How to improve your SAT score!

PWNtheSAT
Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:42:20 +0000

Don’t try to do everything at once. Find patterns in the mistakes you’re making and try to fix just a few things at a time. If you get one fewer question wrong per section on the 8 multiple choice sections on the test, that’s about a 100 point improvement. Do that a few times, and you’re really in business!

If Reading is your weakest subject, why is that? Are you missing questions because you don’t know vocabulary words? Are you consistently picking choices in the Reading Comp that aren’t actually explicitly mentioned in the passage? These are common mistake patterns that can be fixed with practice.

In Writing, be on the lookout for the most common kinds of questions: verb agreement errors, pronoun agreement errors, parallelism. If you get all of those right every time, chances are your score will greatly improve, and you’ll be able to afford missing the occasional idiom.

The value of a practice test isn’t really the taking of it, it’s the reviewing. It’s so important to go back over the test after you’ve taken it to try to understand deeply every mistake you made. Find the patterns, and fix them. That’s how you improve.