<p>Hey guys,</p>
<p>I will be a senior this next year, and am looking into USMA, Harvard, and MIT as possible college choices. I have taken the SAT once (600 CR, 720 W, 770 M) and realize that my Verbal score is well below average for the ivies and other elite schools. I often read college level novels and am currently memorizing the terms SAT has furnished for studying purposes.
Do you know of any other, or more effective way to improve my SAT CR score.
Thanks.</p>
<p>well i am sort of having the same problem …from what i ve heard on the forums …u should do ALOT of practice …and do practice tests as problems …as in do one and then look at the answer and see WHY you got it right/wrong…so that u could reconize patterns ( Xiggi method)</p>
<p>if anybody has anymore info please share it…cause i have the same prob</p>
<p>oh and btw…i just realized that the last 2 digits of ur Screen name are the ;last two digits of your SAT Score…go figure…lol</p>
<p>I suck at reading as well. On my SAT I got a 610. I am currently studying for the CR as well, and one thing that worked for me was really grinding out the meaning and the “why’s” of each question. For example, I would 1st start by doing a whole reading section untimed. Then I would go and look at the answers/explanations (if there is any- depending on the book I am using) and reason with myself/figure out what distinguishes the right anwer from the wrong answer. And as for taking hard classes and being able to read college-level novels, it does not aid you in getting a better CR score. SAT is completely different game- and believe me, I take AP english and all that, but I realized you have to find a way to chose the ACCEPTED answer or the answer that the SAT test makers WANT you to choose. Most of the time I totally disagree with the answers, but you have to play their game. </p>
<p>Hope that helped as far as explaining how you should approach it. Of course, I have heard of many of my peers acing the CR without much practice or being a book worm. But xylem101 is right-practice is the most effective method. </p>
<p>Good luck with everything.</p>
<p>What I’ve been doing to increase my CR score is reading articles on the New York Times. I read about 10 a day, and after about a week of doing that, I’ve increased my CR score from 560 to 640. (raw score from 39 to 52)</p>
<p>develop a method that suits you.</p>
<p>i read the passage, absorbing all the main ideas, then i go to the questions. i don’t read to fast, i read at a normal but constant pace.</p>
<p>also, i familiarized myself with a lot of the vocab.</p>
<p>well i’m not so sure what i did right, but i jumped from a 680 to 770…</p>
<p>my advice is to become very fast at reading…if you’re not, you should practice. Then, when test day comes around, read the passage quickly but make sure you are actually UNDERSTANDING WHAT IT SAYS! I used to read the passage and skim over it, but you need to know where certain things are located. You don’t need to be able to write a book on it, just get the feeling of the passage and be able to remember where things are generally located.</p>
<p>When you get to the questions, go back to the passage and actually UNDERLINE the answer if it is clearly stated. I saved myself from missing 2 or 3 questions by going back and showing myself with pencil, “this is where it says that this is true.” The SAT tries to trick you into answering with your intuition, especially on the CR.</p>
<p>“make sure you are actually UNDERSTANDING WHAT IT SAYS”</p>
<p>Ditto. It’s really important to know the meaning of each passage so you can get a feel for what the questions are asking. In that way, reading quality materials will help.</p>
<p>Once you get that feel, you can usually automatically rule out a few possible answers. Some aren’t PC (like if one puts an ethnic group in an unfavorable light, you know you can throw that one out), others’ stances are too extreme (i.e., they contain words such as “always” & “never”). I found by eliminating like that, I can usually narrow it down to two plausible answers. If you’ve never noticed this before, without reading the passage, just go through some asnwer sets and see if you can spot the bad ones…</p>
<p>GL!</p>
<p>Have you tried the ACT? I got a 700 on my SAT CR but took the ACT and got a 35 English and 34 Reading. I will be submitting the ACT instead of SAT. Maybe I’m just from Ohio.</p>
<p>i got an 800 on CR. from my experience, the questions about factual details of the texts are easy. the more challenging questions involve inferring the author’s intent, opinions, etc.</p>
<p>so when you read the passage, just keep in the back of your mind the perspective and viewpoint of the author, and sometimes you can get the right answer on questions just by considering what kind of opinions the author holds.</p>
<p>Yeah I took the ACT…best subscores are 31 English, 34 Math, 31 Reading, and 31 Science. I don’t think that the ACT reading section is very comparable to the SAT CR, though.</p>