How to get a PERFECT 800 on the SAT Math (2024)

out of everything on your college application grades essays extracurriculars letters of recommendation the easiest thing to improve is your s math score it doesn't matter if you're getting a 400 or a 700 you can improve your score and you can do it quickly and in this video I'm going to explain exactly how not only did I get multiple perfect scores on the PSAT and sat math but I've also been tutoring the test for over 2 years and I've helped plenty of students improve their scores you know what's crazy if you want private tutoring you can

go over to learn stmath.com and book a free trial session with me isn't that just isn't that just Bonkers okay self-promotion aside the point is I know what I'm talking about with this test I'm like an SAT veteran I've seen it all and so I beg you do not let your Zoomer brain click off this video if you actually want to improve your SAT Math score watch till the end and I guarantee it'll be worth your time I'm dividing this video into three parts the first part is understanding the SAT Math where I'll explain the

structure of the test and exactly what college board is looking for the second part is the blueprint which gives you a specific actionable plan for how you should prepare for the SAT most efficiently and finally the third part is how to optimize for a perfect score where I'll go over the common problems that I see my students make and how you can avoid them to get your score to that perfect 800 so without further Ado let's get into part [Music] one first things first what does SAT stand for I honestly think if they asked this

question on the SAT it would be the most missed question on the entire test because sat literally stands for nothing it's not actually an Acron the test is officially called sat and this is pretty indicative of what the SAT is actually trying to measure which is to say who knows who actually knows according to college board the SAT is measuring college readiness and it's unclear how the inscribed angle theorem is a good predictor of college readiness but allegedly it is in truth the SAT has no real reason to be designed the way it is there

are Concepts that the SAT likes and there are Concepts that the SAT doesn't like and that distinction has nothing to do with college but the good news for you is is that there aren't actually a lot of Concepts that the SAT likes not only does the math only go up to Algebra 2 but it's not even the hardest math you'll see in Algebra 2 there are zero questions about conics graphing rational expressions logarithms proofs partially because these concepts are more difficult to fit in the format of the SAT but also partially because College boes decided

we don't like those and didn't feel like including them every question on the S math tests just one or two key Concepts that are simple to grasp and they test these Concepts in the safe same ways on every single sat all these Concepts fall into four categories each making up a predetermined portion of the test the four categories include algebra this is just linear equations and inequalities nothing past Algebra 1 advanced math this is algebra with nonlinear equations so quadratics exponentials polinomial rational expressions problem solving and data analysis this is everything with tables statistics and

ratios which I like to think of as common sense problems you probably learned all this stuff in elementary or middle school and you don't remember learning it but you definitely learned it and finally geometry and trigonometry which is circles angles volume and very simple Triangle stuff it's the trig you learn in Geometry not the trig you learn in pre-calc but don't think of these as like units or chapters from math classes in school where you have to cover the content of each one before you take the test all the content on the SAT Math is

stuff that you should have already learned in school you are not tested on the depth of your math knowledge you are being tested on your ability to solve the subset of problems that college board really likes so if you can understand those few problems very very well you can outscore people that are one year two years better than you in math easily and because there's not a lot of math on the SAT you can improve your score faster than you think as a private tutor I recently helped a student get from a 660 to a

760 with 8 hours of tutoring and 10 hours of work on his own that's 100 points of improvement in just 18 hours and 18 hours might seem like a lot but in the big picture of college admissions it's actually pretty incredible right like if you're on a good sport team or you're in model un or Robotics and you have some big competition coming up 18 hours can be your weekly commitment to that activity and the impact that that game or competition is going to have on your college application pales in comparison to the impact of

increasing your SAT score by 100 points so as I said before the SAT Math is the easiest thing to improve on in your college application you just need the right approach and this brings us to part [Music] two in this part I'm going to give you an exact blueprint for how to prepare for the SAT Math this is your golden ticket to a perfect SAT Math score so what makes this guy so much better than KH Academy you World videos articles and the Princeton Review course that you have to sell your kidney to afford well

