How to Improve Low SAT Math Scores 9 Strategies

How to Improve Low SAT Math Scores 9 Strategies SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips Are you struggling with SAT Math scores between 300-500? You're not alone- hundreds of thousands of students are scoring in this range. But many don't know the best ways to break out of this score range and score a 600 or above. Here we'll discuss how to improve your SAT math score effectively, and why it's so important to do so. Put these principles to work and I'm confident you'll be able to improve your score. Brief note: This article is suited for students scoring below a 600 and goes over basic SAT math strategies. If you're already above this range, my perfect SAT Math score article is more appropriate for you. In this article, I'm going to discuss why scoring high is a good idea, what it takes to score a 600, and then go into test strategies. Stick with me - this is like building a house. First you need to lay a good foundation before putting up the walls of the house and pretty windows. Similarly, we need to first understand why you're doing what you're doing, before diving into tips and strategies. (In this guide, I talk mainly about getting to a 600. But if your goal is a 500 or below, these concepts still equally apply). Understand the Stakes At this SAT score range, improving your low SAT math score to a 600 range will dramatically boost your chances of getting into better colleges. Let's take a popular school, University of Alabama, as an example. Its average SAT score is a 20.Its 25th percentile score is a 980, and 75th percentile is an 1240. Furthermore, its acceptance rate is 57%. In other words, a little over half of all applicants are admitted. But the lower your scores, the worse your chances. In our analysis, if you score around a 980, your chance of admission drops to 35%, or around 1/3 chance. But if you raise your score to a 1240, your chance of admission goes up to 72% - a really good chance of admission. For the Math section, this is especially true if you want to apply to engineering or science programs. They expect your math score to be better than your other sections, and if you score low, they'll doubt your ability to do college-level quantitative work. It's really worth your time to improve your SAT score. Hour for hour,it's the best thing you can do to raise your chance of getting into college. Curious what chances you have with an 1800 SAT score? Check out ourexpert college admissions guide for an 1800 SAT score(equivalent to 1200 on the 1600 scale). Know That You Can Do It This isn't just some fuzzy feel-good message you see on the back of a Starbucks cup. I mean, literally, you and every other student can do this. In my work with PrepScholar, I've worked with thousands of students scoring in the lower ranges of 300-500. Time after time, I see students who beat themselves up over their low score and think improving it is impossible. "I know I'm not smart." "I just don't get algebra and I can't see myself scoring high." "I don't know what to study to improve my score." It breaks my heart. Because I know that more than anything else, your SAT score is a reflection ofhow hard you work and how smartly you study. Not your IQ and not your school grades. Not how Ms. Huffington in 9th grade said you'd never get geometry. Here's why: the SAT is a weird test. When you take it, don't you get the sense that the questions are nothing like what you've seen in school? It's purposely designed this way. The SAT can't test difficult concepts, because this would be unfair for students who never took AP Calculus. It can't ask you to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. The SAT is a national test, which means it needs a level playing field for all students around the country. So it HAS to test concepts that all high school students will cover.Basic algebra (solving for x, manipulating equations), data analysis (mean, median, mode), advanced algebra (solving systems of equations, quadratic equations), and geometry (triangles, circles, lines). You've learned all of this before in high school. But the SAT still has to make the test difficult, so it needs to test these concepts in strange ways. This trips up students who don't prepare, but it rewards students who understand the test well. Here's an example: Find the area of the shaded region below, if the radius of the circle is 5. This is a classic SAT type question. The first time you see this, it might be confusing. How do you get the area of each of the shaded corners? It kind of looks like a triangle, but not really because of the curve region. But you've learned all the concepts you need to solve this. Notice that the shaded area is the area of the square, with the area of the circle punched out. Imagine the square