SAT tutoring strategy: stress management

Taking the SAT is a stress-ridden experience. There are challenging questions and a clock ticking away. One technique that was helpful for a student that I worked with in Sudbury, MA, was to rearrange the order of how she attacked each Verbal section. The Verbal section begins with five to eight sentence completions, followed by several short passages and questions, and then ending with at least one very long passage with its own set of questions.

This student would become so frazzled getting through the first two stages, that by the time she got to the long passages at the end, she was completely spent. To make matters worse, she now knew she was down to precious few minutes to read an entire page of dense, boring text and then answer convoluted questions about it.

So I had her try to read the long passage first, and basically go backwards through each Verbal section. She found this very helpful, because once she got through the long passage, she could take a deep breath and know the worst was behind her. She still had plenty of time to get through the next two shorter sections, and was able to do so with more calm and clarity of mind.

This student’s Critical Reading score improved from 440 to 580 after I finished working with her.