No. I got 3 wrong, received an absurdly low score of 9 on my essay, for a total of 690.
Sorry all. I don’t mean to complain. (I didn’t realize you can’t remove posts!). Now I know.
Done with October. On to November’s SAT. Good Luck to all of you planning on taking future SATs!
That is weird. I just checked again. 690 w/ 3 wrong and 9 essay.
@worriestoomuch: 9 is an “absurdly low score”?? You can still get an 800 on many tests with a 9 essay…did you mean that you thought you did way better than a 9??
@juicy mango Yes, that’s why I apologized. There’s no way my essay deserved a score of less than 10, but there’s no point in complaining, is there, since we have no recourse and venting here is pointless. There are a number of people who have posted here with the same results and we are all equally frustrated and discouraged.
@worriestoomuch I swear you’re in my exact situation. I missed 3 on writing with 9 essay when I KNOW it should’ve been a 10 at minimum.
I got a 9 too when I thought my essay was amazing ! Whatever, time to study for November.
What does it mean when CC says I am jailed. I don’t think I did anything wrong.
M: 800
W: 800
CR: 660
ugh i just can’t improve in Crit reading…this was my third time and i only improved 20 points 
how much will this hurt me…
Was the October SAT easy? because my friend reached 2110, and I’m not saying I doubt her ability, but… I didn’t think she would get over 2100.
Math was easy (until the last section, where it was SORT OF tricky). Writing was easy, maybe one or two questions. Essay, I honestly didn’t like - but it wasn’t a “tough” prompt, just had nothing to write about. CR, not easy (was it ever?)
For those of you who got 800 on CR, how many questions did you miss? I missed 5 and got 730. I think it 's reasonable, but just wondering.
I got an 800 in CR and missed 0. Even though someone argued with my rationale for choosing an answer to no end awhile back.
Of two users that reported 100% success on critical reading questions, one said trace the origins was correct and the other said provide a rationale was correct. How is that possible? Could collegeboard have given credit for both?
I missed 4 and got a 750 in CR. Isn’t -2 almost always an 800 in CR? It’s a shame that the curve is so hard at the top.
That’s a pretty standard curve. Oh, and -2 is sometimes an 800, but not “almost always.”
Darn is the curve harsh?
So MC2 + Essay10 only got 750…
last year MC3 + Essay9 = 750
If you want to see historical curve data, check out [Erikthered’s site](http://www.erikthered.com/tutor/SAT-Released-Test-Curves.pdf).
I also got an 800 in CR and I omitted one question. I think the curve was up to -1 for an 800, maybe -2 (unless I’ve missed something?) I usually do well on CR but have never received an 800, but I know a lot of people wanted tips on CR so I hope this helps!
-
For the sentence completion questions, I start off by eliminating all the ones I know can’t be right (and I physically cross them off on the paper). Then I look at the remaining answers. If there’s only one, I pick that and move on. If there’s more than one, then I think of words that have the same root or look at the prefixes and suffixes. Don’t spend more than roughly 45 seconds on these questions - if you can’t get the answer in 45 seconds, skip it and move on, because in my opinion, it’s better to omit questions you don’t know than not knowing the answer at all and guessing, especially for the sentence ones.
-
For the short passage questions, the ones right after the sentence completion questions, I read the passage first, then read the questions before looking at the answer choices. I annotate the passage to indicate where the answer is so that I can refer back to it as I am checking my answers. Then I look at the answer choices and eliminate all the ones that I know can’t be right. Sometimes, though, there are multiple answers that look/feel right. For those, I spend up to 20 seconds re-scanning the words in the answers for words that are incorrect based on the passage itself. Don’t take more than a minute on these questions, since most of them have very clear-cut answers.
What I’ve noticed is that in the set of 4 questions that accompanies these passages, one is hard and three are easy (with one in the easy category possibly more medium in difficulty). Budget about 4 minutes for this section and practice completing the easy questions in about 1.5 minutes so that you have plenty of time to think about the hard one.
The most important thing to remember with CR passages is that the answer to the question must always be supported by the text. If it’s not, then it’s not right.
- For the longer passages, I find that my attention wavers and I get distracted if I try to read the entire passage at first. So I divide the passage into chunks (up to two paragraphs in each chunk), read it, and then read the questions. A lot of the time, the very first (or maybe the first two) question(s) are about the passage as a whole. I take a few seconds to mark those questions with a big circle around the number so that I don’t forget to come back to them (and I don’t misbubble, either). From there on, the short passage suggestions and the long passage suggestions are relatively the same. In a set, do the word meaning question first, paying attention to the way the word is used in context. Then, I do all the questions asking about information specifically mentioned in the passage next and finally all of the inference questions.
I try to budget my time so that each chunk of the passage takes me roughly three minutes to read and answer questions on - again, try to do each of the word meaning and information questions in about 45 seconds so that you have plenty of time to think about the inference questions.
Sorry this is so long. Again, I hope that this helps!
Good luck for the November/December SATs if you are taking them! 
91% of the time, -2 is an 800 according to College Panda’s calculator.
Anyway, did the other person who got a perfect score miss any? I guess it’s possible, even though I thought it was pretty clear, despite the controversy on here, that providing a rationale was the best answer. 