Since 10th grade I have been studying hard on SAT reading and pretty much nothing else.
10th grade PSAT = 2060 (540R, 800M, 720W)
10th grade May SAT = 2140 (590R, 800M, 750W, 11 Essay)
11th grade PSAT = 2130 (620R, 800M, 710W, dahm -2 = 710!) Will not qualify for NMSF, missed by 3 points
11th grade December SAT = 2250 (690R, 800M, 760W, 12 Essay)
My score all four times has been SERIOUSLY HURT BY THE READING SECTION. How in the world are you supposed to comfortably finish an entire section comfortably in 25 minutes? I end up rushing at the end of the section. I have studied tons of books and they do not seem to be helping much. I NEED at least a 700 Reading and have only 2.5 months left to study. The vocabulary section is fine. It is the passages that cause big pain to me. Please help!
Intended major = Mathematics or Physics (but do not know if I am smart enough 8-| )
GPA = 4.0UW 4.65W
Tri-State engineering competition 4th place
First chair trombone, in various regional bands
AIME Qualifier
@southernbelle16 Erica Meltzerâs âThe Critical Readerâ, âSAT Prep Black Bookâ by Mike Barnett, âSAT Reading Bibleâ, âPowerscore 10 SAT Reading Testsâ, âOfficial Guideâ (Blue Book), Total of about 25 practice tests.
Maybe taking a prep class would help you at this point. I would have recommended all of the books you listed. Do you understand the questions you have been missing? Have you been analyzing them?
@southernbelle16 Erica Meltzerâs âThe Critical Readerâ, âSAT Prep Black Bookâ by Mike Barnett, âSAT Reading Bibleâ, âPowerscore 10 SAT Reading Testsâ, âOfficial Guideâ (Blue Book), Total of about 25 practice tests.
I think your trouble with time was due to inefficient reading strategy. You might not want to read the whole passage or article and try to understand the whole article then answer the questions. This could waste a lot of precious time. I read the questions first and quickly mark the sentences asked in the questions. When you read the article, you will have a better idea how you should read and what you are trying to answer. You should also pay more attention to the places you marked. If you think you have very good ideas of answer to the question, quickly mark your answer. You can adjust your answer after reading the whole article.
You should go amazon buy an SAT watch. Use it in the practice. Try to force yourself finish a few min ahead of time. After some rigorous training, you should be good at time management.
690 is a very good score unlike what you think. It means that you really understand the passages and that you are very good in critical reading for all practical and college related purposes. You do better than 94% but I get it, unless you are in the 99% you do not feel good. I do not want to be sarcastic just put some perspective. I assume the mistakes you make are not random but you miss mostly the very hard questions. Is this true? If so then you are stuck in the questions that 2 of the answers are right BUT the one is better supported by the passage. Since you get 800s in the math you have great reasoning skills and you can eliminate the wrong answers with ease. But in critical reading some answers are NOT wrong and could be inferred from the readings, they just not the best answers. That is usually the last âfrontiersâ for most students to move from 690 to above 700. You really have to ponder on those questions and see why the one is a better choice than the other. Spend time thinking about it. After a while you will see how the test tries to âtrick youâ. However, if your mistakes are random and only due to time management then you should invest in some fast reading techniques but I am not sure if that is a skill you can build in a short time.
^I agree with part of that â the part about 690 being an very good (you could also say excellent) score!
Iâm not sure I agree with the part about âtwo right answers, one bestâ. Iâm a math guy, but the reading teachers I have discussed this with tell me that there is always exactly one right answer and that the close calls involve things that are almost-but-not-quite-right, where closer reading of the evidence in the passage reveals the imposter answer.
I would be interested to hear what other reading experts have to say about this.
Look at question 13 (Test 3 from Blue Book, section 4) for example. The passage says: How is one to measure sleepiness? Perhaps by counting the number of times one yawns?..
The question now reads : The above question is based on which of the following assumptions?
B. People will yawn most frequently in the moments before they fall asleep
C. There is a direct correlation between yawning and sleepiness.
This is a level 3 questions and clearly the right answer is C. Notice that the passage says nothing about HOW the yawn counts would be used or interpreted. However answer B is not wrong in a way that a math answer is wrong. Wouldnt you âinferâ that yes the more you yawn, the more sleepy you are? There is no way that more yawing would be correlated with less sleepiness. But all this discussion is totally out of the point.
