More about taking the SAT

When it comes to taking the SAT exams, timing is everything. In Hong Kong, the SAT exams are administered in October, December, March and May, which gives parents time to adequately prepare their child to take the test.

To assess that readiness, parents can begin by asking their child’s English teacher for an honest assessment of the student’s strengths and weaknesses that goes beyond their report cards. You should look at the skills the student already has, especially grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing and sentence structure.

Taking the PSATs — a preliminary version of the SAT — is a helpful way to assess a student’s ability whilst giving them a taste of the SAT itself. This is available on the official website of the test: https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/practice/full-length-practice-tests

With this assessment, parents should then approach a tutor who will develop a course of study to enhance their strengths, build up others, and develop the critical reading and writing skills that are crucial to achieving a high score, especially in the English exam. Achieving these goals takes time and parents must factor this in when selecting an exam date.

As noted earlier, Hong Kong students are not exposed to critical reading and writing in their normal course load. However, critical reading and writing skills have to be built on a solid base of reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary and writing ability.

For example, students taking the test should be able to use a variety of sentence structures in their essays. The reason for this is two-fold. Students must show mastery of these skills, but perhaps more importantly, they need them to adequately express their responses to the reading selections used in the test.

Hand in hand with sentence structure is composition, the ability to order their responses in a logical and effective way. Many students are taught the three- or five-paragraph system of introduction, idea development and conclusion. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but on the SAT, students must produce insightful introductions and conclusions, and flowing intermediate paragraphs that support their thesis based on the reading selection and the questions asked of them.

The analogy section of the test often proves problematic for students who do not have a good working vocabulary and the ability to discern the parts of speech. The analogy portion is multiple choice, with four choices for each question. To answer these questions successfully, students will have to carefully analyse the relationships between each set of paired words — is it a noun or a verb, and adjective or adverb — and use vocabulary skills to either come up with the correct answer and/or eliminate ones that are not correct.

A highly qualified tutor, one who has themselves achieved high scores, can teach students the strategies and skills they need not only to correctly respond to the test, but do it in a way that makes the most of the time allotted. Parents should start planning now. They can find more information about the tests at https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org The website of the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority also has the latest on what tests are offered.

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