As a former student of Dr. Lin, I have quite the experience to share. 

 

          In the summer of my freshman year in high school, I started my journey of preparing for the SAT. I planned to finish preparing for the SAT and achieve a score of 1550 or higher so that I will not have to worry about it during my sophomore and junior years. Every other day of the week that summer, I took the bus to an SAT prep school. Each time, it was the same workload: complete a 3-hour SAT packed for homework, go over it in class, and repeat. Since I was new to the SAT, I thought that this was the only way to improve my test-taking skills. By the end of the summer, my scores did increase, but barely. I certainly did not reach my goal of achieving a score above 1550. That summer, I gave the SAT all my effort, but I reached my bottleneck and could not break through 1550. I thought that I had reached my limit. 

 

          I was wrong. Reaching my bottleneck did not mean reaching my limit. When you encounter a bottleneck, the solution is to rebuild your current knowledge from scratch and create a solid foundation that has the potential to break through any bottleneck. Starting at the end of my sophomore year in high school, I focused on doing just that. Under the tutelage of Dr. Lin, I put aside all of my prior knowledge of the SAT and built the foundational knowledge for each section of the SAT. The Reading Section and the Writing Section required more intensive foundational knowledge, but the Mathematics Sections also required thorough comprehension of each knowledge point. For the Reading Section, I completely changed my strategy for reading each passage and learned from Dr. Lin to find the key information in each passage. I practiced finding the key information within social science passages, natural science passages, historical passages, paired passages, and literature passages instead of trying to read and comprehend every single word in each passage. The reality was, I did not have time to read and understand every single word, and Dr. Lin’s strategy taught me how to save a significant amount of time by reading each passage. Before, when I tried to decipher the meaning of each and every word, I almost always missed the big picture: the focus of the passage. Using Dr. Lin’s strategy, I was able to truly understand each passage and grasp what the SAT is trying to test me on. For the homework, I was assigned targeted passages for each subsection of the Reading Section that helped me hone my newly learned strategy. For the Writing Section, Dr. Lin taught me every single grammar rule that the SAT will test on and prepared me for every trick the SAT could throw at me. Instead of trying to decipher the meaning of each word like in the Reading Section, I learned to only read and grasp the essential information from the passages in the Writing Section. As I did the targeted homework for each grammatical topic, I practiced associating the questions with their corresponding topics. Last but not least, for the Mathematics Sections, I reviewed each concept tested by the SAT and secured my knowledge of this section. The “careless mistakes” that I used to make in the Mathematics Sections were only a testament to the incomplete nature of my understanding of each mathematical concept. After this thorough review, I was confident in achieving the perfect score of 800 for the Mathematics Sections. 

 

          After preparing myself to take the SAT again in August of my sophomore year, I changed. I have heard many teachers caution against taking the SAT too many times since taking the test again will most likely result in a score that was similar to previous scores. However, I was different. I had completely changed my approach to the SAT. On the day of the August SAT, I walked into my testing site feeling confident. The testing site was nowhere near my school, yet that did not make me feel any less confident. With the Reading Section, I was no longer rushed for time, worried about the meaning of some specific word, or debating on whether a question had two correct answers or not. With the Writing Section, I was able to speed through each question confidently. As I did each grammar question, the topic that each grammar question was tested on came to me instantly, leaving no doubts in my mind. With the two Mathematics Sections, I was able to do all the problems more than two times. The first time, I quickly solved each problem with the fastest method. The second time, I slowed down a bit and used the slow but sure method for each problem. Finally, with the time I had left, I looked over as many questions as I could again until the time ran out. When I walked out of the testing site, I felt that I had truly done my best. After all, the preparations that I underwent with Dr. Lin were aimed at propelling me to 1600. 

 

          About two weeks later, my score came back: 1570. After two more months of preparation, I took the SAT again in October. My score increased again: 1580.