna go to, the colleges will look at different sections differently.
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