The SAT is one of the most high-stakes standardized tests you can take in high school. The score you earn on the exam, while not the sole determinant, can certainly go a long way in securing your seat at a top college.
With that in mind, we talked to an expert to find out the single most important thing you need to do in order to ace the SAT. The answer, though ostensibly simple, is actually genius.
"Practice with College Board SAT questions only," Shaan Patel, founder of SAT prep company Prep Expert, told Business Insider.
He says that practicing with other SAT questions, like those produced by Princeton Review, Kaplan, or Barron’s, is a mistake. This is because the College Board is the company that creates the SAT and therefore its practice questions are most like the questions you will encounter during the actual exam.
"The College Board spends millions of dollars writing questions, testing them on students, analyzing the results, and making sure that the questions are truly 'standardized,'" Patel said. "Other companies simply do not have the budget or resources to create questions that are nearly as accurate."
And even more convincing, many of the questions that the College Board releases have actually been used on past SAT exams.
Patel, who attended the University of Southern California for his bachelor's and Yale for his MBA, is particularly qualified to answer this question. He scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT when he took the test in high school. And with that expertise, he created a company that helps high students learn how to ace the test, too.
