What's the best way to prepare for the SAT?

Practice tests. Practice tests. Practice tests. Seriously.

Remember after taking a practice test, you must look through the answers and see what you got wrong and why. Then determine what areas you are weak in and brush up on those. Then take more practice tests.

Repeat this cycle and you’ll do great.

I taught those SAT prep classes for years. There’s nothing they teach you in class that you can’t learn from a book. This is what I would do if I were you:

1. Buy a couple different prep books—Kaplan, Barrons, etc.
2. Take one of the practice tests from the prep books. Make it as much like the real test as possible. Go to the library or somewhere quiet with a timer and take the test from start to finish. (Make sure you give yourself the same breaks you get during the real test.)
3. Score your test and learn from your mistakes. See what areas are your weakest so you know where to focus your studying. And then go through each wrong answer and see why it’s wrong.
4. Make yourself a schedule. This is the other thing the prep classes give you—they force you to sit down for at least an hour every week and study. But that’s not worth $1,000, right? You have to be a little more disciplined to do this on your own, but you can. Figure out how much time you can need to prepare and how much you can realistically devote to studying, and design a reasonable schedule for yourself.
5. About a week before the test, take another practice test. By now you should feel prepared and confident, so you are taking this test to practice pacing yourself and build up your endurance.

If you want specific advice about the test, post back after you take your first practice test and let us know how you did.

Good luck!

Sounds like great advice from @nikipedia and @PnL

Also, when taking the test skip ones that are difficult for you and go back later, just be sure to skip correctly on the answer sheet. Always check the question number and answer number when filling the bubbles.

Lastly read the question well. Do not get fooled by questions that ask you for the answer that does NOT apply, or listing numbers greatest to least. These type of exceptio questions can get you when you are under stress and trying to get through a long test. With math always check your answer by filling in the number you have solved for and making sure it works in an equation.

If you took a foreign language life Spanish you are at an advantage for vocabulary and grammar in my opinion. If a vocabulary word you have never seen before comes up, stop and see if maybe you can figure out the latin root. For insance words like castigate, verdant, culpable, pensive may be difficult for most 17 year olds, but if you speak Spanish and see multiple choice they will be much easier to figure out.

Honestly, there is no pat answer here. best bet is to learn a little bit about everything in life, before you take the test. my son was fortunate. during high school, he loved to study the weather. guess what his SAT test was about? thats right, the weather. he aced the test.

There are definitely some free practice questions on collegeboard.com you can take

What helped me prepare for the SAT (for the record, I took it just a couple years ago and I never took any prep class) was doing the practice tests in the book made by CollegeBoard. That big fat book with all the practice tests in it is the best. That’s the book I used when I tutored my friend and it also helped me improve my score for the second time I took it. I greatly recommend doing those practice tests. You’ll find patterns in the questions that will make them easier, you’ll discover which methods are quicker, and it’ll give you a good sampling of actual questions you will encounter on the test.

@DominicX you never studied SAT words? Or is your vocabulary already big?

@Mike_Hunt

No, I didn’t, really. Though of course that couldn’t hurt. Taking Latin also helped me. :)

All I did was get a good night sleep the night before after reading everything I could get my hands on for 12 years.

@nikipedia, from your experience, do you think there’s any value in getting together with one or two other people and making a group commitment to work through the prep books and practice tests together, or is it such an individual thing that you’d only be wasting time on areas you don’t need to concentrate on?

@galileogirl, it was essentially the same for me, but back then, nobody took prep classes. Now they’re up against people who have taken them.

The SAT for Dummies

This book. Written by young cool people. It helpd me way more than any other book.

@sliceswiththings I read that book as light reading and loved it!! It’s so hilarious that I think I would read it for fun. Ok, so I am a nerd.

@Jeruba: Good question. From what I understand about pedagogical research, people do tend to learn better in groups. The act of explaining is a powerful learning tool.

But some people just don’t do groups. The top student in my grad school cohort never came to any of our study groups because they just stress her out and make her insecure.