<p>So the PSAT is coming up in one week from today, and I just finished the official 2013 practice test. Here’s my score:</p>
<p>208 (careless mistakes included) / 214 (careless mistakes not included)</p>
<p>CR: 66 / 63 (-8 / -10. Damn.)
Math: 77 / 74 (-1/-2; I only missed one of the two because I knew how to do all the steps, but I forgot the formula for area of a parallelogram, which was the last step. lol)
Writing: 71 (-2)</p>
<p>Obviously CR is not my strong suit, and it never has been. I usually miss like 5 per section (CM included), usually the passage-based reading (missed 2 vocab; 1 per section). What can I do to raise my score to at least 70? </p>
<p>So far I have:</p>
<p>-mark up the lines
-play devil’s advocate when stuck between choices
-in double passages, write each other’s stance
-pay attention to themes/symbolism/characters</p>
<p>anything else? Even when I play devil’s advocate, I usually get the question wrong.</p>
<p>Thanks guys</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think it’s kind of problematic that you need a formula for that in the first place, but I digress. </p>
<p>You’re a freshman, and you won’t take the “real” PSAT for another two years anyway, so I don’t think you need to worry too much. IMO the critical reading section becomes a lot easier/more intuitive after you’ve taken a couple of high school English classes…I never really studied for CR, but my junior-year score was 110 points higher (or 11 points higher in terms of the PSAT) than my freshman-year score.</p>
<p>^^ Yeah, critical reading is actually pretty difficult to outright “study” - those who perform well tend to just happen to have experience/exposure to that type of reading and thinking. Avid readers tend to do well on the critical reading section, OP, so maybe reading a bit more than you normally do? It isn’t direct preparation per se, but it will enhance your reading abilities and thought process quite a bit.</p>
<p>Yeah, I never read for pleasure. Reading to me isn’t that fun, but I’ll work on that. </p>
<p>I seem to only miss the line questions (in lines x-y, the author suggests/says/etc.)</p>
<p>Any tips for those? AFAIK that’s the only type of question that’s hard.</p>
<p>For me, it’s weird, but the way that really helps me (especially where I’m at a point that I’m kinda stuck between two different answers), is to think of the perspective of the people designing the test. What is the main point that the test designer is trying to get across?</p>
<p>A lot of the times the hard questions will have two “plausible” answers. One is a trick answer, and it’s right in a more superficial way, but the other one is the true answer and really hits the nail on the head. Ask yourself: why is the author writing this?</p>
<p>Then there’s vocab and in all honesty that’s just a pain in the ass… there’s really no way around it other than either working through SAT vocab lists or praying that you get a test that’s easy on the vocab (honestly for me it was the latter lol).</p>
<p>Also, I agree with halcyonheather. If you’re only a freshman, your school will probably naturally go up. My CR went up like 18 points over two years without any explicit studying.</p>
<p>(And for vocab you can learn Latin and Greek roots.)</p>