October SAT Predictions (2024)

hey guys Laura here with STP welcome back to my Channel today is a big video because I going over some of my October predictions so if you're taking the October sat you've come to the right place now for those of you who are new and don't know me yet welcome I've been a test prep coach for over 17 years now I recently scored a 1580 on the digital sat and I've helped hundreds of students achieve and surpass their sat goals and get into the schools of their dreams so trying to figure out what is going

to be on the next sat is like trying to hit a moving Target but I eat breathe and sleep the SAT I am in the test every single day working with students in the trenches so I've been noticing patterns and Trends and what has been tested lately and I have come up with 10 predictions that I think will be on this next test I'm going to give you guys five math and I listened to you last time after August I hear you guys you want English too so I'm going to give you five English predictions

as well all right let's get started and if you can think of a more creative or more efficient way to do any of the problems we've outlined today we would love to hear it please comment below and let us know also let us know what score you're aiming for on the October sat and how far off you are or if you're already hitting it on your practices [Music] all right my first prediction deals with grammar I think you're going to have a shifting transition word on this test and all that really means is the transition

word is going to be placed either before or after a punctuation mark and you have to determine where so there's basically two steps that I would recommend for solving this type of problem your first step is to basically figure out where your complete sentences are because a semicolon a colon or a comma can separate two complete sentences a comma cannot so that's your first order of business so when I look at this question and I have a divider here because as you can see we have options for a semicolon or a comma so really the

divider is after single-handedly because I basically ignore the transition word for now so because the divider at single-handedly I'm going to pretend it's right in here and I'm going to read up to that word and determine if it's a complete sentence or not so I have okaka doesn't make such decisions single-handedly well that's definitely a complete sentence because we have a subject okaka we have a verb make and then they tell us what he doesn't make he doesn't make this decision single-handedly so we have a complete thought so we are good on the left on

the right I'm going to read it without the transition word it says all historical designations must be approved by a group of nine other experts from the fields of architecture archaeology his history and Hawaiian culture that's also a complete sense because I have a subject all historical designations and then I have a verb it must be approved and then they tell us what it must be approved by we have a complete thought definitely two complete senses so that being said what I'm going to do right now is just eliminate C and D because those would

be comma splices C would be a comma splice D has no punctuation we definitely need a punctuation mark so now I'm going between A and B so as you can see with a the however comes before the punctuation mark So in the second sentence that means it's going to transition with the first sentence okay if it's coming after the punctuation mark that means it's in the third sentence so it's going to be transitioning with the second sentence however I see if they say he doesn't make such decisions single-handedly it must be approved by a group

of nine those two sentences clearly go together so we don't want a transition word however linking those two sentences the transition word must come at the end of the second sentence and transition in um be a contrast with the first sentence all right so take it two steps at a time find your complete sentences then figure out where to place the transition you're good to go all right guys so my first prediction deals with a no solution equation they've been coming up a lot lately and I really can see this happening on your test so

here's the thing you want to recognize that the goal is to get the X's to cancel out if so then what you'll end up with is 0 = 52 and we know that that's never true so that will make no solution so simply you just need to look at the coefficients and make sure they're additive inverses so I need the -4 to basically um equal 7R but I want 7R to be a positive four so they cancel so when I solve for R I end up getting 47 easy peasy do you know what we found

statistically separate students who score in the top 2 or 1% from the students that don't or the students that actually land their goal SAT score from the students that come up short it's actually whether or not you subscribe to this channel so if you haven't yet do something really good for yourself today smash the Subscribe button and notification Bell below because I come out with helpful tips and tricks every single week to help you master the SAT my next prediction for the English deals with comma placement questions and names so this is really easy all

you guys need to know is if you have a description before the name you do not need commas you can read right through that if you have a name ahead of the description you actually need commas around the description because now it's what's called a non-essential clause which I'm not going to get into too much but essentially this is specific enough where we really don't need the extra stuff that's why we tuck it between two commas so as you can see when we read this one it says a film that critics St a chin claims

da da da well as you can see when I just read that I didn't even need to pause I could reite through that why is that because critic is the description and then the name comes after so I certainly don't need to pause between those and you know just a heads up you'll never ever want to pause between the name and the verb so that's a no no don't do that either really we just don't need any commas there so we're going to go with c um rule of thumb too just a quick trick for

you guys if you're stuck on a comma placement question and you're going between two and you're really not sure my advice to you is to pick the one with less commas in it less is more it will definitely increase your odds of picking a up the point all right my second math prediction deals with percent questions involving an increase or a decrease so at the end of the day you need to look at the language on these questions so if they talk about increasing pay attention to that because if you're increasing by 600% you actually

need to multiply by 700% or seven because you're starting with a 100% of X and then you are adding onto that an extra 600% for the increase so just be careful if they say decrease it's the same thing you're going to have to subtract from 100% so when I set up the equation I basically have 7x is means equals 126 and then I'm going to go ahead and solve for x so when I do 126 / by 7 I get 18 you're done now I think it's important that you're just aware of what it will

