{"id":982,"date":"2013-04-04t09:36:59","date_gmt":"2013-04-04t09:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/sat\/?p=982"},"modified":"2019-12-26t09:50:21","modified_gmt":"2019-12-26t17:50:21","slug":"an-sat-trick-debunked-when-to-bubble-in-your-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/hs\/sat\/an-sat-trick-debunked-when-to-bubble-in-your-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"an sat \u201ctrick\u201d debunked- when to bubble in your answers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>there are some gems buried in the scads of sat tips and tricks (like filling in the sentence completion blanks <a href=\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/hs\/sat\/sat-reading-tips\/\">with your own word<\/a>), but there are also some disasters waiting to happen. some test prep sites will tell you to do things that might totally screw up your sat.<\/p>\n<p>why would that happen? tips and tricks for the sat are really tempting to sell because they\u2019re quick advice to impart and they give immediate results\u2014at least, theoretically. but even the best intentioned test-prep guides find themselves selling snake-oil if they\u2019re not careful. sat tricks may be easy to teach, but they\u2019re not always right.<\/p>\n<p>there\u2019s one \u201ctrick\u201d in particular that\u2019s always bothered me\u2014filling in the answer bubbles all at once\u2014and here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>a disaster caused by good intentions<\/h2>\n<p>around the time i first started teaching sat preparation for one of the major test prep companies, i proctored a practice test for another teacher\u2019s class. usually, watching over tests is pretty easy, and i knew that\u2014i\u2019d already done a few and knew what to expect. the rules of the test are pretty simple, and when you tell students to put their pencils down, they put their pencils down. \u2026usually.<\/p>\n<p>this one teacher had accidentally sold some bad advice, though. at the end of each section, there were three or fours students who kept furiously bubbling in until they were told, for the second time, \u201c<i>put your pencils down<\/i>.\u201d see, they\u2019d been told to just circle the answers in their books while working through the section, then transfer answers to the scantron sheet in the last couple minutes. but there was a problem; the students who took that advice consistently misjudged how much time it would take to transfer their answers, and they ended up omitting questions that they didn\u2019t even mean to skip just because they didn\u2019t have time to fill the bubbles. one poor student was only able to bubble in about ten questions out of thirty in one section. you can imagine what that did to her score.<\/p>\n<h2>bubble in answers as you go<\/h2>\n<p>the idea sounds attractive\u2014if you bubble in after having found the answers to a group of questions (or an entire section), then you don\u2019t have to go back and forth so often, and you save time. but the truth is that it takes only a little bit more time to bubble in each question individually than it does to bubble them in all at once. the time you might save isn\u2019t worth risking that last minute, frantic bubbling.<\/p>\n<p>filling in the scantron sheet as you go also takes away the danger of bubbling a long line of answers incorrectly because you skipped one or repeated yourself by accident.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>think twice about whether that \u201ctrick\u201d might come back to bite you<\/h2>\n<p>there <i>are<\/i> some good tricks to use when taking the sat (like <a href=\"\/\/www.catharsisit.com\/hs\/sat\/sat-reading-tips\/\">scanning verbs<\/a>), but beware of any that look too good to be true. there\u2019s often another side to the story.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>there are some gems buried in the scads of sat tips and tricks (like filling in the sentence completion blanks with your own word), but there are also some disasters waiting to happen. some test prep sites will tell you to do things that might totally screw up your sat. why would that happen? tips [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[36,44],"ppma_author":[24883],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- this site is optimized with the yoast seo premium plugin v21.7 (yoast seo v21.7) - 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