Most test prep sells tricks: eliminate the extreme answers, hunt for keywords, plug in numbers instead of actually solving the equation. They’re quick to teach, and a student walks out of the first session feeling like they learned something. The problem shows up later, when the test doesn’t look quite like the practice set and the trick has nothing to grab onto.
What tricks actually are
Most tricks are a real principle with the context stripped off. Eliminate the extreme answers works because test-writers rarely commit to an absolute claim, and that’s worth knowing. But it’s worth knowing as a fact about how the test is written, not as a rule you apply on reflex. Reflexes don’t adapt when the test does. A student who’s only learned to eliminate answers hasn’t learned to weigh evidence — they’ve learned a habit that happens to work until the format changes underneath it.
What real preparation looks like
The gains that hold come from treating the test as an honest measure of skills a student should have anyway, not a puzzle to game. For reading, that’s close reading: what is this passage actually claiming, what does it imply, what does it obviously leave out. For math, it’s fixing the gap underneath the wrong answer. A student who keeps missing linear equation questions doesn’t have a technique problem; they have a shallow understanding of what a linear equation is doing, and drilling more of the same problems just gives that shallow understanding more practice being wrong.
On pacing and confidence
Tricks do give a stuck student something to hold onto, and that matters more than test-prep purists like to admit. But the stronger version of confidence comes from a framework: for each question type, knowing exactly what it’s asking you to demonstrate. That takes longer to build, and it’s still there when the test changes shape. Pacing works the same way. A student who actually understands the material moves faster than one following a rule like “skip it if it takes more than 45 seconds,” because speed is downstream of comprehension, not a separate skill trained on top of it.
When tricks are fine
I still teach shortcuts — recognizing a Pythagorean triple on sight, knowing that “however” signals a contrast is coming. Those hold up because they’re narrow. They apply in one well-defined situation and nowhere else, which is exactly what most tricks pretend to be and aren’t: a general heuristic dressed up as a reliable method, until it meets a question it wasn’t built for.
What I tell students
I care more about what a student still knows the week after the test than about the score itself. Build the actual skill, and the score comes along as a side effect. That skill is also the one college asks for next: reading carefully, telling strong evidence from weak evidence, working through a model instead of pattern-matching to one. A student who can already do that doesn’t need a trick. They just need to show up.