So I’m a sophomore and I took the SAT in June because I’m graduating a year early.
My overall score was 1180 (first timer), I bombed the grammar and this was my overall score.
Any tips on how to improve? I used the Blue Book to study.
Math - 620
Reading - 320, Grammar - 240
Wow–you have a LOT of room for improvement. Tips? Learn about clauses and modifiers, subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement and case, parallelism and comparison, and information flow. You certainly also need vocab–desperately. Honestly, I’m pretty shocked that someone with your extremely underdeveloped R and G skills would consider graduating early.
In all my AP courses I’ve done pretty well, I’ve never had a problem with grammar it was just my first time taking the exam so I was quite nervous, I did pretty well on all the practice tests in the book considering I had one year less to study than everyone did. I’m going to obviously study all the material again for the next exam.
I recommend using Khan Academy’s SAT prep. KhanA works with CollegeBoard to create free, online, personalized SATprep material.
Master ALL of the skills in EVERY section. KhanA has a neat calendar feature which helps you set your goals and schedule how much to practice every day. Only take the practice test when you’ve mastered everything. It’s nice to see your progress increase as you practice, but the purpose of a practice test is to estimate your score on a real test, so you should only take it when you are ready. And then after every practice test, drill the the skills of the questions that you got wrong. Depending on how much time you have, you might have to master multiple skills a day in order to have time to take all the practice tests and be able to learn from your mistakes. (However, I don’t recommend STUDYING using KhanA. Their videos really don’t go in-depth into the math skills at all, so if you ever need to learn something, use some other online resource. Google it. Youtube it. I only used KhanA for the questions, estimate of what I need to work on, and practice tests.)
I followed this schedule for a month. I mastered every skill and left 4 days to spare before the test. I took a practice test every day, and then spent the rest of the day drilling the questions that I got wrong. If you have more time, I’d recommend stretching this out to 8 days - test every other day, and practice during the rest. Testing can take a lot of your energy. And a last tip/motivation: the SAT responds very well to studying, because it isn’t a test of your intelligence. So the more work you put in, the better your scores will be. Higher input = greater output.
I personally believe everyone should aim for the best. You might not get a perfect score, but you’ll definitely go farther than you could possibly have had you aimed at anything less. Good luck!