> cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain
What? Most of the SAT is evaluating high school-level math, writing, and reading skills. It's not like they're asking you to memorize historical dates or names or poems or formulas. Maybe the relatively narrow part of the test on vocabulary falls into this category, but even those words are almost entirely things you'll just pick up if you like reading books. And, now that I'm looking into it, only 10 out of 52 questions in the reading section are even about vocabulary [1]. You can skip 9 of them and still get a 700 on reading/writing [2]. Assuming you get an 800 on math, that's a 98th percentile total score and a 90th percentile on reading/writing alone [3], with almost no vocabulary prep.
I agree about the high pressure aspect, there doesn't seem to be a good way around that.
What? Most of the SAT is evaluating high school-level math, writing, and reading skills. It's not like they're asking you to memorize historical dates or names or poems or formulas. Maybe the relatively narrow part of the test on vocabulary falls into this category, but even those words are almost entirely things you'll just pick up if you like reading books. And, now that I'm looking into it, only 10 out of 52 questions in the reading section are even about vocabulary [1]. You can skip 9 of them and still get a 700 on reading/writing [2]. Assuming you get an 800 on math, that's a 98th percentile total score and a 90th percentile on reading/writing alone [3], with almost no vocabulary prep.
I agree about the high pressure aspect, there doesn't seem to be a good way around that.
[1] https://www.kaptest.com/study/sat/whats-tested-on-the-sat-vo...
[2] https://blog.prepscholar.com/how-many-questions-can-you-skip...
[3] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-ranki...