Have you ever started a new hobby? You bought all the fresh and exciting tools to paint a picture or play golf or knit a scarf or bake a cake. Then you started, and it is a little (a lot) harder than you expected. And the results are quite what you wanted. And you feel disappointed.  SAT© students often feel this way because they misunderstand tools for skills for SAT© .

We have all been there. 

I have a bag filled with yarn and crochet hooks shoved in the back of my closet. I had seen some amigurumi that were classic novel characters, and I decided I was going to learn how to crochet, so I could make these characters. At a craft store, I bought myself some ergonomic crochet hooks (because you know I am going to be doing this for hours and want to protect my hands and wrists) and a selection of yarn, including some thick stuff to start out with. I’m not stupid, of course there will be a learning curve. I watched a few (dozens) of videos taking me step by step through the process. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. But my stitches were too tight or too loose. I lost count and couldn’t find my place. My work was uneven and messy. 

I had the tools, but not the skills. 

Too often, SAT© prep is presented as a simple matter of obtaining the right tools. Look at how many Reddit posts ask about the “best” book to obtain a 1600. (If there were one best book, I promise it would be the one that everyone used, and everyone would get 1600, and I could retire). 

But it’s not that simple 

It also isn’t a matter of a magic number of study hours (another common Reddit question). Yes, some students can take the SAT© with no or little preparation and achieve a high score, whereas another student can spend months and hundreds of hours and stay stuck in the 1400s. Practice is important, but mindlessly completing questions won’t necessarily result in a higher SAT© score.

You need to know what tools you have (and don’t have) and what skills you have and what skills need to be improved. Some tools are simple to get and just require some study, but others are difficult and may need time and effort to ensure you can rely on them. Skills are different. Some students naturally have the required skills, but other students will need years of practice and repetition to develop those same skills. 

It has been 8 years, and I still don’t have the skills needed to crochet those amigurumi. That doesn’t mean I can never, but it means that I am going to need much more practice than others who have developed their skills much faster than I have. 

Tools vs Skills

A tool is something you can learn fairly easily and often has rules or systems connected to it. However, a skill is connected to how you can use the tools you have, and it may be easier or harder to gain, depending on your brain and experience.  

For Example

• Knowing the rules of using commas = tool
• Knowing that a comma needs to go here, to create a pause in the reader’s flow, and that it might be a choice. = skill

Basic tools

• Vocabulary of 10,000 words
• Knowing the rules for common punctuation
• Understanding sentence structure and being able to identify subjects and predicates

Advanced tools

• Vocabulary of 15,000 words or more
• Knowing the rules for all punctuation
• Idioms

Skills for the SAT© : Basic skills

• reading fluently at 200 words per minute
• Able to identify stated main idea of a passage
• Able to identify the answer to a literal comprehension question

Skills for the SAT© : Advanced Skills

• Reading fluently at 300 words per minute
• Able to use context to identify the needed word for a blank
• Able to use tone to identify the needed idea
• Able to use logic to understand implied meanings in a passage
• Able to infer the implied or unstated main idea of a passage
• Able to shift between concrete and abstract expressions of the same idea
• Able to identify sentence structures and apply accurate punctuation and phrasing
• Able to use evidence to make logical conclusions and provide support for arguments

Above are just a few of the skills you need to be successful on the SAT. The bigger problem is that these skills are not easily taught, take time to develop and refine, and overall are less tangible. So students (and teachers and prep books) focus mainly on the tools that are explicitly easy to grasp. This feels like progress. But the frustration lies in working hard on all these tools and seeing a stuck score at 640/800.

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