look like and sound like when you're not doing an increase and you're not adding on to 100% so I'm just going to give you guys a quick example of that so if I say a number is 250% of 25 what is the number see how it says is 250% it doesn't say is increasing by 250% so all we need to do here is just set up the equation a number we don't know it so that's X is means equals so 250% % is 2.5 and then of means multiply so we multiply by 25 and then

we solve so that is a different variation of a percentage problem where you literally just use the percent itself and you're not adding or subtracting from 100% this video is brought to you by prep Ley the first ever app designed specifically for the new digital sat have you run out of blue book test to prep from do you like the idea of doing daily practice conveniently from the palm of your hand with prople you have over a thousand unique questions in your pocket you can hone in on your weaknesses doing drills in specific question categories

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SAT score to the next level I will link it up here right now and put it down in the description below all right my third English prediction deals with having a note taking question where you actually have to read the bullet points I know it is everybody's worst nightmare right we definitely counted on these at the end to be easy and to go quickly here's what I would say on this first just business as usual try to answer the question without reading the bullet points and then if you notice two or three answers could work

that's a sign you have to go in and fact check with the bullet points so in this one it says the student wants to indicate the californ here let me blow this up for you guys the student wants to indicate the California red-legged frogs FWS classification category okay so we're looking for how the red-legged frog is classified uhoh I'm already looking at a and it says that the redlegg of frog is classified as that or that um okay and then I'm looking at C and it says that it's in the endangered category that sounds kind

of like a classific ification to me and then I look at D and it also talks about how the California red-legged frog is classified so I don't know which one to believe they're all telling me different stuff C says endangered D says threatened a says endangered or threatened meaning it could be either this is the time you need to fact check and go into the notes so I'm going to go over to the notes and I see the last bullet point talks about the California red-legged frog so it says the californ red-legged frog is likely

to soon become endangered according to FWS well likely to soon become endangered doesn't mean they're endangered yet so I need a little bit more information I'm going to go to the bullet point right above it it says a species that is likely to soon become endangered is classified as threatened Okay cool so that means the red-legged frog is classified as threatened I finally cleared it up I'm going to go with all right my next math prediction prediction three deals with tricky exponential function questions so it's going to be important for you guys to understand the

components of an exponential function question because they're going to want you to interpret it but the biggest thing with this one is it says the population is predicted to increase by 4% every n months what is the value of n recognizing where the rate is in the equation is key to unlocking the answer to this problem problem as you can see the 04 is the rate that means the rate is 4% so if we want to know how long it takes to go up 4% we want there to be one iteration to this equation so

that means up in the exponent is where the time is we want that exponent to equal one so that if it equals one it will go up exactly 4% because there will be one iteration so all I need to do at this point is take 4 f t set it equal to one and solve so that's what I'm going to do right now and essentially I multiply by the reciprocal and I end up getting T = 54s and so we need to put that into months now months are out of 12 so I see there's

a denominator of four I'm going to convert that to 12 to get it in months by multiplying by 3 over 3 so I end up with 15 over 12 that means n is 15 cuz it's going to take exactly 15 months for it to go up 4% if you're liking this video so far show me some love hit the like button below all right guys my fourth English prediction I'm going to have a little fun with you um this is such a gamble but sometimes those SAT vocabulary words have had a tendency to repeat themselves

so I just pulled this words in context question I think posi might come up again as a word for you it's a word that's very common most of us don't know it so when we read this basically it says new and interesting research conducted by sulaman a Sweden and mo alj is oh gosh I probably butchered that we'll say ma is inspired by their observation that though there have been many studies on the effect of high altitude on blood chemistry there is a blank studies of the effect of on blood chemistry of living in locations

below sea level okay one thing I'll say about the science is you cannot tell contrast based on tone often because science is objective and factual so what you want to look for is you want to look for a contrast in the language I noticed high altitude and then all of a sudden they're talking about low altitude or below sea level that sounds like a contrast to me so if they're saying there have been many studies and high altitude I want to find the opposite of that for the low altit itude because I also see this

transition word though which is a contrast this is a huge contrast question so when I look at all the answer choices of course I'm familiar with them because I'm an SAT tutor but if you're not familiar with any of these words you should be starting a list of SAT words you don't know and you should be looking up the definitions because I'll tell you guys the words on the SAT repeat a lot Coral obviously is to argue that's not going to do it for us profusion Pro means like a positive thing when you f like

