Should I honestly retake?

medhopeful1231
Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:58:47 +0000

Yep I agree; a retake would be a good idea.
I don’t know if this’ll help, but I took the SAT I this past year and got a 2390 on the first try, and these are basically my thoughts on the SAT portions:
For CR: that’s more of a long-term process; as in do you read on a regular basis and think about the meaning/particular use of words/style, that sort of thing. Doing lots of practice the day before is pretty much no use at all because you really need the process of understanding. So I’m guessing you’re a rising senior, so you still have time to practice-summer is good, if you have the time. It doesn’t hurt to read (TIME [the opinions articles are always good] and european literature [I’ve heard that it helps and I personally agree ]) but the main thing is practice. Practice everyday; and do different books like the official Collegeboard, the Princeton Review, Kaplan, etc since every book is different. You don’t need to do hours per day, I’ve found that as long as you refresh your brain everyday for maybe 15 minutes even, it’s super helpful. It’s like…if you don’t play piano for a week and then start again, its a lot harder. Vocabulary-wise, it’s useless to memorize those 5000 word lists; the trick is to memorize the standard list of maybe 800 words that Flex I know gives you (I used FLex’s list that I got from a friend) becuase those are the words tha tusually come up the most. Obviously, you won’t know every word on the SAT but with practice, you can guess the meanings with time.
Writing: actually, I (and lots of my friends) have found that writing is relatively easy to improve; again, practice the multiple choice questions everyday. It’s more important to get the multiple choice questions right. I got a 790 on writing and I missed one multiple choice question, got a 12 on the essay. From most people I know, the multiple choice squestions are the ones you should be focusing on because you can get a 10, 11 on the essay and still get 800 if you get all the mc questions right. I’ve heard that that is becuase you get…35 min if i remember correctly to do …a not very large number of writing questions…and also, most people get a large number right, so the curve isn’t very big for the mc. So, focus on that.
Essay-I’ve heard that personal experiences are less …impressive? but I don’t know much about that. Personally, I’ve always written essays with reference to popular classic literature like Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, so on. I’ve heard its best not to use HP or anything omnipresent along those lines, but again, I’m not sure, since I never use HP. But of course, if you can write a good essay about yourself or about HP, go ahead, that can also get a 12, but around my district that occurs less.
Math: practice everyday! Not much to it…good thing about math is that its pretty straightforwards-its right or its wrong, and theres no real mess like there is with CR interpretation. Also, there are limited questions to ask about math–they will be similar from test to test, whereas CR is more versatile.
And yep, MIt 012 is right, 2000+ is solid.
I hope this helps haha this is all from personal experience (and that of friends) so if I’m mistaken about anything, I apologize in advance.
Gluck though!