is cookie dough, and the circle is a cookie cutter you punch out. OK. Now you just need to use the area formulas.The area of a square is side x side, or 10 x 10 = 100. The area of a circle isÏ€r2, orÏ€ * 5 * 5 = 25Ï€. So the area of the shaded region is 100 - 25Ï€. This might have been confusing the first time, but the next time you see a question like this, you'll know exactly what to do: find the area of the larger shape, and subtract out the inner piece. The SAT math section is full of examples like this. To improve your score, you just need to: Learn the types of questions that the SAT tests, like the one above Put together the concepts you already know to solve the questions Practice on a lot of questions so you learn from your mistakes I'll go into more detail about exactly how to do this. First, let's see how many questions you need to get right. What It Takes to Get a 600 in Math If we have a target score in mind, it helps to understand what you need to get that score on the actual test. We're going to use 600 as our score target, because this is above average and will make you competitive for a lot of schools. Here's the raw score to SAT Math Score conversion table. (If you could use a refresher on how the SAT is scored and how raw scores are calculated, read this.) Raw Scaled Raw Scaled Raw Scaled Raw Scaled 58 800 43 640 28 520 13 370 57 790 42 630 27 510 12 360 56 780 41 620 26 500 340 55 760 40 610 25 490 10 330 54 750 39 600 24 480 9 320 53 740 38 600 23 480 8 310 52 730 37 590 22 470 7 290 51 710 36 580 21 460 6 280 50 700 35 570 20 450 5 260 49 690 34 560 19 440 4 240 48 680 33 560 18 430 3 230 47 670 32 550 17 420 2 210 46 670 31 540 16 410 1 200 45 660 30 530 15 390 0 200 44 650 29 520 14 380 Notice that if you're aiming for a 600, you only need a raw score of 38 out of 58 questions. This is a 65% score. This has serious implications for your testing strategy. In essence, you only need to answer 2/3 of all questions right. Is this fewer than you thought? A 65% on a math test at school might give you a D, but on the SAT it's actually not that bad and can be more than enough for your target score. We'll go into more detail below about what this means for your testing strategy. Whatever you're scoring now, take note of the difference you need to get to a 600. For example, if you're scoring a 480, you need to answer 14-15 more questions right to get to a 600. Once again, if your goal is a 500, the same analysis applies - just swap the numbers. OK - so we've covered why scoring a higher SAT math score is important, why you specifically are capable of improving your score, and the raw score you need to get to your target. Now we'll actually get into actionable strategies that you should use in your own studying to maximize your score improvement. 9 Strategies to Improve Your Low SAT Math Score If you're struggling with your SAT Math score, follow these nine strategies to help you reach the score goal you're aiming for. Strategy 1: Skip the Most Difficult Math Questions Here's an easy strategy most students don't do enough. Remember what I said above about raw score? To score a 600, you only need a 38 out of 58. What does this mean?You can completely guess on 20 questions and still score a 600if you answer the other 38 correctly. In fact, because when you guess you have a 25% shot at getting it right, guessing will give you an extra 5 points - which means you can miss 5 questions and still get a 600. Wow - you can completely skip the hardest 30% of all questions and still hit your goal. Skip questions carefree - like this woman. Why is this such a powerful strategy? It gives you way more time on easy and medium difficulty questions - the questions you have a good chance of getting right. If you're usually pressed for time on your SAT section, this will be a huge help. Here's an example. On Section 3, you get 25 minutes to answer 20 math questions. This is usually pretty hard for most students to get through - it's just 75 seconds to answer each question. The average student will try to push through all the questions. "I've got to get through them all, since I've got a shot at getting each question right," they think. Along the way, they'll probably rush and make careless mistakes on questions they SHOULD have gotten right. And then they spend 5 minutes on the last question, making no progress and wasting time. Wrong approach. Here's what I suggest instead.Completely skip the last 20% of questions in each subsection.Don't even look at them, don't even read them. Instead, focus all your energy on getting the first 80% of questions correct. This works because, unlike Reading and Writing, Math questions are ordered in difficulty.The hardest questions are always the questions at the end of the subsection. I've been using the term subsection, because