Many new SAT candidates, whether self-taught or enrolled in classes, take brushing questions as the top priority. What is embarrassing is that the real questions of the new SAT are very limited. The official only gave 8 sets, which is definitely not enough for many students. Then how should we complete the effective preparation for the exam?

In the past, many students studied preparing for exams, and many people (teachers and classmates) thought that "brushing real questions" would directly help improve their grades, but it was not! Among the hundreds of thousands of students I have taught, there are also many students who insist on "brushing dozens of sets of questions". After several exams, they have not improved, but they find me puzzled. They are often depressed because they always feel that they have worked hard, but they have not been rewarded accordingly.

In fact, if you can understand the basic truth that "all exams are testing certain abilities, and test scores are positively related to these abilities", it is easy to understand the truth that "brushing questions will not improve your grades"-"brushing questions" itself does not change your abilities, but only helps you test whether these abilities are defective.

So in the process of preparing for the exam, there is no need to worry about the number of real questions. More importantly, we need to figure out what abilities are tested in the new SAT and how to improve them. I don't think the so-called "problem solving skills" can help candidates, because sometimes teachers don't understand what these so-called "skills" are. A stunt has been told several times, you may believe it, but can you believe it?

In my opinion, compared with the SAT before the reform, the core competence of the new SAT has not changed substantially, mainly in two aspects:

1, language ability. Although the SAT is not a language test, its basic assumption is that all candidates have reached the language level of students in grades10-1/in the United States (that is, our senior one to senior two). Therefore, for China students, improving our language level, or mainly reading and writing, is the primary task.

We might as well think about our Chinese level in high school-we can freely read articles of various themes and genres, understand the logic and rhetoric in words, understand the hidden information and emotions behind words, and skillfully use Chinese to write argumentative papers. Similarly, the English language ability required by SAT is the same. Therefore, it is impossible for a candidate to reach the above level just by doing real questions. What students need to do is targeted language ability training, including reading articles, logical cognition, rhetorical recognition and understanding, and written expression.

2. thinking ability. This is actually the real core of the new SAT. Simply put, thinking ability has two dimensions-depth and breadth. The so-called thinking depth refers to the degree of your views on things and problems, whether the logic of your thinking is clear, and whether you can gain insight into the essence of the problem. The breadth of thinking is how wide your knowledge is, whether you have an understanding of various topics encountered in life and problems involved in academic research, and whether you can put forward your own unique opinions. The thinking ability formed by these two dimensions is actually what we often call "critical thinking"

(critical thinking) "ability.