740 M
730 W (7 essay)
690 CR
2160 Composite
This was my first time taking the SAT in high school (I’m a sophomore), but I took the SAT 3 times in middle school. I’m shooting for 2300+ before the SAT changes. What do I do? I feel like getting to where I am now exhausted all my resources (I only have a few BB tests left and that’s about it).
Congratulations! Those are great scores, especially for a sophomore. You are not unlike my daughter, who is a sophomore. She just did her first diagnostic test and scored a 2150. She too hopes to achieve 2300+ by January 2016.
My favorite resource for those trying to achieve close to 2400 is prepscholar.com. Check it out. Check out their various guides for scoring an 800 in each section.
My specific advice for you would be to focus on your weakest areas. A 7 on your essay is merely “average” while your other scores are far above average. If you can improve your essay writing to a 10, you could bring your writing score to an 800 (or very close to it). There are numerous free online resourses that give you advice on improving your essay.
Next I’d focus on CR. Again, check out the prep scholar advice on that topic.
Keep doing practice tests, but most importantly, keep track of your errors by writing them in a notebook. Dig deep to fully understand each mistake and turn each remaining weakness into a strength.
In addition to the BB tests, there are four official College Board tests available online for free download.
If you really need more BB tests than that, you can get 10 more from CB’s online course (which costs about $70 I think).
If some of your BB tests that you’ve already used were the ones you practiced with in middle school, you could probably take them again and still learn and benefit from the process. If you need to buy a new BB because you marked up a lot of the old tests in middle school, you can buy a new one online from Amazon for only about $12 - $15. Also, you can buy the version with a CD included, and that will give you one more full SAT practice test. Again, just be sure to record your errors in your notebook, and learn from each mistake by either digging deeper into the topic or devising new strategies for dealing with that type of question. Review your notebook from time to time.
Good luck!
Good score. Congrats! Keep it up.
What specifically can I do to improve my essay score? The first three times I took the SAT, I scored 6, 6, and 7. It’s not that I’m a bad writer; on the contrary, I was one of the few who consistently got As on lit essays this year, and I feel like my writing MC score adequately reflects that.
It’s mostly the time constraints and having to think light on my feet that ruin my grade. I usually write about 1.5 pages every time.
I think what’s also possibly pertinent is that I tend to struggle with the prompts themselves. Typically, the SAT essay questions, from my experience, tend to ask moral-centric questions; on my most recent one it was based around loyalty, and I remember doing a practice one about white lies. I typically have to think long and hard about answering and logically supporting a question based on something not tangible, as I can’t draw from my world history or literature knowledge for concrete facts.
Any suggestions?
It’s time to move on and focus on something you enjoy doing.
Nty
@Yakisoba:
I made that comment in all seriousness for your benefit. There’s a point where many top schools look at the academic profile as a means of conveying “Can this person handle the workload?” Once they determine “yes”, like the 10s of thousands of other applicants, then they’ll look at the rest of your application.
Don’t fool yourself focusing too much on the SATs. If you don’t believe me, then spend a few hours looking through the decision threads on CC for many of the top schools. You’ll see many with very high SAT scores not get accepted, while others with lower scores who did get accepted.
When my daughter first took a diagnostic test for the SAT sophomore year, writing was her weakest score by a lot. A family friend who is in her 20s told my daughter (who is a good writer and English student) that her strategy for the essay was to come up with 3 to 5 topics that she knew enough about that she could write about them in response to almost any prompt. That is what my daughter did. She had some examples from history and some from literature and whatever the prompt, she chose one example from history and one from literature and used them to support her argument. She took the SAT twice this year and got 800 on both writing sections so I think that method worked for her. Also, for CR, you need to study vocabulary. Direct Hits (both volumes) worked for my daughter.
Thanks! I think I got lucky with CR this time, tbh. There was probably only one vocab question that I knew for sure that I got wrong. Most of my trouble comes with passage based reading.
Also, with coming up with specific examples for essays beforehand, where can I go to get my thinking started?
For my daughter, she chose books and historical figures that she had studied and/or written papers about in her English and History classes. For reading, you probably need to just do practice tests. My daughter reads The New Yorker every week and, specifically, the long articles that they have about obscure subjects so I think that has helped her with reading.