Section 3 and Section 4 each have two parts. The first part is the multiple choice subsection. The second choice is the free response question. Let's use an example from real practice tests. This is the Question #15, last question of the multiple choice subsection in Section 3: Pretty tough, right? This is one of the questions you should skip. But here's the next one, Question 16, the first question in the Free Response subsection: Pretty easy, right? This is the type of question you're likely to get right and should thus spend more time on. So, section by section, here's your skipping strategy: Section Subsection Total Questions Questions to Skip Section 3 Multiple Choice 15 3 Free Response 5 1 Section 4 Multiple Choice 30 6 Free Response 8 2 By doing this, you raise your time per question from 82 to 104 seconds per question. This is huge! It's a 25% boost to the time you get per question. This raises your chances of getting easy/medium questions right a lot. And the 12 questions you skipped? Like the example above, they're so hard you're honestly better off not even trying them. These questions are meant for 700-800 scorers who have really mastered all the SAT math skills on the test. If you get to a 600, then you have the right to try these questions. Not before you to get to 600. Important note: skipping does not mean LEAVING BLANK!There is no guessing penalty on the SAT, so you MUST make sure you bubble in every single blank answer on your answer sheet before the section ends. Not doing so will cost you valuable points. Next strategy: find your weak links and fix them. Strategy 2: Find Your Math Weaknesses and Drill Them If you're like most students, you're better at some areas in math than others. You might have done better in algebra than geometry. Or maybe you really like statistics, but hate fractions. If you're like most students, you also don't have an unlimited amount of time to study. You have a lot of homework, you might be an athlete or have band practice, and you have friends to hang out with. This means for every hour you study for the SAT, it needs to be the most effective hour possible. In concrete terms,you need to find your greatest areas of improvement and work on those. Too many students study the 'dumb' way. They just buy a book and read it cover to cover. When they don't improve, they're SHOCKED. I'm not. Studying effectively for the SAT isn't like painting a house. You're not trying to cover all your bases with a very thin layer of understanding. What these students did wrong was they wasted time on subjects they already knew, and they didn't spend enough time on their weaknesses. Instead, studying effectively for the SAT is like plugging up the holes of a leaky boat. You need to find the biggest hole, and fill it. Then you find the next biggest hole, and you fix that. Soon you'll find that your boat isn't sinking at all. How does this relate to SAT math? You need to find the sub-skills that you're weakest in, and then drill those until you're no longer weak in them. Fixing up the biggest holes. Here's our complete mapping of all 24 skills tested on SAT Math: Basic Algebra Linear functions Single variable equations Systems of linear equations Absolute value Advanced Algebra Manipulating polynomials Quadratic equations Dividing polynomials Exponential functions Function notation Solving exponential equations Systems of equations with nonlinear equations Problem Solving and Data Analysis Ratios and proportions Scatterplots and graphs Categorical data and probabilities Experimental interpretation Medan, median, mode, standard deviation Additional Topics Coordinate geometry - lines and slopes Coordinate geometry -nonlinear functions Geometry - circles Geometry -lines and angles Geometry - solid geometry Geometry - triangles and polygons Trigonometry Complex numbers I know this is overwhelming. SAT Math covers most of basic high school math, which is a LOT of stuff. Looking at this list, do you know where your weaknesses are? Do you know what you need to train on to get the most out of your study time? If not, I'm not surprised. This is hard for even the best students to do. It takes a lot of test knowledge to be able to categorize questions, and it takes a lot of discipline to analyze your mistakes. For every question that you miss, you need to identify the type of question it is. When you notice patterns to the questions you miss, you then need to find extra practice for this subskill. Say you miss a lot of coordinate geometry questions (the ones involving an x-y grid and lines). You need to find a way to get lesson material to teach yourself the main concepts that you're forgetting. Then you need to find more practice questions for this skill so you can drill your mistakes. Quick Plug: If all of this is making sense to