“As someone who hates standardized testing, I had always thought of the SAT as a pain, a weary obstacle that had to be scaled because there exists a vague thing called “college.” But as I prepped for the SAT at Improve Your English, I realized that there was something big, something monumental, occurring in my education.
I had always been a “reader,” at least by the strict definition of the word. Piling books higher and higher, I had viewed journeys through literature in a purely quantitative sense. I would happily finish a volume and check off another “important” book read. More pages, more miles—this is what reading is all about, right?
But during my test prep, I finally learned to read in the imaginative sense. To borrow a Shakespearean phrase, I learned to read with my mind’s eye. Every word, every description became a world inside my head. Truly, learning to read and absorb literature in such a manner has fundamentally changed my ways as a student. The text, previously black and white upon printed paper, leapt outwards into my reality.
So for me, SAT test prep wasn’t so much a tool for success on the SAT, but a transformation in the way I understood the English language.”
