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If you're short on time and looking to squeeze the most out of every SAT prep session, you’re not alone. Good news — there are proven learning strategies that can help you make real progress, faster. These tips are inspired by research in Make It Stick, a book that unpacks what truly helps students retain knowledge. Spoiler alert: It’s not mindless repetition or cramming the night before.
The Old Way: Cramming for hours the night before a test.
The Smart Way: Study a topic, then come back to it a day later, then a few days after that. Spacing out your practice forces your brain to work harder to retrieve information, which strengthens your long-term memory. Instead of doing five math practice sections in one sitting, do one today, another tomorrow, and a third over the weekend. This is far more effective than binge-studying.
The Old Way: Mastering one math topic (like linear equations) before moving on to the next (like quadratic equations).
The Smart Way: Mix different types of problems together in your practice sessions. When you switch between different concepts, you’re forcing your brain to identify which strategy to use for each problem. This is exactly what you have to do on the real SAT, where questions are all jumbled up. At Preppinbee, our practice sets are designed with this in mind, giving you a mix of questions that mirrors the real test experience.
The Old Way: Rereading your notes or highlighting a textbook.
The Smart Way: Actively try to recall information without looking at the answer. This could be as simple as doing a practice problem and then, before checking the answer, explaining to yourself why you chose it. Or, after learning a grammar rule, try to write your own sentence using it. The act of pulling information from your memory is one of the most powerful ways to learn. Our platform’s detailed answer explanations help with this, but the real magic happens when you try to solve it on your own first.
The Old Way: Thinking, “Yeah, I get it.”
The Smart Way: Try to explain a concept in the simplest terms possible, as if you were teaching it to someone who knows nothing about it. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. This is a great way to find the gaps in your knowledge. For example, after a practice test, pick a question you got wrong and try to explain to a friend (or even just to your wall) why the right answer is right and why the wrong answers are wrong.
The Old Way: Doing practice tests over and over, hoping to improve.
The Smart Way: Use your practice tests as diagnostic tools. After each test, analyze your mistakes. Are you consistently missing questions about punctuation? Or maybe you’re struggling with functions? At Preppinbee, our analytics dashboard does this for you, pinpointing your weak spots and giving you targeted practice so you can turn those weaknesses into strengths. Stop wasting time on what you already know and start focusing on what will actually get you more points.
Ready to put these strategies into action? Sign up for a free trial at Preppinbee and see how our science-backed approach can help you study smarter, not longer.
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