the main reason is exactly what we've talked about the big thing you need to learn for the SAT Math is the style of questions that they're going to ask and the farther you get from the source material that is this the less useful your preparation gets the SAT is incredibly consistent because it has to be because it's a standardized test they want the test to be as similar every single time it's administered as possible so you know what to expect going in if you stick to practice tests and past SATs like with this problem for

example if you've prepared by doing 10 hours of algebra drills you might see this problem and think you're supposed to cancel things out or distribute the exponent or split it up into multiple fractions somehow but if you've prepared by doing practice tests you'll know that there is absolutely no way an SAT problem is going to be that complicated it's asking you to solve in terms of P so flip the fraction move it to the other side and there you go you've solved in terms of P when you do practice tests you build an intuition for

shortcuts like these and a lot of people feel like the SAT is tricking them and when you feel like that just do more practice tests and you'll pick up on all the tricks the other reason why practice tests are so good is the testing effect which states that testing yourself is a much better way of storing information in long-term memory than any passive means of studying like reading or watching videos and this isn't just for the SAT by the way if you're learning anything you should test yourself this is a widely researched phenomenon in cognitive

science trust me okay so now that I made my very long pitch about practice tests let's get into the actual blueprint first thing to do get a benchmark score download the Blue Book software go to practice test one and take the test without any resources or breaks as if you were taking the actual sat then score yourself and compare that score to the score that you want to have when you submit your college applications think of how much you want to improve and how long you have to make that Improvement and this is most mostly

just for motivational purposes now here's the key go back to your practice test and go through every single problem asking yourself these three questions how did I approach this problem how should I have approached this problem and what should I do differently in the future ask these questions even for the problems that you got correct because at this stage you're trying to get a feel for the style of sat problems and by thinking critically about them you might find a better way of approaching them than what you initially tried here's an example of what this

might look like let's say you got this problem correct ask yourself a three question questions first how did you approach this problem well you used elimination you multiplied the top equation by three you multiplied the Bottom by two you added both equations together you solved for y you plugged in to solve for x then you solved for x - y you got the correct answer but it was a little time consuming question two how should you have approached this problem well if you look at the answer key it says that since you're solving for x

- y you can add both equations together and then divide by 5 to get x - y on its own this is a much shorter way of getting the same correct answer so question three what should you do differently change your approach based on what you're asked to solve for if asked to solve for x eliminate y if ask to solve for y eliminate X and if asked to solve for some specific combination of X and Y don't eliminate either variable try solving directly for that combination note that this explanation of what you should do

is not specific to just this problem you're giving yourself a plan for how to approach every systems of equations problem in the future this is a problem type that you'll see multiple times on every single sat so repeat this process process for every single problem on the practice test you just took and then rinse and repeat with each practice test and past sat that you do you will see your score start to improve after a few practice tests it'll stop being worth going through all the problems that you're getting correct because you'll have a feel

for pretty much every single type of problem that you'll see on the SAT I'd say once you get to your fourth or fifth practice test just focus on the problems that you get wrong or the ones that you guess on but this sort of problem solving is at a very micro scale you're fixing mistakes on the level of individual problems but not bigger picture mistakes with how you're approaching the entire test and these bigger picture mistakes are often what causes people's scores to plateau and prevents them from getting to that perfect 800 so that's what

we're going to discuss in part three for most students taking a few practice tests and building some amount of intuition is enough to get them the score that they want but if you want to get a perfect 800 on the SAT Math you need to avoid any and all mistakes so in this part I'm going to cover all the common mistakes I see my students make why they happen and how you can eliminate them dumb mistakes when you make dumb mistakes what you're really doing is going too fast take a practice test untimed and go

very slowly tell yourself that you are not allowed to make any mistakes on this test I know it sounds brutal just do it go very slowly and articulate the logic behind each step of your work when you do algebra literally write out plus 5x - 7 as you do each step as if your life depends on it underline Parts the problem right l notes for yourself whatever it takes to ensure that you don't get a single problem wrong on this test one of my students was missing five or six problems on every practice test he

took I asked him to do this strategy he got a perfect score on his first try it actually works it slows you down it makes you think more critically and you will avoid your small mistakes running out of time before you even start the test know which problems are hardest for you and deliberately skip those when you get to them if you find yourself spending 3 4 5 minutes on a single problem you should not have even attempted that problem in the first place that problem should have been saved for the very end of the

