SAT and PSAT standardized tests are taken up every year by thousands of high school students as requirements for college admissions in the USA. Besides getting good grades in standard high school academic tests and exams, these standardized tests are being sought after by institutions in a bid to attract the best students. It therefore becomes important to pay close attention to the performance on these standardized SAT and PSAT tests, because there is a good potential to earn financial scholarship awards by performing well.

It is the purpose of this brief article to describe simple techniques that students can use to enhance their performance in the PSAT and SAT exams. First and foremost, these standardized tests evaluate your time management skills. For example, even if you can solve all of the problems correctly, but take more than the allocated time, then your scores will be lower, since you cannot answer ALL of the questions. Hence it is imperative to manage time very well. If you feel a question is becoming harder to comprehend within the first few seconds, skip it, go to the next question and then come back to the original question later on. Second of all, most of the questions in these tests are fairly simple. Hence if you feel that a question is quite convoluted and seems to take up a circuitous path to solve it, chances are high that you are missing the easy solution. Skip it and come back to it later. You must be quick and accurate in arithmetic and pay close attention to the positive and negative signs especially when moving terms from one end of an equation to the other.

Excellence in vocabulary is almost an imperative when it comes to answering questions pertaining to writing skills. To improve your vocabulary, start reading good books in English rather than simply run of the mill fiction. The older classics generally use high level words, which come in really handy in the SAT and PSAT tests. Purchase a good but concise English dictionary for constant and immediate reference. A very important area where potential errors can be committed is in marking the correct bubble corresponding to the question number addressed. In other words, if you are answering question number twelve, then make sure you are blackening the appropriate bubble corresponding to answer number twelve. Errors in marking the correct answer in the incorrect location will end up causing problems all over the test answer sheets. If a problem or question seems complicated, eliminate answers that are definitely incorrect and this way you can narrow the possible responses and then concentrate on the remaining ones to choose the correct answer. Note that some sections provide negative points for incorrect responses, so guessing answers may not always work in your favor. One needs to pay close attention to the little details in order to score well in PSAT and SAT tests.

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