The PSAT will be given in just one month — October 15 and 18 — across the country and here in St. Louis.  It is given to juniors as part of the National Merit qualifying process, but also to sophomores who want to see how they stand in performance on the SAT.

Many kids ask me why even bother taking the test if they know they cannot do well enough to qualify for National Merit.  I tell them that is not the point of the test.  Less than 1% of students qualify for National Merit, so the test is really not designed just for them.  It is given as a way to preview the SAT, to have a real test environment with the same style questions and time pressures.  Most sophomores or juniors have not taken a test of this difficulty or length.  So taking it in and of itself helps give the student insight into what the future holds with the SAT, and that student’s relative ability at that moment in time.

But taking the PSAT cold is not a good idea because it will give you a score lower than your actual potential and you will not be able to sort out errors due to lack of familiarity from errors due to concepts or time or other skills.  Knowing your actual baseline before you take the test will tell you how well (or not so well) you did when you get the actual results back.  The more preparation one does before the test, the better the read one has after taking the test.  Plus, any PSAT prep is also SAT prep.  Finally, the earlier a jump one gets on the PSAT, the earlier the SAT process can end or the longer one will have to prepare and test multiple times if that is the necessary road.

If you want more information of preparing for the PSAT, just drop me a note here.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under College Entrance Exams, For Parents, For Students. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.