You’ve probably heard the chatter.

It’s been compared to Election 2000 in Florida and if you were one of the 4,000 students who incorrectly received a lower score on the October SAT test due to a technological glitch, you’re no doubt still tortured by the mishap and ready to torture the people in charge of scoring for the College Board.

You did what you had to do to get through the college bound pressure-years, and to think that you may have missed out on an early action acceptance or meritorious money due to a test that was incorrectly graded is enough to make the most forgiving want to do the mamba on somebody’s head.

Approximately 4,000 students who took the October test were recently told that their scores were wrong. The College Board said that 95 percent of the affected students had their scores lowered 10 to 90 points. For 16 students the scores were undervalued by 200 points or more, and for 600 students the scores were inflated.

Many suggestions have since been made to protect students from this in the future, all of which cost money. I’m going to list some of them, and then I’m going to give you vintage College 101, which you know isn’t going to cost you a nickel, and, more importantly, it’s going to make things better.

College counselors and experts are advising students to request the Question and Answer Service (QAS) after each test as well as a copy of their answer sheets.

Total cost is $34, and as Brad McGowan, a college counselor at Newton North High School in Massachusetts, chuckled, “peace of mind is priceless.”

In addition, McGowan believes that everyone should pay the additional $50 fee to have a person hand score their answer sheets. I don’t think you need to subscribe to this thoughtful, pricey, preventive measure.

So what’s a student to do?

Whether you think of this as a tempest in a teapot or more evidence that the college admissions process is forever seasoned with costly gaffes, make certain to get all of your testing out of the way junior year.

If a student takes the SAT for the last time in June of his junior year and there’s another glitch (which there will be), he will be notified and the score will have been corrected before he applies early action in November or regular admission in January.

Another reason to get your testing done in the spring of your junior year is because academic rust tends to build over the summer; math and language arts classes keep those brains oiled for the toughest high school test known to teenager.

So now that we got that cleared up, let me offer a few insights on how to prep for the SAT. Become a better reader. Both the math and the verbal tests are reading tests.

Flying to get the test done, kids often misread a question or the text. But it’s not enough to tell the kids to slow down and read the questions carefully. They’ll give that as much respect as you’ll give a speed limit sign when you’re running late.

So here’s what you do. Buy The Official SAT Study Guide: For the New SAT published by the College Board. Have the students do the practice exams. When they’ve completed the exams have them check their answers.

Then, armed with the right answer for each question they got wrong have them go back and figure out why the right answer is correct. Often they’ll realize it’s because they incorrectly read the question, the text, or one of the answers.

The reading on the SAT requires an attentiveness that the average high school homework assignment doesn’t demand. Remember this test is trying to measure which students worldwide have the best verbal and math skills. It’s built tough; roughly 16 kids out of 10,000 get a perfect score.

Once students dial into the test they start to realize it’s very much like a foreign city with its own protocol, a peculiar culture that takes some time to get to know. Once they start to become familiar with the test’s ins and outs things start to get better.

Take for example, the critical reading, the hardest part of the test. There’s always a word in each wrong answer that will signal that the answer can’t be right: The words: proof, solution, more than, always, only, reiterate, compare, contrast, and better than can easily allow a student to rule out answers. The student simply has to ask himself, was there a proof in what I just read? No there wasn’t; therefore it’s wrong. Same for solution and the rest of the key words mentioned above.

By chance I happen to see an article earlier this morning in Education Week about John Wooden, who the authors argued was the greatest coach of the 20^th century.

Wooden, whose UCLA teams dominated college basketball in the 1960s and early ‘70s, said that he learned as a young high school teacher that “failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”

Over 50 years he kept detailed records of every practice. He identified what he did that worked well, and what didn’t help his players to become better. The approach is similar to the Japanese practice of lesson study which focuses on helping students to anticipate misunderstandings.

No matter how you slice the SAT, the more students know and practice for the test, the better equipped they’ll be to beat the gatekeeper.