Hacking the Hidden Obstacles to Your Kid’s Best SAT/ACT Score — Even if They’re Bad at Test-Taking

In today's episode, I’m sharing a webinar I did on test prep strategies designed to help your teen break through their score ceiling, even if they have ADHD. I’ll cover the common test prep mistakes that hold students back and share strategies to help them achieve their best SAT/ACT results. If you want to ensure testing doesn’t stand in the way of their dream schools, this session is for you. Join me to learn how to guide your child to success!

Access free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

Transcript

Sheila Akbar: 0:00

When we do this kind of work, your student has a lot more time to react accurately and efficiently to the problems that are in front of them, right? They're focused all of their mental energy on that question, and none of the other stuff that's there to distract them or put the pressure on you. Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed a week off from me. I had a great time at the NACAC conference, and I will be sharing some more insights from that experience in the next couple of weeks. It was a great time. Very well organized, saw some wonderful people, heard some extremely insightful sessions, and met some people that I hope to bring their wisdom to you on a future podcast episode. So stay tuned for that today. What I want to share with you is a talk that I gave a few weeks back on approaching standardized testing with students who feel like they're bad at testing, or maybe they have ADHD or their executive functions are just not at the level that they need to be to finish all those questions in that amount of time, or to stand up to The pressure of those tests. So I'm going to hit play on that recording for you. And of course, it was a talk with slides. And so I'm going to pop in from time to time and give you a description of what the slide was, because obviously, in this format, you can't see it, but I think that there's some really valuable information for all kinds of students about deliberate practice and how it can help on a standardized test, in improving sports performance, in improving musical performance, in improving academic performance. It's so widely applicable, it's very exciting idea for me. I'm sure you're going to hear in my voice on this recording, and I'm so excited to share it with you all. So check it out, and I'll see you on the other side. Today, we're going to talk about those hidden obstacles that may be standing in the way of your child's test score. And this might be just a middle of the road test score that they're being held back from, or it could be really high test score that they're being held back from. And what I found in my 15 plus years of doing this is that both those groups of students, the ones that are just trying to get a decent score and the ones that are really aiming for the top scores, the 99th percentile, they tend to be struggling with the same sort of performance obstacles. And you don't hear a lot of people in the test prep world talking about performance. You hear them talking about, you know, building familiarity with the test or learning the content. And I kind of want to separate out all the pieces of a lot of moving parts to doing well on a test. I want to separate all those pieces help you have some language to talk about what's actually happening for your child, and then help you see some solutions to getting them to where they want to go. We will do a little bit of discussion of, you know, what is the SAT, what is the ACTT, how do you decide what you need to do? But really, today's talk is going to be focused more on, how do you move the needle on that score, the principles that I'm going to show you here, the framework that we like to use at Signet is totally applicable to all kinds of standardized tests. So you might be looking at the HSAT, the SSAT, the ISEE, for tests getting into high school, SAT ACT for getting into college. Some of this will even apply to AP exams and things like that. GRE GMAT, MCAT, LSAT. And I want to call out I don't believe anybody is bad at test taking. I do not believe in research has shown people are not born with certain abilities on tests, or, you know, some innate intelligence level that they can get to. It's really about our experience, the skills we're able to build, the practice that we're able to put in what we're exposed to. And I do believe everybody can get better at these tests. It is a separate question, whether these tests should be required, whether what they measure is actually something we as a society care about whether your particular student should test. But the fact remains, these are standardized tests. You can get more familiar with them. You can build the skills to do well on I want to start by telling you I got a perfect score on my SATs back in 1986 so four versions of the SAT ago today, it's not uncommon to have a tutor or a number of students who who score that well, right? Lots of people score that well. I think the thing that is worth remarking on is that most people who do well on these tests do not really know how they did it, and they may feel like they're lucky. Or they're just smart, or somehow the test just sort of unfolded in front of them, and they understood exactly what they needed to do. I know how I did it, and that experience has come to influence what we do at Signet. We obsess over the why and the how, so that we can show your kids how to to you see what I did there. So we spend a lot of time reading pedagogical research, testing things out with our students, and articulating to one another why we approach something a certain way, why we think a certain technique or practice regimen worked with this or