Knowing about a strategy doesn’t help you if you never use it on the SAT. Many students read a book like this, say “Yes! That’s all true!” then never once apply the techniques on the real or practice test. As you might expect, their scores don’t improve very much, if at all.

To prevent this from happening, look at every item you encounter and first ask yourself “Which strategy would work well on this item?” Sometimes more than one strategy will do the trick.

The items themselves often contain clues within the stem that give you a good idea of what strategy to use: