Mind Over SAT: Mastering the Mental Side of the SAT

Mind over SAT

Mastering the Mental Side of the SAT

"One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

by Retley Locke

Copyright 2013 by Retley Locke

Smashwords Edition

In accordance with the United States Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all those facing the SAT® with the courage and perseverance to explore the mental game of testing. Thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and self-talk can have a positive or negative affect on SAT performance. This book is about turning negatives into positives and defying fear and self-imposed mental limitations to grab the brass ring.

INTRODUCTION

This book will show you how taking the SAT relates to skydiving, ballroom dancing, professional golf, college basketball, martial arts, concert pianists, Olympians, coaches, Navy SEALs, and the Dalai Lama. It’s all about the mental game.

If you are neglecting the mental side of SAT performance, you are limiting your score. The mental factors affecting your score do not have to be debilitating to significantly decrease your score. Your score decreases as mental interference increases, even when the interference is at a medium or low level. If you have never experienced test anxiety, a test as significant as the SAT can trigger a first experience. The SAT is a judgment tool used to determine college admissions and eligibility for merit-based aid awards. Additionally, SAT scores are used as a basis for personal comparison among test takers.

The SAT is a game where familiar material is tested in an unfamiliar way. The math tested on the SAT is equivalent to concepts covered by a typical 10th grader. The verbal material, while broader in scope, is still limited. Therefore, to avoid three million perfect scores, test makers must design questions to elicit an incorrect choice when the known answer is an available choice on the test. Test makers use mental games to entice you into make incorrect answer choices. Mental toughness is the issue, not knowledge or competence. No amount of knowledge will generate the mental toughness and confidence necessary to achieve your maximum SAT score.

Unfortunately, traditional SAT study materials focus on competence, using a drill-and-kill approach to build knowledge, but neglecting the mental side of performance. The implied premise of these study aids is that competence will build confidence, but this is a fallacy. This book is unique because it focuses solely on the mental side of test performance: it applies the mental performance secrets of athletes, performers, Tibetan monks, and warriors to the SAT. This is useful because the mental, emotional, and physical factors that affect SAT performance affect performances of all kinds. The brain is the common denominator in emotional, physical, and mental performance, The brain facilitates communication among the three.

Most of us allow our minds to hamper our performance. It does not have to be this way. You do not need to watch helplessly as your hopes are dashed. This book shows you how to perform like a champion. Performing at a maximum, physically or mentally, requires emotional toughness, which is what results in unshakable self-confidence. Confidence allows you to trust your ability, release conscious control, and let the subconscious mind produce at a level beyond your expectations.

You can experience freedom from conscious control in a variety of activities. In sports, this freedom is called being in the zone. It’s what the Danish virtuosic pianist Victor Borge was trying to describe when he asked renowned pianist Vladmir Ashkenazy, Has it ever frightened you to play, [to] watch your fingers moving and not know who it is that is making them move?

The human mind is more powerful than any supercomputer. Imagine the power of your mind working for you on the SAT; instead of picturing doom, imagine trusting yourself to perform, uninhibited by preconceptions or fear of outcome.

Mind over SAT focuses on the mental side of SAT performance. It is a supplement to competence-focused traditional study materials. This book will help you develop the mental and emotional toughness to achieve your personal best on the SAT—to grab that brass ring!

PART I

GETTING TO KNOW THE PLAYERS

Chapter 1: Know Your Opponent

‘‘Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts."

—Albert Einstein

Knowing your opponent is important in any competition. It is why NFL players and coaches spend hours watching game film and why the military gathers mountains of intelligence. It is how an NBA guard knows to force an opponent to his right, where his shot is less effective. The same is true for test takers: those who are able to discern a teacher’s interests and tendencies are better able to anticipate potential test questions, and students who best anticipate questions score higher on tests. While it is impossible to anticipate SAT questions, knowing your opponent is vital.

You may believe that the three million students taking the SAT worldwide this year are your opponents, but this belief is incorrect and actually hinders your performance. Your real opponent is the College Board and its test makers. They create the game, they make the rules, and they keep score, all while endeavoring to entice you into choosing an incorrect answer.

One SAT instruction, Choose the best answer, makes the test makers your opponents and the test like a game. Choose the best answer makes test makers your judge and jury. Best answer is never defined, but rather, it is implied. The best answer has nothing to do with what you or even an expert thinks is best; the test makers are the sole source of the best answer. This adversarial relationship makes the SAT a competition between you and the test makers.