that student, and how we can take those learnings from one individual student and share it with our team of tutors so that they can apply these learnings, you know, across the board with with a lot of their other students. We want to understand the context and the why, so that we can reproduce those results for that individual student, but for all of the students that we work with, it's important to really establish that these tests are not measuring what students know they are not traditional achievement tests in that you know they're testing like a unit test in their history class, did you learn the facts that you were supposed To learn in this section of the class, these tests measure what you can do within certain constraints. So this is really a skills based test, and skill is related to knowledge. Yes, it's how you apply knowledge, but it's very different from knowledge. You just can't memorize a bunch of math equations and feel like you're going to do well on the SAT, or the ACT. A good analogy here is like with piano, you can theoretically understand how to read music or understand what a certain chord is going to sound like. That doesn't mean you're going to sit down and play a concerto perfectly. The knowledge is very different from the skill, and the same thing applies to any of these standardized tests. I actually think the ability to perform the skill matters more than your content knowledge, and we'll talk about why, as we as we go forward here, this is one of the things that I have to spend a lot of time actually explaining to parents, more than to students. I think as a society, we've been really led to believe that these tests are a measure of a student's aptitude or potential or even IQ, and that's why colleges care about them. It's not it's just not at all. And there's a lot of research and literature on this and why colleges do what they do with it. We won't get into all of that right now. What I want to do is get into a question. What I've got up here on the screen is a typical question from the ACT science section. In this section, you have 35 minutes to get through seven passages, which are like these texts and diagrams and charts, and about seven or eight questions per passage. So if you don't even spend any time on the passage itself, reading the information, you have a little over one minute per question that should get you feeling a little bit on the edge of your seat, a little here, like the time pressure is real. In addition to that, the science section is the fourth section of the ACT, so you've already done about three hours of testing before you get here, starting at like 830 in the morning. So you're probably pretty tired and getting hungry when you're in this section. To make matters worse. So before I talk about, how do we solve this, and why am I showing you this, I would love if you could put in the chat how you feel about this question. Are you scared? Are you overwhelmed? Are you the kind of person who goes straight to the diagrams and the charts? Are you really trying to understand the science here. I'd love to hear from you in the chat, and I'm going to wait, because I do want some participation here, so somebody put us out of our misery and put some stuff in the chat here. Grateful that you don't take this great answer. Kathy, how about this? If you're feeling overwhelmed by the information here. Put a one. Oh, Kubine being your brain shut down. Joy says, Uh. Yes, Evan, it's, it's a one for you overwhelmed. Yeah, Regina, as well. Okay, if you feel like you're not sure what to look at first, put a two. Okay, couple people, yeah, great. If you are, like, Kubine said shutting down like this is just too much, and I'm not. I can't give me a three. Okay, so maybe no one in the audience feels that way, but I will tell you, a lot of students feel that way. Oh, okay, Joy. Joy added one on here. A lot of students feel that way, particularly if they already believe they're bad at test taking, that they don't do science, or any number of these sort of limiting beliefs that that they may have convinced themselves of with or without data. They may believe these things, and when they see something like this, they're like, I'm not even gonna try. But if we can get clear on what actually makes this problem difficult, it's a lot of the things we talked about. There's just lots of information. There's a lot of words. Some of those words are in italics. Then we have a diagram. We have jargon, like vocabulary words that we don't know, nodes, radial, linear, amplitude. What are these things I don't know. I don't know this science, like sand covered drum head, like, Was I supposed to learn that in school? And then we also have a chart right this table over here, but I don't really know what it means. So there's lots of information coming at us, a lot of self doubt coming up for sure. And then, if you know you're you were a student on the ACT, you would also be thinking about, I don't have time to sift through all of this, like this section is almost over, and they may also be going to the place of, oh my god, I'm never going to get into college, right? So much is riding on this. So when we think about maybe more abstract terms for these challenges, it's the timing, it's the stress tolerance, its attention to detail, its ability to focus, it's your ability to process different types of information and really just, like, hold it all together, right, to not get lost in the details. But you've got to, like, kind of come at this from a higher level way of thinking. We look at our question. I'm going to show you how easy this question actually is. You don't need to read any of this stuff based on the results of experiment one, which are here in this table. How, for how many of