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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of school and academia, my daughter is taking the SAT test and me and her are both bamboozled by the passages. The texts are very dense and you don't know what detail to take note of of or discard so your short term memory is immediately overloaded with information. Are there any tips on how she can get better at seeing "through" the details so she can get the essence of the text to answer the questions? She is reading literature and reading The guardian, science articles etc. but none seem to help her.

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Read the question first, then read the passage

Yep, I got a 2380 on my SATs and the trick was literally to just study for the test (overfit on the style of the test)

Look through the questions and many of them mention specific passages. Mark those sections in the reading first and then read the passage.

Tons of little tricks like that.

To GP, this is the correct strategy.

Further, to improve thinking, she needs to do a post-mortem after every practice session. Go over every question, and irrespective of whether she got it right or wrong, she needs to figure out how she could have thought better and faster.

This works for homework problems in school, too. Look at the problems, then go to the text(s).

Have you tried studying using the SAT Prep Black Book? It explains really well how to study for the test and why the test is designed the way it is

Do you have an example on hand? I don’t recall SAT questions being more than a few sentences but it’s been years since I took it and I know at least one major section has changed.

There's a reading comprehension portion where you have short readings (about 4-5 paragraphs in length as I recall, but it's been a long time) and several questions based on the reading. The questions themselves are still short, 1-2 sentences, but the context for answering those questions is not.

The "trick" for me on tests like that was to skim the reading and note key items (dates, names, topic terms) and then review the questions. Most of the time I could answer them directly, but if not I could go back to the reading and find the answer. Having skimmed it, I could jump straight to the relevant sentence(s).

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