@leslieknope4
There’s some good advice here. I’ll provide a few more details.
First, I want to comment on what you said: “I know I am not smart”
Smartness has little to do with your score on the SAT. More often than not it’s based heavily on how hard you work and how intelligently you study. I’ve seen this with thousands of students who’ve gone through our program. If you don’t know how the test works and you’re not used to the format, you’re going to get a lower score than someone who does, even if you’re at the same education level.
I’d hate to see you beat yourself up if you fail to see yourself improve. Instead you should try to set up positive feedback cycles for yourself. Put in a unit of effort, and you should see a unit of result, like an increased score. You want to see the result of your work so that you keep your motivation up.
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Secondly, a lot of advice on CC is geared toward scoring super high. The general principles on how to study are good, but not completely applicable for scoring in the 600 range.
Here’s one piece of advice: you don’t need to answer every question.
In fact, you should skip the hardest questions. For example, in math, to score a 600 you just need to get a raw score of 35 out of 54. This allows you to omit say 10 questions (bringing you down to 44) and miss another 7 questions (bringing you down to 35).
Why skip the hardest questions? Because they’re so hard you’re unlikely to get them right, and it sucks away time from the easier/medium questions you can be getting right.
Math and Writing questions, and Reading sentence completions, are ordered in difficulty, so you can automatically skip the last 20% of questions in each subsection, and focus your time on the easier questions.
Reading passage questions aren’t ordered in difficulty, but if you find yourself taking too much time to solve a question, you should skip it and come back to it.
A rule of thumb I tell our students is to spend 30 seconds on each question. If you don’t find that you’re making any progress toward solving it, skip it.
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Third, if you have a busy schedule, you should study efficiently.
What this means is you need to identify your weak points and biggest opportunities for score improvement, and focus on those. This is different for every student. Some students really need to work on test strategy. Others know test strategy but need to work on the underlying content and skills.
If you can do that yourself with books, that’s great.
@southernbelle16 mentioned PrepScholar (disclaimer: I’m a co-founder of this company). We have a program that automatically detects your strengths and weaknesses and customizes your study program, so that you’re always working on what’s most effective for you to study. Students find that this takes the guesswork out of what to study.
The other thing you should do is be ruthless about understanding your mistakes. Don’t let any one of them by without understanding why you missed a question. Otherwise it’s just wasted time. I write a lot more about that here (http://blog.prepscholar.com/how-to-get-a-perfect-sat-score-by-a-2400-sat-scorer)
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Finally, even with a lower SAT score, there are some things you can do to try to raise your overall college application success, like having a higher GPA, more impressive extracurriculars. You might even try taking the ACT to see if you score higher on that test. More on this here: http://blog.prepscholar.com/what-to-do-with-a-low-sat-/-act-score
Hope this helps!