the diameters tested was the frequency for NP, one less than that of NP, two, okay, NP, one is less than NP. Two for that one less than NP, two for that one less than MP, two for that less, the less that it's all five, is J That's it, right? I had to hold all of this stress aside to actually be able to engage with the question and the data that is right here in front of me. Realize I don't have to know any science, really. I do, I guess, have to know what less than means and how to read a table. And the question is very simple, right? But these are the things that kids who think they're bad at test prep struggle with. We can't hold all of that information aside and stop worrying about the timing or the impact to our college application or push, you know, compartmentalize this stress. So I can actually think about what needs to be done here. And I think this is a really great example of how this test is measuring a skill and not knowledge. Definitely anything about a sand covered drum head is not taught in a, you know, standard science curriculum. It's not about that. This is about navigating the information that's given to you to answer a question. So please let go of the sense that you have to have some knowledge to do well on this test, you have to have a skill. And of course, you know there are exceptions to this, like, yeah, you need to know some algebra. You need to know some grammar rules, right? But what's more important is that you know how to apply those things. So let's move forward from here. I hope that I have convinced you that it is not about your intelligence, it's also not about how much time you put into studying. A student's willpower, their ability to work hard. I meet a lot of families who are like, Okay, we need SAT prep, and I want them doing three hours a day of practice, or they've come to us and they've already been doing three hours a day of practice. And I get really worried in those situations, because to actually move the needle on your test score, you have to deliberately practice the right things the right way, at the right times and for the right length of time, for whatever your specific goal is. I'm using really black and white language. There's a right way and there's a wrong way, but that right way is going to be different for every student, depending on what their goal is. I'm going to talk about deliberate practice a lot, and the opposite of it is really blind practice, just kind of doing more and more and more stuff, without reflecting on it, without having targeted assignments, just going through an SAT book, for example, without any real intention. And that is not advisable. So if you think about a person going to a gym, and they're like trying to, I don't know, increase the size of. Arms they're doing all these bicep curls. It's not actually how many bicep curls they do or how many hours they spend at the gym that is going to determine their success. It's the technique they got to get the technique right and then do the bicep curls with the right technique. And then there's going to be a point of diminishing returns where you've totally exhausted your body and you need to refuel so that you can can, you know, come back the next day and continue building from where, from where you left off. Preparing for a standardized test is not all that different. Building a skill is not all that different. It needs to be kind of the right size and the sort of target for for helping you reach your goal, but it also has to be done with a lot of intention and the right technique. One of my tutors says, When you practice the wrong thing or the wrong way, you're not actually solving the problem. You're making the problem harder to solve, because now we have to untrain you and undo all this damage that you've done where you've, like, built, you know, a bunch of muscle memory and some neural pathways around doing something a certain way, and if that way is not serving you, we got to undo that first and then replace the habit, as opposed to, you know, getting clear about what's the right way to approach this thing that I'm struggling with and then practicing that right way to do it a lot simpler to do it that way. I think it's really important for kids who are bad at test taking to understand this, but also those students who are good at test taking, right, those students who just naturally waltz into a test and put up a score in the 90th percentile. Often, those students are a little overconfident about what they can do, or they feel like, oh, this test is easy, and what trips them up are the careless mistakes, the misreading, the calculation errors, and they're not practicing those things that that are challenging for them, right? Because they may think, oh, then the knowledge is not very advanced, like this level of algebra. I studied it two years ago. This is easy for me. This is one of those limiting beliefs that both these groups of students really need to understand, and it's helpful to be explicit with them about it, because kids are smart. First, I want to show you why focusing on this particular way of building performance, skill is so impactful and so valuable. So go with me here. I'm gonna give you a little example. We got a baseball game, we got a pitcher, we have a batter. The pitch is about to be thrown. Now, if you can imagine a winding path, unpredictable path, from the pitcher to the plate, it's going to be a hard pitch to hit, but if you are a really practiced baseball player, somebody who has studied pitchers and the different kinds of pitches and knows how to position yourself to hit them, well, can you tell I'm not a baseball player? You're gonna know right when the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, what that ball is gonna do based