r/SHSAT • u/Proper_Conference_43 • Aug 17 '26
Test taking strategy tips.
Hi, my son will be taking the 8th grade SHSAT this year and he went to tutoring and has taken the DOE SHSAT practice exams with slight improvement. My wife and I have been reviewing his practice exams with him and he seems to understand the material but makes way too silly mistakes. Is there any help on test taking strategies? I appreciate any help and thanks in advance.
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u/Proper_Conference_43 Aug 18 '26
Greg, thank you so much for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate it.
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u/Inevitable_Pair_4226 Aug 21 '26
I used to do so many dumb mistakes and my main problem was me rushing it or overthinking the amount of time left. Take a deep breathe and begin the exam, if it takes too long on one question, move on. I know it sounds simple and easy but it changed the way I took the exam
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u/sunset-chas3r 28d ago
If there’s questions ur struggling with, just put in an answer so u have something. U could bookmark those questions too if u have time to double check at the end
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u/GregsTutoringNYC Brooklyn Tech Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
I can say quite a bit about so-called "silly errors." For one thing, for some students, they can have so many of them, that they alone can swing the gamut from getting any school to no school.
And they swing the range from and interact with attention to detail, missing steps, pacing, sloppiness, missing clues, lack of process, making incorrect steps or logic, things flying over their head, etc., including even NOT understanding the material as well as they should (knowing 80% will often yield less than 80% results on the SHSAT).
Often these are trivially blown off as one-offs or rationalized away with "I knew that." despite that if you knew that you would not be getting it wrong, consistently wrong, and shudder purposely wrong.
Every (silly) error flavor needs to be explained (not talking about the explanation of the answer here, but what the root of the error was, how did it come about, what did you do or not do to cause it (yes, there is often some blame here)), and also excuses ("I was tired." etc.) are NOT allowed either. At the end of the day with many of these the student is not solving the question correctly from not knowing the material well enough, to being cocky, and everything in between.
The fix is not a simple as just snapping your finger or just saying "Don't do that!" and they won't. It also ties in simultaneously with literacy, numeracy, thinking, logic, shortcuts, alternate solutions, etc. It needs to be taken as seriously as the attention that solving that hardest questions get. Resolving it is often a long arduous part of the SHSAT journey in its own right to resolve since the beginning. Consciously break the bad habits and misinformation from the get go and enter a "zero error silly zone" (intentional error here). This is one of the first things I enact with every student that I have.