Many students will benefit from seeing the format and content of the PSAT especially the grid-in questions on the Math section. They are $3 -- just got 10 of each for the 2008 administration (Wednesday and Saturday).
The two biggest surprises seem to be
1. “20 questions in only 25 minutes?”. High school courses may or may be preparatory in terms of content or time management.
2. The grid-in questions that are not multiple choice where the student writes the answer and bubbles it in on the test form.
Order of Difficulty
The Math questions are arranged in order of difficulty based on field testing. So #1 and 2 should be easy and by #17 they are challenging.
However, on the Math section with the grid-ins
(the first 8 questions are multiple choice and the last 10 are grid-in)
Questions 1-8 (multiple choice) swing through the Easy/Medium/Hard
and the first few grid-ins (they start at #9) start back at Easy
so do not spend too much time on questions 6 - 8.
Being familiar with PSAT format and timing will help students on Test Day (given only once a year in October) and oh, just make you smarter anyway ;)
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