you, you'd love our SAT prep program, PrepScholar. We designed our program around the concepts in this article, because they actually work.When you start with PrepScholar, you’ll take a diagnostic that will determine your weaknesses in over forty SAT skills. PrepScholar then creates a study program specifically customized for you. To improve each skill, you’ll take focused lessons dedicated to each skill, with over 20 practice questions per skill. This will train you for your specific area weaknesses, so your time is always spent most effectively to raise your score. There’s no other prep system out there that does it this way, which is why we get better score results than any other program on the market. Check it out today with a 5-day free trial: Strategy 3: Focus on the Most Important Skills and Ignore the Rest Remember the 24 skills listed above? Not all of them are made equal. Some are represented FAR more often than others. In fact, the most common skill (algebra - solving single variable equations) is 29 TIMES more likely to appear than the least common skill (algebra - function notation). As you can see, it's not enough just to divide into rough subjects like algebra, geometry, and data analysis. Even within algebra, some concepts appear FAR more often than others. If you ignore this distinction, you'll waste a lot of time studying things you don't even have to know! So I'm about to make your day. I'm going to tell you the most important skills you HAVE to practice hard, and all the skills you DON'T need to study. If you've been nervous about how much SAT Math material you need to know, you'll feel a lot better soon. First, hereare the most common SAT Math skills. I'll explain the % of questions for that skill, and the # of questions you can expect to see: Skill Frequency # of Q's Solving single variable equations 12.50% 7 Define and interpret linear function .21% 7 Ratios and proportions 10.78% 6 Solving systems of linear equations 7.76% 5 Manipulating polynomials 7.33% 4 Scatterplots and Graphs 6.47% 4 Solving quadratic equations 5.60% 3 Coordinate geometry of nonlinear functions 4.74% 3 Exponential functions 4.74% 3 TOTAL 71.13% 42 This is great news - with just eight skills (33% of all 24 skills), you cover 71% of the test! For example, if you mastered just these skills and got all 42 questions right, that would already bring you up to a 630. In reality, this is unrealistic because some of these 42 questions are going to be pretty tough, and questions I recommend you skip as mentioned in Strategy 1. But you can see how important the most important skills are. Focus on what really makes up most of the pie. Now, what skills do you NOT have to know? Here are the LEAST common skills on SAT Math: Skill Frequency Expected Questions Per Test Dividing polynomials 1.72% 1 Trigonometry, radians 1.72% 1 Absolute value 1.29% 0.75 Complex numbers 1.29% 0.75 Experimental interpretation 0.86% 0.5 Lines and angles 0.86% 0.5 Solid geometry 0.86% 0.5 Systems of equations with nonlinear equations 0.86% 0.5 Function notation 0.43% 0.25 TOTAL 9.89% 5.75 Look at these nine skills. Altogether, they add up to a measly 10% of the entire test. Remember what % of the test you need to get right to get a 600? It's 66%. If you completely ignored these nine skills, you'd still be able to get a maximum score of 730. So good news! You don't need to study trigonometry, complex numbers, solid geometry, and other subjects above. Good riddance, because these are some of the more complicated subjects. When you study make sure you focus your time on what's really impactful. Once again, I believe in this strategy so much that I designed our PrepScholar SAT program around this idea. Your PrepScholar programdoes all the hard work for you by automatically customizing your prep program to exactly what you need to do to improve your score most. You'll work on the most important skills first so that you get the most out of every hour you study. You just need to focus on learning and doing questions. Strategy 4: Use Only Realistic, High-Quality Sources After reading the three strategies above, you might be hyped up to go out and practice. The question is - what are you actually going to use to study? Books? A prep program? Be really careful about which sources you choose to use. Honestly, most of them are pretty bad. To begin with, most books that claim to be adapted for the New SAT are actually just minimally edited versions of their Old SAT books. Math has changed a lot between the two versions of the test, both in terms of which skills are tested and how the questions are structured.The worst books copy over the exact same questions from the Old SAT book - this is hugely misleading and can end up wasting a ton of your time with no improvement in score. Second, a lot of prep programs