One other opponent is present in every competition. The other omnipresent opponent is you. The SAT will not report how you felt on test day or to what degree your thoughts and emotions impaired your score, but they will report an assessment of your cognitive ability. You can be your greatest asset or your worst enemy.

IQ versus SAT

The SAT was born from military IQ tests, and like all IQ tests, it purports to measure aptitude for higher-order cognitive ability. However, the SAT differs from typical IQ tests because it is a standardized test. A psychological professional administers traditional IQ tests in a one-on-one environment. The SAT is administered in a group environment. The subject matter tested also differs from traditional IQ tests.

The SAT tests math, verbal, and writing skills. The math and verbal skills are tested in a multiple-choice format. Traditional IQ tests rely on verbal responses and are less curriculum bound, using a variety of sources including blocks and pictorial representations to measure intellectual potential. The open-ended structure and varied source materials leave room for professionals to make observations and interpret answers. The SAT is a machine-graded, multiple-choice test covering specific material with no room for observation or interpretation.

Students have typically covered the math skills tested on the SAT by the 10th grade. The verbal section covers a larger sphere, but is still limited to certain types of problems. Verbal section study guides rely on the fact that certain words appear more frequently. Finally, the multiple-choice format means the one best answer is available for everyone to select. Therefore, it will come as little surprise that SAT test makers must entice you into choosing incorrect answers or face three million perfect scores.

A Mental Game

The material is familiar and the correct answer is printed on the test, so why is the best answer elusive? The best answer is elusive because, remember, the SAT is more akin to a game than a test. Test makers try to entice you into selecting an incorrect answer, but they must carefully craft the answers so that high scorers will answer them correctly while low scorers answer incorrectly. The reason for this is that impossibly difficult questions give lucky students the same odds of being correct as high-scoring students, and this eliminates any cognitive measure. This is why test makers introduced a guessing penalty. To compete with test takers, test makers employ several strategies.

Creating time pressure is one way to encourage mistakes. Time pressure creates distress, which causes forgetfulness, increases mistakes, and increases carelessness (Mann, 2009). Traditionally, the SAT is less time-pressured than the ACT, however, time-consuming questions indirectly create time pressure, leaving less time for the remaining questions. Additionally, time pressure impairs decision making, further slowing progress.

Obscuring the best answer generates mistakes, especially in the verbal section, where a word can have three, four, or more meanings. Disguised incorrectness makes incorrect answers more attractive. Test makers work math problems using incorrect methods to create distracting choices. A test taker employing the incorrect method will confidently select an incorrect choice. In the verbal section, this method entices belief in incorrect meanings and interpretation.

Research indicates that many highly intelligent students can see potentially valid reasons why an incorrect answer might be correct, leading them to choose an incorrect answer. This causes lower scores despite an abundance of higher-order cognitive ability. Ambiguity, leaving questions open for alternate interpretation, capitalizes on this tendency. In the math section, ambiguous terms confuse the required operation, leading to incorrect methods. In the verbal section, ambiguity and double meanings make questions time-consuming and impair decision making.

Personal biases also distract test takers. We all bring interests, value judgments, and personal baggage to the test. Test makers use this to their advantage by creating questions that require suspension of personal bias to obtain the best answer. Test takers with a concentrated background of study may choose an incorrect answer based upon specialized knowledge and jargon. In the reading comprehension section, bias clouds the evaluation of tone or argument.

Test makers use self-doubt against test takers by labeling the penalty for being incorrect a guessing penalty, causing some test takers to feel guilty for guessing because it is penalized. The College Board has no way to know if you guessed. They can only detect an incorrect answer, which costs one-quarter point. The College Board justifies the guessing penalty moniker with basic statistical analysis. Statistically, a test taker answering five multiple-choice questions, each with five possible answers, has a one in five probability of answering a question correctly. Assuming this probability holds for five questions, the tester is awarded one point for the correct answer and loses one-quarter point for each of the four incorrect answers; resulting in no net-score increase. However, research indicates that guessing on the SAT increases scores, even when only one answer choice can be eliminated.

A huge amount of judgment is associated with the SAT. Its wide acceptance causes it to be viewed as more indicative of intellectual ability than it actually is. People equate the SAT with self-worth, viewing an unsatisfactory score as revealing a lack of cognitive ability, effort, or motivation. People who cannot remember their anniversaries remember their SAT score.

Last, the security measures for the SAT create anxiety. Requiring photo identification that looks