on how the pitcher's weight is shifting their grip, the spin on the ball, you know it way up there before it makes its curly loop and gets to you. And when you have that advanced knowledge, you have more time to prepare yourself. You know how to react, and you can sort of train yourself say, Oh, if I see this, I know I'm going to stand this way, or I'm going to move, you know, in this other direction, or I'm going to crouch a little lower, whatever it is. You have the time to react with intention, with some calm. You feel confident. I know what's going to happen. I know what I'm going to do. The rest of us who don't play baseball that much haven't studied a lot of pitchers. We don't know until the ball's already done it, it's over here, right in front of us. And now I'm like, Oh, crap, okay, I don't know. I don't know how to hit it. And probably I swing and I miss, maybe I get hit by the ball. Who knows? I'm really frustrated, because maybe if I had had a few more seconds of reaction time, I could have hit that thing, but I didn't have it. And what we need to do in this situation and on the test is build that automaticity, that feeling that it's just going to happen automatically, because I can read what's happening, and I instinctively, because I've trained I know exactly how to react in the thing that allows us to do that are good mental models, and this is really widely researched. What I just gave you, that little baseball scenario is a mental model of what a mental model is. A mental model allows you to read a situation quickly and tap into how to respond to it quickly. It sidesteps all of these limitations of your short term memory and a. Allows you to rise above those low level details we could have gotten lost in and think about things from a high level. Think about a process that is efficient. It reduces mental strain. There's less kind of decision fatigue and active observation that needs to happen in the moment, and it helps maintain confidence in the face of challenges. So that ACT problem we saw that made us want to shut our brains down. I've seen 1000s of questions like that now I'm not going to get flustered by it. I know exactly what to do to move through all of that stuff that's there to freak me out. The noise is gone, and I can focus on exactly what I need to do get to the answer my question without stressing myself out or building up my anxiety. So we need to build mental models. I want to talk a little bit about the phases of test prep so that we can get there. We've got to start with some content. You need some basic understanding and skill to be able to start moving through these questions once we've made sure that the content gaps are filled, then we start looking at strategy. This might be test wide strategy, like how to use the process of elimination? How do you manage your pacing? You know? How do you make productive use of your breaks, all that kind of thing. It also might be more section strategy, right? Like I have a very specific strategy for how you move through that science section on the ACT, or what you do in the reading section of the essay t, when you have those individual texts, they even maybe question level strategies, but performance comes kind of all at the same time as those things, but it becomes the focus of the later stages of test prep. Once we learn the content and the strategy, we start to think about all of the aspects that they need to be prepared for on test day. How do you manage all these different streams of information, maybe stimuli in the room, there are other students who maybe have a stiffly nose or are tapping their feet in a really distracting way, or it's cold in the room. How do you prepare for all of those things? How do you prepare your brain for that kind of endurance? How do you fuel your body? How do you wake yourself back up when you're starting to drift off? How do you deal with test anxiety? All of these things have to do with the performance prep, and so we spend a lot of time here, and a lot of students are kind of confused, like, Why do you care what I ate for breakfast? But I tell them, it all plays a role in how well you can show up in the testing room, and how well you're able to demonstrate your knowledge by applying it in these ways. So it's really important that we think about all those variables and control all the things we can control so that you can perform at your best. All of these phases of test prep are really carefully based on ongoing analysis and diagnosis of where the challenges are and reflecting on performance, and this is how we know which mental models to develop. Right which question level strategies do I really need to make sure the student know and which ones they've kind of got already? And if I could take a little aside here, when you work with, you know, a typical test prep company, they're going to do the content in the strategy. They may do a little bit of performance. Usually it's not very much, but most of their focus is going to be on content and strategy, which is great, but we know that performing on test day is really, really crucial. So at Signet, what you really get is content, the strategy, the performance we've already talked about. But because we do all of these other things, you get a lot of other value right. Because we do executive function coaching, we're actually really good at helping students build their executive function skills to be able to perform on these tests. That's a lot of what we're talking about here is focus and stress, tolerance and attention to detail. All of those things kind of fall under the umbrella of executive function. So we have broad expertise in executive function coaching, and we're able to apply it in Test Prep. We also do a ton of college