test after every other problem had been correctly answered cuz every problem's worth one point don't spend your time on the hard ones another trick and this may sound counterintuitive is to take a practice test giving yourself less time than you have on the actual sat this forces you to go a lot faster and make shortcuts when necessary and you might actually be surprised that if you cut 10 or 20 minutes off your time your score might actually not be that affected by it word problems are confusing when you're reviewing your answers pay special attention to

word problems certain situations that they'll describe lend themselves to certain math concepts and you want to pick up on those patterns for example when a word problem has two objects and two comparisons of those objects you use a system of equations also note that these tend to be prices if you pick up on these patterns then you'll see a word problem and you'll more easily be able to identify what math you're supposed to use to solve it another piece of advice is not to rush problems where all you're doing is essentially translating English to math

for example in this problem is means equals more more than means addition so this problem is 16 + 4x = 10 + 14 I'm slow with algebra do more Algebra I forget formula okay we'll go back to the previous one when I say do more algebra generally that comes from getting farther in your math classes put more effort in your algebra 2 in your pre-cal in your Calculus whatever class you're doing you're definitely doing algebra put more effort in solve more problems without a calculator it'll pay off realistically you can be slow with algebra and

still get a perfect SAT Math score you have the time on the test to go very slowly through your computations the part of the SAT that's timec consuming is not the actual solving of problems it's figuring out how to solve the problems and so if you have a good idea of how to solve the problems spend as much time as you want actually solving them I forget formulas don't focus on memorizing formulas focus on understanding them the Pythagorean theorem the distance formula and the circle formula are taught as three different equations but if you actually

understand them you'll realize they're all the same formula understand formulas by asking asking yourself why why is sin x equal to cosine 90 - x why is it that the division of exponential terms is the same as subtracting the exponents try to figure out why on your own just by playing around with math even if it takes some time if you actually derive a formula on your own you won't forget it I just don't know where to start you get a problem and you freeze now the first thing to do is skip the problem and

come back to it at the end so let's say you've done that and you've come back to the problem at the end and you're still stuck what do you do now what I always tell my students is to approach every problem with a sense of direction figure out what you're trying to end with and work backwards from there the best example of this was covered earlier in this video it's this problem right here you're asked to solve in terms of P how do you solve in terms of P well you want to get p on

its own how do you get p on its own well you want to get rid of this fraction how do you get rid of a fraction you multiply it by its reciprocal you figured out your first step by starting at the last step and working backwards throughout the problem this is a great strategy try it out how do I stay motivated this is a very big picture question the easiest answer get a private tutor go to my website learn stmath.com book a free trial session start paying for my tutoring I will keep you motivated I

will give you a schedule I will keep you on track but of course you don't need a private tutor for motivation you can motivate yourself the way I'd suggest giving yourself accountability is putting yourself on a schedule pick a time pick a date but keep the same time and date every single week if you tell yourself I'm going to do one practice test every week that's too vague you're not going to follow through with it how many practice tests should I take before I'm ready I've tutored plenty of students and I still can't give you

a definition of answer for this every student's going to be different some students are going to improve quickly some students are not just put yourself on a schedule and then as you start to go through that schedule figure out do I need to ramp up the amount of practice I'm doing or decrease the amount of practice I'm doing as long as you have that consistent schedule to begin with and you give yourself a decent amount of time before your sat to start preparing you're going to be fine you'll play it by year and so that's

all the common mistakes SL also a few questions that I see people have if you think of any other common mistakes SL questions about the SAT throw them in the comments below below I'd love to answer them and of course I'm going to have to plug myself one more time if you want to get that perfect 800 as fast as possible you can get my private tutoring over at learnmath docomo is by no means necessary to get a perfect 800 I mean I got a perfect 800 I didn't get a tutor what tutoring does is

it makes the process a whole lot faster and easier because you don't need to create your own system of accountability and for a lot of students that's just enough to push them over the edge and get them the score they want but whether or not you decide to do tutoring you can always subscribe for more SAT Math videos thanks for watching and good luck St [Music] by