lets discuss and distroy the CR section from great tips!!
Read, read and read.
@cauldroncastle - So reading is the only way to ace the CR section, eh?
no tricks there ?? no useful websites ??
If you’ve got a reasonably good English and can score at least 600+ in the official tests, then, it’s time for employing tricks to squeeze out the best score you can. Otherwise, reading is the only way.
@cauldroncastle - Bro, what sorta stuffs are we supposed to read? SAT passage based questions or anything we can get our hands to?
@cauldroncastle - I need to crush the CR section, bro. I really need to! Haha.
take the official tests. And read the Black Book once. that is the holy grail for passage readings. For the passage based reading, read and understand the passage but never infer anything from it. The option which exactly paraphrases the content in the passage is always the right answer. And don’t practice from unofficial books. Only practice official questions. You can find plenty of official questions and previously administered tests on the internet.
For the vocab section, Direct Hits.
I encounter this question from people time and again. I’m with @cauldroncastle on this. Read, as much as you can. Read. A lot of you are taking a year off. You probably have part time jobs and what not, but you also do have a lot of time. Take that time to read. New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and a helluva lot more in novels, blogs, and what have you. Read as much as you can, and look up words when you don’t know what it means. Re-read a passage until you fully understand what it means.
At the same time, also take a lot of practice tests. Do it under time-trial, as if it’s a real test. Put the pencil as soon as time is up. You cheat, you hurt yourself - no one else. Go through the explanation even if you got the problems right. Take as many practice tests as you can.
@cauldroncastle you said not to pracrice from unofficial pappers… do u mean college board only as an official source or others also … i have been practising from cracksat,sparksnotes and others which i find more content and easy … am i doing wrong from your point of view ? and please post a link where past pappers are found !!
@alchemist9 I haven’t taken a look at Cracksat etc. If the questions come from official sources (CollegeBoard) or resemble them perfectly then, I suppose it’d be okay. But, I’ve looked into books from McGraw Hill and Barron’s. And I found both of their questions to be very different from what actually comes in the test. I found they used to hurt my scores rather than improving them. As for a link for the past tests, I don’t have it right now.But a quick google search should do it.
There are actually people in my school who had practiced for the test SOLELY from Barron’s and got 800 in the CR. One of those seniors got into Williams this year. Barron’s is a lot tougher than the actual college board questions. So it ultimately comes down to the difficulty level of the passages you’ve been practicing with and, more importantly, the mindset/way with which you’re approaching the questions. I’d recommend practicing from all the books (kaplan, barron’s, collegeboard, princeton) cause that’s how another of my classmate got a score of 2290. she’s taking the test again and will be applying to colleges this year.
sixstringsrocker is right. The only trick to doing well in critical reading is: being good at critical reading. This is not a cliche`. CR is really supposed to be the test of reading skills you have acquired over the period of your life. You may not be able hack your way into performing well without really knowing how to read. That’s okay. Don’t give in. Realize that it is an important skill to have and start by reading. Read everything, so that you come across a variety of “mental models”. Some of these will be difficult to grasp, but with practice you will have to be able to absorb astutely. You do not have to have just a good CR score to get into college, but you will regret not having a good CR skill in the long run if you never develop it, or try to find your way around it. But wait…your may never regret for the very lack of the skill…