admissions consulting. I have a team of former admissions officers, and so that means everything that we're doing in testing is sort of guided by an admissions strategy. We know what kind of colleges you you want to look at, I know what kind of score we're going to need to get, instead of you having to either coordinate between your test prep tutor and maybe the college counselor at your high school, or if you have an independent consultant, you have to be the conduit of that information, or maybe just kind of making the judgments. Everything at Signet is very coordinated in that way. Even if you're not working with us on admissions, we are going to give you our recommendations based on your admissions goal. Of course, all of it is done in spirit mentorship, right? Everything we do is one on one, repairing your student with somebody that they can look up to, that you feel it could be a great role model for them, that they're going to feel comfortable with sharing those challenges and they feel. Really inspired by and that really keeps the motivation up. So in that way, you get so much more than just transactional test prep, which you're going to get anywhere else. Okay, now we get to the how, and there's sort of five step process here, and it is cyclical. It repeats. The first thing we need to do is address our limiting beliefs, right? So talking to kids who think they're bad at testing, even the ones who think they're good at testing, that could limit them in a lot of ways, the idea that practice doesn't actually help. And unfortunately, there's a lot of homework that's assigned in schools that really is just busy work. It's not very intentional. And so students start to believe, well, this homework stuff doesn't really matter, doesn't help me learn anything. And so really talking to them explicitly about a mental model and why that can help them, giving them those examples that they can really wrap their heads around, so that they can feel a little more optimistic. Then we want to measure and analyze performance as we go along, we really want to go question by question, why did you get it wrong? What happened here? What was happening before you did this practice section? What'd you eat? How'd you sleep? Did you get in a fight with your mom or whatever it is like, what was going on in your mind? To really understand, like, again, what can we control as we identify what those challenges are, what those patterns are, the common pitfalls that each student kind of comes up against, we're able to say, Okay, here's a solution I want you to try that's going to help you manage your timing, or here's a solution I want you to try when it comes to these kinds of math questions that Have a diagram in them, or the reading questions that are more fiction, right? We have to identify the places for intervention first get to the root cause of whatever that challenge is. Where does things break down in their process? And then give a solution that they can practice. We really want them practicing the things that are hard for them, because that's how you get better at that. Can't just practice the things you're good at. You do need to practice them right, keep those skills sharp, but we really need to practice the things that are hard for them, and we have to scaffold it in a way that it's not overwhelming, that they feel some success. They could gradually get better and better and do the hard thing, but that's not going to happen overnight, so we've got to build up towards it. Towards it, and then we repeat, right? We've practiced the solution to solve this problem. We take another practice test, we analyze how we're doing, we find our problem areas, we figure out what our solutions are, we practice those solutions, and we do it all over again till we get to the score we need to get to as we do this practice, I have my students keep an error log. So an error log is just the name I use for a pretty detailed spreadsheet where I'm tracking what test the student was doing, what section they were in, what question number, the topic of the question, and then any number of reasons they might have gotten the question wrong. I have a number of sub categories for different types of content challenges. Like they remembered it generally, but not in enough detail to answer the question, or they knew the concept but they didn't know how to apply it, or they had never heard of this thing before. So, you know, we can say they don't know the content. We got to drill down underneath that to get a little bit more granular. There's also a section that is really focused on the performance challenges that might be getting in the way. You know, the most common one of these is misreading, and I get them to go granular on this as well, because I want to know, did you misread the question the source material, right? If there was a passage or some sort of diagram, or did you misread the answer choices? All three of those things could happen, and they are going to take different types of interventions to solve. And then we also have things that fall under the umbrella, large, broad umbrella of test anxiety. I blanked, I panicked or I understood the question, but I bubbled in the wrong answer. Lots of little things that, really, we would categorize as sort of careless mistakes, but sometimes they have to do with, you know, some underlying panic or fear or anxiety, something like that. Of course, if you want a copy of this spreadsheet, this template, I'm happy to share it with you, which is, send me an email, we'll get you a copy. This is a really simple tool, but it is so powerful, so we can get really, really specific and targeted in how we solve their problems. And what I think is really valuable here is that students also gain a lot of confidence in understanding what's going wrong. They don't feel like they're just banging your head against the wall not knowing what why didn't I get that right? I felt like I got it right, but like what happened right? They start to be able to see the steps in their mental processes and understand where they need to tweak things to so this really helps in building their own understanding. So here's some more. Detail on deliberate practice. And the most recent work on this is a book called Peak by Anders Ericsson, which is really fantastic. It's full of very interesting stories. He spends a lot of time talking about how to memorize long strings of numbers on the fly. But he also does go into kind of the elements of deliberate practice that allow people to build that skill. And that's where this comes from, and it's what we've been doing at Signet for, you know, 14 years, long as I've been here. So it should have a very specific goal, and in many cases, it's just not make the same mistakes you made last time, or get one point higher on that section that you're going to do. It could be not missing triangle questions, right? Could be that specific. It should be fully focused and engaged. So students can't just kind of go through the motions and finish the homework. They need to be bringing all of their faculties to bear using the methods that they've learned with their tutor, any processes, any strategies, they need to bring all of that into their practice session as though it were the real test, and they need to be fully engaged with it as they're doing it. This one is really hard for students, and it's very helpful to have, you know, a tutor, or somebody who can act like a coach for them, to help them remember that that this is how practice pays off only when you're fully engaged. It's got to include that detailed analysis and feedback. So of course, we want them to grade their work and then think about why they got things wrong, and what are they going to do next? It has to not be too easy or too challenging, and this is where a tutor can really be helpful in targeting the assignments for your students, because if it's too challenging, they're going to give up. They're going to feel like they can't do it. If it's too easy, that's going to give them a false sense of confidence, and they're not going to be ready for the real thing, right? So it's got to be the kind of Goldilocks in between where they are gradually improving and they need to be kind of chasing their edge. Is what I tell my students, like, we want to be looking for the limits of your performance. We want you to practice there, and that's how you build consistency and mastery. It also has to incorporate ways to maintain motivation in all the stories that are in this book. Nobody has said it is fun. You know the violinists who practice for five hours a day, the guy who memorized, I don't know how many 1000s of digits of pi, it's now fun, but there is something that's keeping them going, and we need to figure out what that is for your child. It might be this score is going to unlock, you know, some possibilities in the college process. It might be, you know, some kind of bribe that you said, if you get this interim score on a practice test, you get, I don't know, the car for a night, or I'm going to buy you something, whatever it takes to keep them motivated. I do find this is another place that a tutor can be very, very helpful, because tutors are really good at building that relationship with students and understanding what actually motivates them. And some students are just motivated by doing better, constantly improving, proving to themselves that they can do it. And sometimes it's as easy as that to tap into that motivation and then deliberate practice should be resulting in good mental models, right? That baseball player who can see what the pitch is going to do well before it gets to them. When we do this kind of work, your student has a lot more time to react accurately and efficiently to the problems that are in front of them, right? They're focused all of their mental energy on that question, and none of the other stuff that's there to distract them or put the pressure on. So it's, I hope you could see I'm, like, pretty animated about this. I really believe in this method, and I've seen it work wonders for our students, not just on their tests, but they're able to say, Oh, I took this into my US history class, where I had to memorize all those facts, or I took this into my advanced physics class, where the problems, where we have to apply these equations, are just out of this world. But I was able to use some deliberate practice and get better at these things and organize my notes and be ready for these exams. So I love to see it. So I'm ending the replay there. We went into a lot of questions about, How do you choose between the SAT and the ACT, how do you decide whether you're going to submit the score or not? How do you know if it's worth even embarking on this process of test prep? These are all things that I probably addressed on some other podcast episodes, but if you still have questions about this, of course, I am happy to chat with you, so let me know. But I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you'll check out the book, because it is really inspiring, and for me, was quite validating. This is something that we've done at Signet for a very long time. It's really good to know this is a highly researched and very impactful practice. So that's it for today's episode. Next week, I'm really excited to have my friend Danny Tejada join us. Let's talk about his academic journey and how he works with students. So until then, we'll see you next time, and I hope you have a great week. Thanks, everybody.