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Aristotle’s admonition to make a good start on any journey counts doubly on difficult SAT/ACT math problems.  Beginning is often half the battle, and almost anything you can do to get yourself going will probably be helpful.   This is sometimes easier said than done, but there are several things you can generally try. It's good to keep in mind a few tips to help grease the wheels when stuck at the beginning of a tough question. Primary among these is to reread the question slowly and carefully, at half-speed. Many times, you’ll find you simply missed something, and can now solve the problem. Easy as that. To get a feeling for what’s going on, experiment with simple, realistic numbers in place of unknown quantities. Let the cost of the sweatshirt be $20, for instance. Use that number in the problem, and see what happens. Based on what you learn, the solution may reveal itself. You can try making up a “simpler similar problem.” Solve that simpler problem, and apply the same appr...

Aristotle’s admonition to make a good start on any journey counts doubly on difficult SAT/ACT math problems.  Beginning is often half the battle, and almost anything you can do to get yourself going will probably be helpful.   This is sometimes easier said than done, but there are several things you can generally try. It's good to keep in mind a few tips to help grease the wheels when stuck at the beginning of a tough question. Primary among these is to reread the question slowly and carefully, at half-speed. Many times, you’ll find you simply missed something, and can now solve the problem. Easy as that. To get a feeling for what’s going on, experiment with simple, realistic numbers in place of unknown quantities. Let the cost of the sweatshirt be $20, for instance. Use that number in the problem, and see what happens. Based on what you learn, the solution may reveal itself. You can try making up a “simpler similar problem.” Solve that simpler problem, and apply the same appr...

Aristotle’s admonition to make a good start on any journey counts doubly on difficult SAT/ACT math problems.  Beginning is often half the battle, and almost anything you can do to get yourself going will probably be helpful.   This is sometimes easier said than done, but there are several things you can generally try. It's good to keep in mind a few tips to help grease the wheels when stuck at the beginning of a tough question. Primary among these is to reread the question slowly and carefully, at half-speed. Many times, you’ll find you simply missed something, and can now solve the problem. Easy as that. To get a feeling for what’s going on, experiment with simple, realistic numbers in place of unknown quantities. Let the cost of the sweatshirt be $20, for instance. Use that number in the problem, and see what happens. Based on what you learn, the solution may reveal itself. You can try making up a “simpler similar problem.” Solve that simpler problem, and apply the same appr...

Needless to say, when I graduated high school in 1975, it was an entirely different world. With plenty of well-paying blue collar jobs available in the U.S., a college education was seen as an optional luxury, not at all a requirement to live a good middle-class life. I remember befriending a Golden Gate Bridge worker in the late-1980’s who was paid an annual salary of nearly $60,000 – $150,000 today – taking tolls! Not many students used any kind of prep, though. I took the PSAT in high school, cold, no prep or pre-test studying at all, as a lark (and hit 98th percentile). But I never told the SAT (didn’t feel like wasting a Saturday morning). Most of my friends acted similarly. College just wasn’t a must-do, at the time. Stanley Kaplan invented the modern test prep industry in 1939, and between 1940 and 1980 his company’s courses and books were essentially the only ones available to help interested students maximize scores on the standardized tests like the SAT. Then along came the...

Needless to say, when I graduated high school in 1975, it was an entirely different world. With plenty of well-paying blue collar jobs available in the U.S., a college education was seen as an optional luxury, not at all a requirement to live a good middle-class life. I remember befriending a Golden Gate Bridge worker in the late-1980’s who was paid an annual salary of nearly $60,000 – $150,000 today – taking tolls! Not many students used any kind of prep, though. I took the PSAT in high school, cold, no prep or pre-test studying at all, as a lark (and hit 98th percentile). But I never told the SAT (didn’t feel like wasting a Saturday morning). Most of my friends acted similarly. College just wasn’t a must-do, at the time. Stanley Kaplan invented the modern test prep industry in 1939, and between 1940 and 1980 his company’s courses and books were essentially the only ones available to help interested students maximize scores on the standardized tests like the SAT. Then along came the...

Needless to say, when I graduated high school in 1975, it was an entirely different world. With plenty of well-paying blue collar jobs available in the U.S., a college education was seen as an optional luxury, not at all a requirement to live a good middle-class life. I remember befriending a Golden Gate Bridge worker in the late-1980’s who was paid an annual salary of nearly $60,000 – $150,000 today – taking tolls! Not many students used any kind of prep, though. I took the PSAT in high school, cold, no prep or pre-test studying at all, as a lark (and hit 98th percentile). But I never told the SAT (didn’t feel like wasting a Saturday morning). Most of my friends acted similarly. College just wasn’t a must-do, at the time. Stanley Kaplan invented the modern test prep industry in 1939, and between 1940 and 1980 his company’s courses and books were essentially the only ones available to help interested students maximize scores on the standardized tests like the SAT. Then along came the...