Knowing math is the most important ingredient to doing well on the Math SAT. Knowing how to approach math questions strategically can make your math skill shine. This section discusses math strategy, explaining how you can maximize your time and give yourself the opportunity to earn the most points you possibly can.

Each math section comes with a reference area that provides you with basic geometric formulas and information.

You should know all of these formulas without needing the reference. The reference area should only be used as a last resort. If you can avoid flipping through your test book to remember formulas, you will save time.

We mentioned this strategy in the verbal section: know where you are in the order of difficulty, and use that knowledge to help you strategize for particular problems as well as the entire section. For instance, in the 30-minute section with QCs and GIs, each group of questions is ordered by difficulty: first the QCs will progress from easiest to hardest, then the GIs will do the same. Remember to use the order of difficulty to your advantage: there is no sense struggling with a difficult QC when a number of easy GIs are ripe for the plucking.

Don’t get bogged down on a hard question if there are easier questions left to answer. When a question seems like it’s too difficult, either mark it as something to return to, or eliminate whatever answers you can and guess.

Draw diagrams or write out equations to help you think. Mark up graphs or charts as necessary. Cross out answers that can’t be right. Basically, the test booklet is yours to write on, and writing can often help clarify things so that you can work more quickly with fewer mistakes.

Now that we’ve told you to write in your test book, we’re going to qualify that advice. Doing math scratchwork can definitely help you avoid careless errors, but doing pristine work, or more work than necessary, can be worthlessly consuming. You must find a balance between speed and accuracy. You need to be able to follow and understand your work, but other people don’t. Nobody will look at or reward your work, so don’t write it out as if you’re being judged.

Carelessness is the worst, leading to lost points and lost dreams. Here are two ways to avoid being careless on the math section of the test.

Do not look at the answer choices immediately after reading a question. Instead, you should first take a second to process the question, making sure you understand what the question is asking and what method you think you should use to solve it. Then come up with your own answer. Only then should you look at answers. This way, you won’t get bamboozled by tricks in the question or distractor answers.

After you come to an answer, quickly plug the answer back into the question. Take a few seconds to make sure you haven’t made a careless mistake.

Guessing on the math section is a little different from guessing on the verbal. For the regular MC and QC questions, you should guess if you can eliminate one possible answer choice. But be careful: just because QC questions have only four possible answer choices, don’t assume you should automatically guess. The guessing penalty for QC questions is slightly higher than it is for the MCs, so you still have to eliminate an answer to make guessing beneficial. There is no guessing penalty for GIs, but that’s because it’s incredibly unlikely that you will be able to guess correctly. There’s no real point to blind guessing on GIs, but since there’s no penalty, if you come up with an answer, any answer, you should grid it in.

You are allowed to use calculators during the SAT, and statistics show that those who use calculators often do a little better on the math section than those who do not. If you are careful entering data, calculators can help you avoid careless computational errors.

Here are the rules for calculators on the SAT. The actual rules are those that you’ll see in the test instructions. The practical rules are the common-sense rules that the actual rules don’t tell you.