and books don't have very realistic SAT Math questions. They're either too hard, too easy, or structured incorrectly. The root of this problem is lack of true understanding of the SAT Math section. Without going through a full question by question analysis of the test, you really can't understand the test deeply. This means your materials will be terrible. OK - so what do you use? The very, very best sources for SAT Math questions is the Official SAT Tests.This is why as part of PrepScholar, we include these official practice tests to gauge your progress and train you on the real thing. The problem is, for the New SAT there aren't that many practice tests available right now. Because you want to use these to train your endurance and sitting for a full-length test, you do need to conserve this precious resource. This means to get enough SAT Math practice, you DO need to use extra materials. If you want to study exclusively through books, I recommend the best books for SAT Math here. If you're interested in a prep program that can provide all the test content you need to excel, I'd suggest you consider PrepScholar. Obviously as creator of the program I can be biased, but I honestly believe we have the highest quality Math questions available anywhere. This is because of the level of scrutiny and understanding of the test that I think no other company has achieved: We've deconstructed every available official SAT Practice Test, question by question, answer choice by answer choice. We've statistically studied every question type on the test (like you saw above). We understand exactly how questions are phrased and how wrong answer choices are constructed. As head of product, I'm responsible for content quality. I hire only the most qualified content writers to craft our test content. This means people who have scored perfect scores on the SAT, have hundreds of hours of SAT teaching experience, and have graduated from Ivy League schools. This results in the most realistic, highest quality SAT Math questions possible. Even if you don't use PrepScholar, you should be confident that whatever resource you DO use undergoes the same scrutiny as we do. If you're not sure, or you see reviews saying otherwise, then avoid it. Make sure you avoid duds. Strategy 5: Understand All Your Math Mistakes Every mistake you make on a test happens for a reason.If you don't understand exactly why you missed that question, you will make that mistake over and over again. Too many students scoring at the 400-600 level refuse to study their mistakes. It's harsh. I get it. It sucks to stare your mistakes in the face. It's draining to learn difficult concepts you don't already understand. So the average student will breeze past their mistakes and instead focus on areas they're already comfortable with. It's like a warm blanket. Their thinking goes like this: "So I'm good at geometry? I should do more geometry problems! They make me feel good about myself." The result? NO SCORE IMPROVEMENT. You don't want to be like these students. So here'swhat you need to do: On every practice test or question set that you take, mark every question that you're even 20% unsure about. When you grade your test or quiz, review every single question that you marked, and every incorrect question. This way even if you guessed a question correctly, you'll make sure to review it. In a notebook, write down the gist of the question, why you missed it, and what you'll do to avoid that mistake in the future. Have separate sections by subject and sub-topic (number theory - fractions, algebra - solving equations, etc.). It's not enough to just think about it and move on. It's not enough to just read the answer explanation. You have to think hard about why you specifically failed on this question. By taking this structured approach to your mistakes,you'll now have a running log of every question you missed, and your reflection on why. No excuses when it comes to your mistakes. But don't stop there. Go Deeper - WHY Did You Miss a Math Question? Now, what are some common reasons that you missed a question? Don't just say, "I didn't know this material." That's a cop out. Always take it one step further - what specifically did you miss, and what do you have to improve in the future? Here are some examples of common reasons you miss a question, and how you take the analysis one step further: Content:I didn't learn the skill or knowledge needed to answer this question. One step further:What specific skill do I need to learn, and how will I learn this skill? Incorrect Approach:I knew the content, but I didn't know how to approach this question. One step further:How do I solve the question? How will I solve questions like this in the future? Careless Error:I misread what the question was asking for or solved for the wrong thing One step further:Why did I misread the question? What should I do in the future to avoid this? Get the idea? You're really digging into understanding why you're missing questions. Yes, this is hard, and it's draining, and it takes work. That's why most students who study ineffectively don't improve. But you're different. Just by reading this guide, you're already proving that you care more than other students. And if you apply these principles and analyze your mistakes, you'll improve more than other students too. Strategy 6: Experiment With Different Strategies to Solve Math Problems Sometimes, you get really stuck on a question. You just have no idea how to solve it, and the first step doesn't seem obvious. When this happens, a really useful skill to learn is having a toolkit of alternative strategies to solve a question. Broadly speaking, there are two that will come up most often: Plugging in Numbers, and Plugging in Answers. Let's see an example in action: Let's say you don't know how to solve this with algebra. Let's break down the question. It asks, "which of the following numbers is NOT a solution of this inequality?" What that really means is, "Three of these answer choices, when plugged in, will result in a true statement. One answer choice will result in a false statement." So let's try plugging in each answer choice, one by one. Start with A) -1: 3(-1) - 5≠¥ 4(-1) -3 -3 -5≠¥ -4 -3 -8≠¥ -7 Wait, that's not true! -8 is not greater than -7. Thus answer choice A is tentatively marked as the correct answer choice. Just in case, let's try answer choice B. 3(-2) - 5≠¥ 4(-2) -3 -6 -5≠¥ -8 -3 - ≠¥ - Yes, - is equal to -! Choice A is likely the right answer. (You can evaluate answer choices C and D too, but this is unnecessary since you checked your work and A seems pretty sound). Bonus: Algebraicway You can also solve this question by moving x to one side and the number to the other: 3x - 5≠¥ 4x - 3 3x - 5 - 4x≠¥ 4x - 3 - 4x -x -5≠¥ -3 -x -5 + 5≠¥ -3 +5 -x≠¥ 2 x≠¤ -2 This gets you answer choice A as well! In both your practice and your real test, try to get unstuck by approaching the question differently. Check out our strategy guides on Plugging in Answers and Plugging in Numbers to see more details on how these work. Strategy 7: Monitor Your Time During the Math Section Once again, time pressure is a big problem for 400-500 scorers. Because many questions are difficult, it's easy to get sucked into a hard problem. This takes away time from other questions that you can solve and get points for. There are two ways to ease time pressure for yourself. The first way is by getting better at the test.By doing more practice, you'll automatically get faster at solving each question. By learning patterns to what the SAT asks, more questions will just 'click' for you. The other way is to monitor the time you're spending on each question. What you want to avoid is spending too much time on a single question, since this gives you less time for other math problems. Remember: all points on the SAT are worth the same as each other. An easy question is worth 1 point, as is the most difficult question on the entire test. So here's what I recommend: if you spend 30 seconds on a problem and aren't clear how you can get to the answer, skip and go to the next question. If you finish the section early, you'll have time to get back to the questions you skipped. You'll especially have extra time if you follow my first skipping strategy (skip the most difficult questions). Even if you don't have time to get back to the questions you skipped, you just bought yourself time to try a lot of other questions. Strategy 8:Bubble in Your Answers All at Once Here's a bubbling tip that will save you at least three minutes per section. When I first started test taking in high school, I did what many students do: after I finished one question, I went to the bubble sheet and filled it in. Then I went back to the booklet and solved the next question. Finish question 1, bubble in answer 1. Finish question 2, bubble in answer 2. And so forth. This actually wastes a lot of time. You're distracting yourself doing two things at once - solving questions, and bubbling in answers. This is like rubbing your belly and patting your head. This costs you time in both mental distraction and in physically moving your hand and eyes to different areas of the test. Here's a better method: solve all your questions first in the book, then bubble all of them in at once. This has several huge advantages: you focus on each task one at a time, rather than switching between two different tasks. You also eliminate careless entry errors, like if you skip question 7 and bubble in question 8's answer into question 7's slot. By saving just 5 seconds per question, you get back 100 seconds on a section that