<p>Brassmonkey is entitled to his opinion but I would think there were extenuating circumstance for the CalTech student to be admitted with v460. </p>
<p>In your case, if you don’t do anything to improve it, it tells admission you are lazy, or worse yet, try to say 460 is good enough for the school. That’s like making them really easy to reject you.</p>
<p>Yeah… least raise it to 500’s… then try to shoot for 600’s… 400’s just bad…</p>
<p>ericat, it is not absurd to suggest a learning disability. Learning disabilities are often identified when a person has wildly different scores in two areas on, for example, an IQ test that gives separate scores for verbal and performance. </p>
<p>The OP is saying that he/she does well in math–very very well. A gap of 300 points between math and verbal scores does suggest a learning disability. If the OP had 420 in both math and verbal, then that would suggest that the person was performing normally for someone of “average” intelligence. </p>
<p>I’ve never seen anything correlating SAT scores to IQ. The tests are very different.</p>
<p>There is no reason you can’t get a book and do a little studying. I was having major issues with verbal, so i went through one short passage per night(taking 10 mins per night out of my time wasn’t a big deal) I only did it for a few weeks and my score shot up 60 points. </p>
<p>Are you a junior or a senior?</p>
<p>What kinds of books do you read for enjoyment? Do you have problems with the assigned reading from school?</p>
<p>
I’m going to try that and hopefully I can shoot up 50 points atleast. But I only have about 3 weeks before the May test. By the way, I’m a Junior.</p>
<p>
I don’t read any books for enjoyment. I usually fall asleep after 1 short chapter. And yes, I do have problems with assigned readings from school. For example, we are reading The Great Gatsby in my English class, and I have no idea what it is about. And for APUSH, my textbook is pretty difficult to understand. So yeah…</p>
<p>If you’re a junior, then you still have plenty of time. Take the May test and see how you do. Then, i think you should do a lot of studying and wait until maybe October to take the next test. I bet if u put work into it you could get up to a 550 or so in that 5 month period or whatever.</p>
<p>What you have described doesn’t sound normal to me. Reading exhausts you, but why?</p>
<p>You should go for a vision screening, a thorough one where they test your focal adjustment and your eye movement patterns. Another area of difficulty for you might be in word recognition and reading comprehension. You would be surprised at how many people muddle through life with reading difficulties when a few months of intensive treatment could have turned their lives around. Some school districts will cover the testing. Talk to your parents and the counselors at your school about finding the source of your problem.</p>
<p>How accurate is the Blue Book? I just did a 9 question long reading passage and got 8 right and 1 wrong. This usually happens when the story is interesting and easy. :)</p>
<p>I was in your situation exactly 1 year ago, this is how i got here.</p>
<p>1.Oct 2005 -got 39 on CR practice PSAT
2. March 2005- can’t comprehend any kind of classics , so i read John Grisham books. Real easy read. (The Brethens, A Painted House, The testiment, Runaway jury…etc)
3. May 2005 Start reading newsweek<br>
4. June 2005 SAT CR (practice on my own) boost to 500s
5. Oct PSAT 2006 540 CR
6. Oct - Now 2006 600s CR Read Economist, WSJ, and New Yorker (harder than newsweek) Still improving at a very impressing rate , IMO. Passages make a lot more sense now.</p>