下面是来自啄木鸟教育满分学员高同学的一封信。他的托福成绩是116分。他详细谈到了自己怎样备考托福、SAT。啄木鸟教育公开给大家，希望能有所帮助。

Hey folks, what is up?

　　Since I feel so self-conscious and unnatural facing a camera, I rather choose to, in this way, jot down a few words I have for you. 
 

　　It is so ironic how I am self-praisingly sharing my advice with you, meanwhile when I am also being on the edge and worrying about the forthcoming December SAT. So who am I to give the advice? I did not get the perfect score. Not even close actually. And although I got a considerably high score on TOEFL(116-30 30 27 29), there is nothing to brag about, since I have been in the States long enough. But, out of my unique experience and some detours I have gone through, I am willing to share with you some thoughts of mine and I hope they could help. 

高同学的托福成绩单：116分

　　　　First and foremost, BIRD (Woodpecker) is awesome. If you are reading this out of some brochures or websites or theirs and still wondering about which agency to go to, make up your mind go to BIRD today. With all of my integrity, honors and glory, I officially allege teachers/tutors at BIRD to be the most responsible, dedicated and experienced I have ever met (in terms of college application and test preparing). The writing class for SAT I took at BIRD covered all I needed to know in only four hours. While the time might vary depending on your level, what I am trying to say is that you will not waste a single second there. I cannot even count how many mock tests I took in that EC mall and cannot even estimate how much they have helped me. So if you are with BIRD, stick with it. If you are still wandering about, go to BIRD today.

Second, let us talk a little bit about TOEFL. Four years ago, when I first took that test as an eight-grader (to apply for boarding schools in the states), I got a bloody 66. Of course I realized that it was too low and I tried all the possible means to boost it up. I went to a lot of different classes and did a lot of exercises (Barron’s, Delta, you name it). But the improvement of my score and/or my skill was just so not proportional to the effort I put into it. One month later, I took the test again and got 85 and was so frustrated because there was no time for me to retake it before the deadline of application. So I applied to schools with this score and just left TOEFL aside. But my mom, again, chose to act against me. She was full of sayings like, “you are going to school in America within few months, and your English need to get better right now!” Fed up with her 24/7 jibber-jabber, I picked up NCE 3(New Concept English). In the beginning, I was just pretending to be studying to shut her up (sorry mom), but doing nothing much actually. But as I went a little further and deeper into it, I started to realize how great those little cute passages actually are and started enjoying my everyday time with them. With every passage, I started with vocab, and then read aloud along with the recording (on computer of course), and memorized it. Yes, I memorized every single passage in NCE 3. Four months after I took TOEFL the second time, I went in the test center again to try my luck. And quite astounding to me, I got a 105. I am not saying that test prep books are not helpful or classes are useless. But if you have a few months to actually prepare for the test, choose some material you like and work on improving your actual English skill, instead of mere test-taking skill. You will benefit much more from this in the long run as well.

Third, SAT. I have absolutely no idea why I am talking about this, when I, myself, am also so struggling in the middle of it. Honestly speaking, I started preparing for SAT a little less than a year ago, about late December in 2011. Although I cannot really dramatically emphasize how much effort I have put into it, or how hard I have worked on it, I believe I have done a fair amount. But the sad thing is that it did not really pay back to me, yet. So I guess all I can do right now is sharing with you some of the things I did to improve my score from 2040 to 2190(690 770 730), even though I am still ashamed of my score.

高同学1月SAT分数：2040分

高同学10月SAT分数：2190分

　　　　Math. I got nothing to contribute. As a student (math genius in others’ eyes) who has taken math courses to third year in college (non-linear algebra, differential equations, etc.) and has won dozens of math competitions of various levels, I did not manage to ace the SAT math test. Enough people have made fun of me on this, so let us just pass this.

Writing. I tried everything I can but still could not get anything higher than 10 on the essay. As you might have noticed in this piece of writing, my style is literally of no style, meaning that I always drift off and only follow my own stream of thoughts. And this is really not a good thing for writing academic essays, especially on the test. So my advice for you is to actually PREPARE for the essay that you are about to write on the test day. Gather the examples you like, write down and try to sort out what is your style of writing introduction and conclusion (first and last paragraph). And most importantly, really practice with real test essay prompts. For the first time or two, I do not see it to be really necessary to time yourself; just try to make the writing perfect so you can reuse the sentences and logic that are really yours later on. But as the test is coming up, you really need to time yourself and write within those 25 minutes, because believe it or not, more people would encounter time shortage in the test than you think. And of multiple choices, go to a teacher/tutor for a thorough, complete grammar summary and extensively exercise on your own. Think about this, if you could hypothetically manage to get no error on multiple choices, with an ok essay score (above 9), you get 800 on writing! How awesome is that! So try your best with essay, and multiple choices are the KEY!

Reading. The Satan from hell. The devil that has ruined so many people. To be honest with you, I still have not got above 700 yet - 690, although I blame it on the crazy curve of October due to the overwhelming amount of people taking it. For the vocab part, I did not do Barron’s 3500. That would definitely help if you could tackle it, but it really does take a considerable amount of energy, determination, persistence and the strong sense of never giving up. For me myself, I trusted MonkeyBro (LOL). I did nothing more than those 2300 words for sentence completion and got no error for that on the October SAT (I even got all vocab questions in reading right). So I suggest you start with those 2300 words first, and if you have time, energy, or just want to find some boring thing to do, go playing with Barron’s. The passage reading is miserable. I have been in this pretty elite boarding school for almost four years now, and I have to say that my reading skill has been very well trained, after all those reading assignment of AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, U.S. History or American Literature. But the problem for me is that although I read fast enough and could pretty easily fathom what the writers try to convey, I always have problems matching them with the correct choice. I understand that it is not very realistic for you to really improve your reading skill at this moment now (although I highly recommend you to do so before going into college), maybe a more practical way is to work even more on vocab. Ideally, if you know every word in sentence completion, it would be so easy for you and pretty much would not take any of your time at all. All the time you have saved could be better spent on your weakness: passage reading.

　　Last but definitely not least, take it easy and enjoy the moment. I know that you are all stressed out, under great pressure, and feel like screaming and pulling your hair out. Because I am going through this just as you are. But I hope you can cut it loose a little bit and take it easy. Go playing some sports, go to movies with friends (there are a lot of good movies coming up), have some good time with parents, and boy/girlfriends. Yes, college is important. But maybe not so important as you think it would be. Your most fabulous years of life are right now and you need to enjoy yourself. Fight for the hardest but only expect for the most modest. God grant us the courage to change what we can, the serenity to accept what we cannot change, and more importantly, the wisdom to tell the difference between those two.

So my friends, may courage, serenity and wisdom be always with you. And may the odds be ever in your favor!

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