has 20 questions. This is huge - you can use that to solve a whole other problem. Note: Be careful as you watch your time that you fill in all your current answers with at least five minutes remaining!Otherwise, you might run out of time before you have the chance to bubble in the answer choices all at once. Make sure you practice this on a full-length practice test so you're confident with it. Strategy 9: Guess on EveryQuestion You Don't Know You might already know this one, but if you don't, you're about to earn some serious points. Starting in 2016, the SAT no longer has a wrong answer penalty. In the old SAT, each wrong answer would deduct 0.25 points from your raw score. This required you to have a logical guessing strategy based on how many answers you could rule out. No longer! Now there is no penalty for getting a wrong answer. That means there's no reason to leave any question blank. Now, before you finish the section,make sure every blank question has an answer filled in. You do not want to look at your answer sheet and see any blank questions. For every question you're unsure about, make sure you guess as best you can.If you can eliminate just one answer choice, that gives you a much better shot at getting it right. If you have no idea, just guess! You have a 25% chance of getting it right. Most people know this strategy already, so if you don't do this, you're at a SERIOUS disadvantage. This is really important when you use Strategy #1 of skipping questions - if you don't guess on the questions, you'll miss out on free points! In Overview Those are the main strategies I have for you to improve your SAT math score. If you're scoring a 330, you can improve it to a 500. If you're scoring a 460, you can boost it to a 600. I guarantee it, if you put in the right amount of work, and study like I'm suggesting above. Notice that I didn't actually teach you any math content. I didn't point to any formulas that you need to know, or specific math solutions that will instantly raise your score. That's because these one-size-fits-all, guaranteed strategies don't really exist. (And anyone who tells you this is deceiving you). Every student is different. Instead, you need to understand where you're falling short, and drill those weaknesses continuously. You also need to be thoughtful about your mistakes and leave no mistake ignored. This is really important to your future. Make sure you give SAT prep the attention it deserves, before it's too late, and you get a rejection letter you didn't want. If you want to review any of the strategies, here's a list of all of them: Strategy 1: Skip the Most Difficult Math Questions Strategy 2: Find Your Math Weaknesses and Drill Them Strategy 3: Focus On the Most Important Skills. Ignore the Rest Strategy 4: Use Only Realistic, High-Quality Sources Strategy 5: Understand All Your Math Mistakes Strategy 6: Experiment with Different Strategies to Solve Math Problems Strategy 7: Monitor Your Time During the Math Section Strategy 8:Bubble In Your Answers All At Once Strategy 9: Guess on EveryQuestion You Don't Know What's Next? We have a lot more useful guides to raise your SAT score. What's a good SAT score for you? Read our detailed guide on figuring out your SAT target score.This is important to set YOUR target score and give you something to aim for. Want a bunch of free SAT practice tests to practice with? Here's our comprehensive list of every free SAT practice test. Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points? Check out our best-in-class online SAT prep classes. We guarantee your money back if you don't improve your SAT score by 160 points or more. Our classes are entirely online, and they're taught by SAT experts. If you liked this article, you'll love our classes. Along with expert-led classes, you'll get personalized homework with thousands of practice problems organized by individual skills so you learn most effectively. We'll also give you a step-by-step, custom program to follow so you'll never be confused about what to study next. Try it risk-free today: Have friends who also need help with test prep? Share this article! Tweet Allen Cheng About the Author As co-founder and head of product design at PrepScholar, Allen has guided thousands of students to success in SAT/ACT prep and college admissions. He's committed to providing the highest quality resources to help you succeed. Allen graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude and earned two perfect scores on the SAT (1600 in 2004, and 2400 in 2014) and a perfect score on the ACT. You can also find Allen on his personal website, Shortform, or the Shortform blog. Get Free Guides to Boost Your SAT/ACT Get FREE EXCLUSIVE insider tips on how to ACE THE SAT/ACT. 100% Privacy. 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