• The Test Prep Process
  How to arrange sessions and set goals
• SSAT Skills
  Secondary School Admissions Test, for 8th graders applying to private high schools
• SAT Skills
  Scholastic Assessment Test, for college-bound high school juniors and seniors
• GRE Skills
  Graduate Record Exam, for graduate school applicants
• GMAT Skills
  Graduate Management Admissions Test, for business school program applicants

SAT Skills

• Critical Reading (Sentence Completion and Passage-Based Reading)
• Identifying Sentence Errors
• Improving Sentences
• Improving Paragraphs
• Essay Writing

In the new SAT, analogy questions have been replaced by questions targeting writing skills, with an emphasis on syntax and grammar. You’re also expected to demonstrate writing proficiency by writing an essay in response to a prompt.

• Sentence Completion passages are short, usually one or two sentence, with one or two blanks to be filled in from multiple choice selections. They test for knowledge of vocabulary in context.
• Critical reading passages include short and long passages, fiction excerpts and non-fiction passages on topics from astronomy to art history to the sociology of television, and the questions test a range of skills, including literal comprehension, narrative devices, and a variety of inference-based analyses.
• The sections devoted to improving sentences and paragraphs are based on a wide knowledge of grammar, with questions devoted to verb conjugation, dependent and independent clauses, prepositional use, and parallel syntax. It’s more important, though, to be able to recognize what’s right and wrong than it is to be able to name the grammatical issue.
• The essay prompts generally ask questions related to psychology, sociology, or ethics. The essay must be completed in just 25 minutes, so it’s important to be able to brainstorm and outline quickly, then write a well-organized, logical response that does not stray from the topic of the prompt.