You’ve got a hefty amount of paper and information in your hands.
How can you work through it thoroughly, without spending eight hours on it the Saturday before the test?
Plan ahead.
Before you start, go to your Student Tools and download the study guide. We’ve broken down the contents of this book into 12 study sessions and suggested a timeline for you to follow. Some of these sessions will take longer than others, depending on your strengths and weaknesses. If any of them takes more than two hours, take a break and try to finish the session the following day. You may want to do one, two, or three sessions a week, but we suggest you give yourself at least a day or two in between to absorb the information you’ve just learned. The one thing you should be doing every day is quizzing yourself on vocabulary and making new flashcards.
We also caution against thinking that you can work through this book during summer vacation, put it aside in September, and be ready to take the test in December. If you want to start that early, work primarily on vocabulary until about 10 weeks before the test. Then you can start on techniques, and they’ll be fresh in your mind on the day of the test. If you’ve finished your preparation too soon and have nothing to practice on in the weeks before the test, you’re going to get rusty.
If you know you are significantly weaker in one of the subjects covered by the test, you should begin with that subject so you can practice it throughout your preparation.
If You Want to Start Early
If you have more than ten weeks to prepare, start with vocabulary building and essay writing. These skills only improve with time.
At Each Session
At each practice session, make sure you have sharpened pencils, blank index cards, and a dictionary. Each chapter is interactive; to fully understand the techniques we present, you need to be ready to try them out.
As you read each chapter, practice the techniques and do all the exercises. Check your answers in the Answer Key as you do each set of problems, and try to figure out what types of errors you made so you can correct them. Review all of the techniques that give you trouble.
Get Your Pencil Moving
You’ll get the most out of this book by trying out techniques as you read about them.
As you begin each session, review the chapter you completed during the previous session before moving on to a new chapter.
When You Take a Practice Test
We recommend some specific times to take practice tests in the following session outlines. Here are some guidelines for taking these tests.
Time yourself strictly. Use a timer, watch, or stopwatch that will ring, and do not allow yourself to go over the allotted time for any section. If you try to do so on the real test, your scores will
probably be canceled.
Take a practice test in one sitting, allowing yourself only the breaks that you’ll have on test day (see pages this page for SSAT and this page for ISEE) and no more than two minutes between other sections. You need to build up your endurance for the real test, and you also need an accurate picture of how you will do.
Always take a practice test using an answer sheet with bubbles to fill in, just as you will do for the real test. For the practice tests in this book, use the attached answer sheets. You need to be
comfortable transferring answers to the separate sheet because you might end up skipping around a bit.
Thoroughly fill in each bubble you choose, and make no other marks in the answer area.
As you fill in the bubble for a question, check to be sure you are on the correct number on the answer sheet. If you fill in the wrong bubble on the answer sheet, it won’t matter if you’ve worked out the problem correctly in your test booklet. All that matters to the machine scoring your test is the No. 2 pencil mark.
The EMA and the ERB consider their Score Reports proprietary information, so we can’t reproduce them for our practice tests. You can get an idea of how you did by marking off how many you got right in the answer key after each test. Keep the learning going!
The Day of the Exam
Wake up refreshed from at least eight hours of sleep the night before.
Eat a good breakfast.
Arrive at the test center about a half hour early.
Have with you your SSAT admission ticket or ISEE Verification Letter, four No. 2 pencils with erasers, and, for the paper ISEE only, two working blue or black pens (erasable pens are
acceptable). The test center may not allow you to take food or beverages into the room, but you can leave them in the hall, in case you have a chance to get them during a short break. Do not take a cell phone or any books, papers, or calculators.
Remind yourself that you do not have to work out every question on the test to get a good score. Don’t let yourself become rushed.
Pace yourself.
And take a sweater! You never know how cold the
room might be.