motivated person needs serious help!

harmonica93
Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:01:29 +0000

It’s really not impossible. I know a bunch of people who went up about that much. You just have to be really willing to work hard.

FOR THE SAT:
Strategically it’s best to skip as few problems as possible. As long as you can eliminate one choice, guessing is better. I know its tempting to skip questions bc you don’t want points off, but guessing brought my score up. Also, don’t get too caught up with one problem. If you are spending a long time on a problem, chances are you find it difficult and might get it wrong anyway. The time you spend thinking about a hard problem could be used to answer a few problems that you find easier. The more questions you answer, the higher the probability of success.

FOR THE ACT:
I didn’t end up taking it, but I took practice tests. It is impossible to get to all of the reading passages in the allotted time, so what really helped my score was to choose a passage that I wasn’t going to read, and fill in a random answer. If you choose ONE letter (C for example) and fill it in for every answer on that question, you WILL get a fraction of them right and will have time to focus on the other passages, rather than rushing through them. The ACT doesn’t take off for wrong answers, so it won’t hurt you.

That being said, I find it really difficult to go by strategy and that the best way to do well on the SAT is to figure out where you are having problems and actually try to fix it. If you understand the question, you will understand how to find the answer. I know that sounds obvious, but I wasted so much time trying to figure out how to “win” the SAT; once I understood how to “play”, my score improved (sorry I just cringed as I wrote that but I couldn’t think of how else to say it). Also, there are definitely some helpful strategies on here, but there is also a lot of speculation over theories of ways to beat the system.

I hope its ok to mention this, but my verbal tutor has a blog (ultimatesatverbal.blogspot.com). It basically says all that she taught me, which raised my CR 130 points and my writing by 100. She seriously knows the SAT inside and out (you can read her the answers, and she can tell you the question). I really wish she had it up before I took the SAT… she posts every day and focuses on different subject matter so that you can actually master the material and not just learn it for the test. if you have as much will as you say you do, reading it daily would be really beneficial.