Fusion if you think about that like you're infused like you're throwing a lot in a profusion is basically a lot I'm just like really simplifying this ver similitude well you see the root Vera which you know is part of the word verify if you want to use Linguistics when you verify something you basically figure out if it's true or prove it to be true so this basically means it seems to be true so none of those really fit the bill so really the word we need here is posi because posi means a little of or

not a lot of so the answer is going to be B because it contrasts with many studies if that is on your test you better comment below and tell me I feel like I should like win a prize or something that would be absolutely amazing all right my next prediction is a juicy one and this is a really tricky problem for students I am predicting you're going to have to use a nonlinear regression at least once on your test how do you know a problem is a great candidate for nonlinear regression well there's three things

that you need basically you need to be given two points on the function and you need to be given the equation to the function or know the equation to the function for instance if they tell you it's linear you already know a line is y = mx plus b if they tell you it's a quadratic you know it's ax^2 + BX X plus C so they might not give it to you but you might just know it as you can see in this question they gave us two points 925 and 0399 immediately I'm thinking okay

a regression is a good thing to use here it'll be a lot easier to use than trying to solve this algebraically with all the constants involved so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into Desmos and I'm going to do a regression by hitting the plus sign in the upper leftand corner then I'm going to hit table then I'm going to put in my values so I put in -9 25 0399 immediately underneath that on the next line I'm going to type in the equation but it's important you understand how to do

it in regression form you can't use y's and X's Desmos won't read it you need to pull from the table so you got to use x1's and y1s also for whatever reason an equal sign will cause an error to come up to tell Desmos to perform a regression on it you need to use a till day it's just part of the programming so just bear with me and go with me on that one so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to type in the equation in the proper format so as you can see

I have y1 till day and I'll type in the rest right now using x1's as well instead of x's okay so now I've typed in the equation and a graph has popped up so Desmos is basically telling me hey this is probably what the graph's going to look like given those points so now what we need to do is we need to look at the question and see what they're asking for they want F of -7 and they want F of -16 now guys remember when you read function notation the -7 and the -16 are

X values F of -7 is a yv value so basically they're telling us to go get the Y values at those X values so I'm going to type in on the next line x = -7 so I can easily see where the yvalue is on the graph because it's where they cross and so we have a yvalue at 25 so I'll go back and I'm going to write that down okay now I'm going to do the same thing but this time I'm going to type in X = -16 and as you can see that black

line is not nowhere near touching so you have to scroll up a lot so I scrolled up aggressively and when you hover your mouse over it the dot will come up showing the intersection point it's intersecting at 3.99 that's the Y value so that's awesome I'm going to go and I'm going to write that down notice I was aggressive in scrolling because I could tell that the the intersection point was far away you have to be able to finesse Desmos otherwise you're going to waste valuable time like Meandering and searching for the point point so

I would encourage you to get really good at manipulating the screen on Desmos so you can get where you need to go quickly they want the some of the Y values so when we add 2 25 and 3.99 together we end up getting 424 so that is going to be your answer for that question my last prediction for you for the English deals with sneaky independent clauses guys I am a big fan of looking for patterns on the SA T test and when all else fails if you struggle with punctuation I'll tell you right now

when I see four answer choices that look like this more often than not like nine times out of 10 you want to pick the one that's different why is D different well because D is the only one that can separate two independent clauses so when we have our divider between silk and by because as you can see those are the two spots where they put any punctu and I go ahead and I throw in the word silk I'm going to read up and determine if that's a complete sense we have researcher Lindsay developed a process

for increasing the T Cell strength measured in gigap pascals or GPA of silkworm silk that sounds like a complete sentence to me this is not essential we can get rid of that we have a subject who is researcher linday we have a verb what they do they developed and then they tell us what they developed complete thought so we're good so complete sentence on the first side Sweet let's check the second side we're going to start with the word by by dissolving and reweaving the silk in a solution of iron metal ions zinc and sugar

now you know this guy is here let me throw the word by in here this part is called a modifier they're basically it's like an introduction to a sentence where they're about to introduce what they're going to be talking about typically your sub always the subject comes right after the modifier so Z is the subject we have a verb Z increased so the amount of force required to stretch it from approximately 05 GPA to 2 GPA they told us what they increased so we have a complete thought that is also a complete sentence so that

corroborates the fact that we thought it was D and confirms our answer so again if you're struggling on a punctuation question pick the one that's different but if you are shooting for a 1450 plus maybe even like a 1,400 plus you really need to dive into the text and read this and make sure because strategies can fail sometimes all right my last math prediction is one on statistics because I heard there was quite a few statistics questions on the last test in August so this is a great one to know because it's very easy to

get once you understand it conceptually you don't have to crunch any numbers but so many students students miss it because they end up doing the opposite or they just don't know how to solve it so this question is asking what would decrease the standard deviation now this is important for you guys to understand if you decrease the standard deviation you need the data points to be more concentrated okay they need to be close together increasing standard deviation it makes them more spread out think about it deviation means to deviate to be different from so if

the data is different from each other you're going to have a higher deviation so in this case if they want a lower deviation we need to pick the number that's inside within towards the middle of the data set not on the outside or making it more spread out like a and C would do so the answer to this one is going to be 56 because it's within the data and it's close to the middle all right guys that's it for this video if you made it to the end of this video let's just play a

trick on everybody that didn't and confuse them go ahead and comment below unicorns are real and let's see um how many of you guys are actually rid or D today don't forget to grab pre Ling the app store or Google Play to get that last minute prep in before your test and until next time guys happy prepping [Music]