How to use this

This course is in reading order. Every lesson assumes the one before it, and the folders are only there so you can find things again later.

#The three things that move a score

Most of what people call "SAT prep" is one of these three, and the ones that work are almost always the second and third:

1. Content you don't know. A gap in the algebra, or a comma rule you never learned. Fixable by reading and drilling. This is the smallest bucket for most students, and the one everyone assumes is biggest.
2. Method you don't have. You know the content but attack the question in the wrong order, so you spend ninety seconds on something that takes twenty. Fixable by doing the same question type ten times with a fixed procedure.
3. Mistakes you keep repeating. You know the content, you have the method, and you still lost four points to the same trap. Only fixable by naming the mistake, which is what the error log is for.

Prep that only does (1) plateaus. You get to a score and stay there, because the questions you're missing aren't the ones you don't understand — they're the ones you understand and get wrong anyway.

#The loop

• Read a lesson. Ten minutes. Don't take notes on the whole thing; write down the procedure only.
• Drill that question type. Ten to twenty questions, untimed at first, then timed. Bluebook's practice tests and the Question Bank on the College Board site are the only free sources of real questions, and real questions are worth several times what imitation ones are.
• Log every miss. Not the question — the reason. "Picked B because I stopped reading at the semicolon." A log of question numbers is useless; a log of reasons is the whole game.
• Re-drill the reason a week later.

#What to do first

Before anything else, sit one full Bluebook practice test under real conditions. Not to get a score you like — to get a score that's true. Every plan after this depends on knowing which of the four Reading and Writing domains and which of the four Math domains are actually costing you points, and you cannot guess that from feel.

Then read The test, in one page, and build the plan.