Last month, I wrote (according to Stoic principles) about students determining what they can control and what they cannot and focusing on what they can control: study time, practice quality, sleep, and mindset. This month, I will focus on letting go of what students cannot control: content (which topics show up most heavily), difficulty level and “scoring curve,” and what other students score.
Students can not control the content of the test—what topics show up most often. Having taught SAT prep for 28 years, I’ve seen some tests assess more of one concept, some tests assess more of another. The more heavily tested concept may be a student’s strength, but it may be his/her weakness. The only thing a student can control is their preparation: exhaust the practice tests. Learn how to do every question on one test before moving on to another. Following this pattern from one practice test to another, the student will minimize variability between tests.
While students cannot control the difficulty of their test administration, fortunately, there is a safeguard. Just like all other standardized test students take, the SAT is scaled and equated. What does this mean? Simply put, a student who scores 1400 has scored higher than 93 out of every 100 testers. Sometimes that is 8 questions wrong on a test. At other times that is 12 questions wrong on a test. While on the surface, this may not seem fair, it is. While the College Board tries to make all tests of equal difficulty, inevitably students perform a bit better on one test than another. Essentially, if a test is slightly harder, a student can get more questions wrong and get the same score. If a test is slightly easier, a student must get more questions correct to get the same score.
Students also cannot control what other students score. If a friend, frenemy, or enemy scores higher than a competitive student, that student can either choose to lose heart, or choose to work harder to score higher than their peer. Muhammad Ali would not have been as great of a fighter as he was if there were no Joe Frazier.
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