What You Most Want To Do After The Holidays
Around this time of year, we start getting a lot of questions about the January SAT, mostly from high-school juniors. Should I take it? Should I wait? My school is making me take it and is that okay?
Quite honestly, it’s a bit of an awkward time to take the test. Some students haven’t been exposed to all the material they’ll need to know for the test by January of their junior year. For those students, it might be better to wait until the spring or even next fall to take the test.
But for those students who have covered the math on the test and are relatively confident in their verbal skills, the idea of getting the test over with in January is quite alluring.
Be careful, though, about over-preparing for this test. Unless you are a very rare person, you will probably end up taking the test again, perhaps more than once. So you will end up preparing for the test several times. And it is possible to overdo it and burn out. The last thing you need is to take the test again and have your score go down because your performance peaked too early.
If you do decide to take the January test as a junior, we generally recommend that you only do some light preparation specific to standardized tests. If you want to do some intense studying over the holidays, we recommend that you do two things: work on your vocab, and read. Reading and improving your vocabulary are the most important things you can do to improve your verbal test scores.
Need some suggestions? Check this list.