<p>Hi everyone,
I am writing to you all with desperation. The first time I took the SAT, I got 2040: CR-670, M-640, W-730. The second time I took the SAT was this May, I got 2170: CR-670, M-730, W-770. I am extremely disappointed in my critical reading score as the last diagnostic test I took before the May test, I earned an 800 on the section. I feel like perhaps that section (which was from the Blue Book) may just have been a fluke or something. I really don’t know what to do. I’m so desperate I am taking college classes this summer in philosophy and critical thinking to help my CR, but I don’t think they will help at all. I am also taking the ACT in the September, but I feel I will only do worse on the ACT. My heart is so invested in the SAT, but I don’t know what to do. The books I currently own are Barron’s 2400, Blue Book, Shaan Patel’s 2400, and a Gruber’s PSAT guide. Ideally, I would also like to get my math up, but I really need to spend more time on critical reading.</p>
<p>Should I buy a Princeton Review book for more problems or seek out alternatives like doing GRE and LSAT problems? What should I do? October is my last chance, and I fear that my scores are holding me back.</p>
<p>I also would love to hear anyone’s opinions on the 11 Tests for the SAT and PSAT from the Princeton Review. Are the critical reading tests similar to those of the CB?</p>
<p>bump somebody help me</p>
<p>buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuump</p>
<p>Gosh, I don’t know if i’m qualified to answer this but i’ll try. </p>
<p>How much time do you have? If you have a good amount of time, my best advice would be to focus your daily reading. Read news articles, opinion pieces, etc and write down every vocab word that you don’t know and write down the sentence it’s in. I found that if you pay attention to TV dialogue and literature closely, you’ll stumble on most of the words the SAT uses. Understanding vocab in a meaningful way will also make it easier to read the passages in CR. </p>
<p>What questions do you most frequently have problems on? Vocab sentence completions? Two passage comparison questions? </p>
<p>Most of the questions I get wrong are the medium difficulty questions in passages. I have trouble on the long passages the most. I usually get very few (1-2) wrong in the sentence completions. I have until October. </p>
<p>What is your method when solving CR questions? It’s very methodical. </p>
<p>If nothing else is working for you, maybe you should try The Critical Reader by Erica Meltzer. It goes over common passage structure and commonly wrong and right answer choices. If you have trouble finding the main point and tone, the book goes over that too. </p>
<p>Go straight to the questions but don’t spend time reading them just look for line numbers, then bracket those line numbers in your reading. Pretend like you care about the passage and read as quickly as you can possibly read while still retaining what you’re reading and pay extra attention to the bracketed lines. That’s the best advice I can give you.</p>
<p>Have you read through silverturtle’s guide from the pinned topic? If not, I’d start there. Another great strategy is from noitaraprep, which you can read about here <a href=“Noitaraperp's Critical Reading Method: How to Attack the SAT Critical Reading Section Effectively”>http://criticalreadingmethod.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-to-attack-sat-critical-reading.html</a>. The core idea is that every answer must be justifiably correct. If you can’t support it from the reading, it is wrong. Drill this into your head and the CR section gets way easier. </p>