Practice tests are valuable study tools for the SAT because they help you pinpoint and address your weaknesses. But how can you you use practice tests to the best effect? Glad you asked.

When taking a practice test, you should try to approximate the conditions you will face in the real SAT as closely as possible. You should also approach the test as if it were the real SAT.

Don’t give yourself extra time on any sections. Be stricter with yourself than the meanest proctor you can imagine. If you can, don’t give yourself time off for bathroom breaks. If you have to go to the bathroom, let the clock keep running—that’s what will happen on the real SAT.

The only reason not to take the test in a single block of time is if you don’t have three spare hours. You will have to take the real SAT in one sitting, so training yourself to endure that much test taking is part of your preparation.

Don’t take the practice test in a room with lots of people walking through it. Go to a library, your bedroom, or a well-lit closet—anywhere without distractions.

These are the rules for controlling your test-taking environment. If you follow these rules, you will be better able to concentrate and will more quickly progress toward your target score.

However, here’s another rule: if you can’t make yourself study because all the rules above make it too boring, you can bend a couple. Do what you have to do in order to make your SAT preparation experience as productive as possible. If following all the rules makes studying excruciating, find little ways to bend them that won’t interfere with your concentration too much. Listen to music, or call a friend between sections to tell him or her how bored you are. Imperfect studying, while inherently not ideal, is still better than not studying at all.

A practice test should simulate the real SAT as closely as possible: aim for your target score when you take it. Resist the temptation to be more daring on practice tests than you would be on the actual test. Similarly, don’t be less vigilant about making careless mistakes. The more closely your attitude and strategies on the practice test reflect those you’ll employ on the actual test, the more helpful the practice test will be in predicting what particular types of questions you tend to get wrong.

After you take your practice test, you’ll want to score it and see how you did. When you do your scoring, don’t just write down how many questions you answered correctly. You should also keep a list of every question you got wrong and every question you skipped. This list will be your guide when you study your test.

You know how to have fun. Go do that for a while. Come back when you’re refreshed and ready to continue.

After grading your test, you should have a list of the questions you answered incorrectly or skipped. Studying your test involves examining each question on this list to help you understand why you got the question wrong, why the correct answer is the right one, and what you could have done to get the question right. Do not move on from any question you are studying until you can confidently answer all three of these questions.

There are four reasons why you might have gotten a question wrong:

Reasons (1) and (2) for getting a wrong answer are similar: each results from you not knowing a topic or not understanding how that topic was being tested. In the second case, you made the correct strategic maneuver, while in the first you had a misguided sense of your own knowledge. In either case, you know that you have a weakness in the topic that the question covers. Reasons (3) and (4) are also similar: in each, you made some sort of mistake. In the first, you made some error all on your own. In the second, you fell for a trap set by the test. If you answered a question incorrectly for either of these reasons, you should not just say to yourself, “Oh I made a careless error, I won’t do that again.” Make sure you don’t do it again. Reenact your thought process on the problem and see where and how your error took place. Did you rush? Did you skip a mathematical operation? Know your error, look it in the eye, and then promise yourself not to make that mistake again. If the test tricked you, figure out exactly how it tricked you and run through how you should have approached the problem to avoid the trick—a future test will definitely try to trick you in the same way.

If you got a question wrong because you were careless or tricked, it will probably not be all that difficult for you to understand why the correct answer is correct. If you got a question wrong because you didn’t understand the topic it covered or the way the question tested that topic, then this is a very important step. In order to figure out why the correct answer is the correct answer, you must understand the question and the subject the question tests. In other words, by learning why the right answer is the right answer, you learn the knowledge the question is based on and how that specific SAT question tests that knowledge.

Once you understand why an answer is the right one, don’t just assume that you will be able to arrive at the right answer so easily. It is easy to get confused when you’re in the middle of a question, even if you theoretically know the right answer. Work the question out. Make sure that you not only know the right answer but that you can derive the right answer on your own.

If you left the question blank, the steps for determining what you could have done better are somewhat different. Leaving a question blank can result from one of three things:

If you left a question blank because you simply had no idea how to deal with it and couldn’t eliminate even one answer, then clearly you need to go back to that topic and do some studying.

If this was the case, you should spend some time learning about how to eliminate answers. Go through the question again and see how you might have been able to eliminate some answer choices.

If you left a question blank simply because you didn’t even have time to look at it, look over the question to see whether you could have answered it. If you definitely could, then you know that you are probably working too slowly and throwing away points. If you couldn’t have answered the question, then study the topic the question covered.

Yeah, it’s embarrassing. Yeah, you’ll look dumb. But talking to yourself is perhaps the best way to pound something into your brain. As you go through the steps of studying a question, you should talk them out. When you verbalize something to yourself, it makes it much harder to delude yourself into thinking that you’re working if you’re really not.

This is just a suggestion. We can’t enforce it. But it is a nice little study trick. And it will help you.