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access to the hard module. While our analyses offer a reasonable estimate of what that threshold might be, we’re not going to tell you. Why? Even if you knew the number, so what? Let’s say the threshold is 11 7 . Would you focus only on getting 11 questions right? That’s not a smart strategy, and we are Study Smart Tutors, and you are a Study Smart Student. Just try your best on every question.
TEXT COMPLEXITY
Not all passages are created equal. If you’ve ever taken a SAT before, you already know this. Just as there are easy, medium, and hard questions, there are easy, medium, and hard passages. That’s called text complexity. The passages on the SAT are each assigned to one of the following complexity bands.
Band 1 Band 2 Band 3
Grades 6 to 8 Grades 9 to 11 Grades 12 to 14 8
Of course, the SAT won’t preface a passage with “This will be hard” or “This will be easy.” And just because the passage is hard doesn’t necessarily mean that its corresponding question is hard too. Just try your best on every passage and every question.
GUESSING
You’ve probably heard this advice before: If you don’t know the answer to a question on the SAT, always guess—never leave anything blank. This is true because there is no “guessing penalty” on the SAT, but that is not entirely accurate either. Before explaining why, let’s distinguish between two types of guessing: • Blind guessing: When a student chooses an answer at random. • Informed guessing: When a student chooses the answer most likely to be correct based on the available information and some level of reasoning. On the SAT, you will want to employ informed guessing. But whether you employ blind guessing or informed guessing, some educators just dislike multiple-choice tests because there’s always a chance that a student can answer a question correctly by just blindly guessing! In fact, some teachers refer to multiple-choice tests as multiple-guess tests. For example:
What molecule exhibits a Jahn-Teller distortion in its ground state geometry?
If you’re reading this book, you’re probably not a chemist or Jahn or Teller, which means you have no chance of answering this question correctly: 0%.
7 It is not 11. 8 What are grades 13 and 14? When the College Board refers to grades 13 and 14, it’s using these designations to categorize students who are taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which are designed to be equivalent to college-level courses.
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