I do not disagree with your teacher. I did not mean that both answers are correct and SAT arbitrarily chooses one of them. What I meant is that it is confusing for some to chose between 2 answers that are correct but one is inferred and not literally supported by the the text .
@agupte ~ I wish I knew. Poor D tested three times hoping to bring her CR score up past 600. Her other two scores were low 700s and mid 700s but she got 600 all three times on CR, even after using some of the hints found here and studying what she could. Because of the CR score she misses the 50% mark for all the top LACs and universities. We are hoping that holistic admissions will overlook the score given her high GPA and rigor of coursework. She did choose to submit her scores to each school even though some were test optional. She wanted them to see her other two scores but it was a toss up whether to do it or not.
Just wanted to chime in here on the time management issue and the question of 2 ârightâ answers on RC. On the latter point, this issue is to me one of the most important things if not the single most important thing to understand about all âVerbalâ questions. You are right @pckeller, there is always only one right answer - its what I call âThe Principle of No Ambiguity.â There cannot be ambiguity as to which answer is correct and which is not. Obviously sometimes you might not be able to see which one is right and which is wrong, but just knowing that 1 answer is right and the other 4 wrong may push you to go deeper analytically (either in the answer choices themselves or in the passage) to finally discover why one is right and the other 4 wrong.
One of the difficult things about this is that on hard questions the SAT writers like to make the right answer not sound as good and make one or two of the wrong answers sound really good. They need to do this to make the question hard - if there is an obvious separation between the right answer and the wrong answers then the question wonât be that hard. Often on these hard questions the right answer is basically acceptable (as in not wrong) whereas the wrong answers may sound better in some ways but there are things about them that make them definitely, demonstrably wrong.
So that question that @am9799 referenced is actually a good example. Its probably a level 3 question because choice C is pretty clearly right, so it would be hard not to pick it (to make this question harder they could have made that answer not as clearly correct). But yeah, choice B is very close and very tempting. But it is still wrong. First of all its just not really an assumption that the question makes. But more specifically the passage is talking about measuring sleepiness, and this is not the same thing as âfalling asleep.â You could be sleepy all day and yawning a lot but not be close to falling asleep. So the switch from sleepiness to âfall asleepâ in choice B is part of what makes that definitely wrong.
So to the extent that you are able to, I would really try to not settle for ambiguity and try to not just choice an answer that you think is right but try to figure out why the wrong answers are wrong. And remember that the right answer will often not be perfect, but it will be the only one that is just not wrong.
Given your score I am guessing that this is probably less of an issue than the time management part. So on that, I agree with one of the other posters that you may need to try to read the passages a little differently and focus more on the big picture and the authorâs purpose. You canât do this for all of the passages (for example the fiction passages often require you to read the whole thing very closely), but for some of the passages, if you really focus on the beginning of the passage to get a good understanding of where the author is going then you can then skim over things further on in the passage since you will know WHY they are there. If you get questions about the specifics you can always go back and reread but understanding the purpose of function of things in the passage is the most important thing and will often really allow you to speed up once you have a sense of where the passage is going.
This post is already pretty long so I wonât go into detail about exactly how to do that, but I think Erica Meltzerâs book is probably the best at laying out some of these strategies. One more thing I would throw out thereâŠnot all of the CR sections end up being so tough time-wise. Often there is one section that has more SCâs and then maybe 3 passages including one that has a lot of questions to go with it. Usually for people that ends up being a lot easier than the one that has fewer SCâs and then 2 short passages and 2 medium to long passages. So pay attention to what the section looks like (scan ahead as soon as the section starts) and try to budget your time accordingly. And if there is one passage that looks much harder, maybe skip that one and deal with the one you are more comfortable with first and leave the harder one for last. And then if that harder passage has 1 or 2 killer questions, maybe skip those and come back at the end if you have time.
People who find the critical reading part unchallenging rarely understand why some end up facing two choices and having to guess. Just as it happens in the math section, there is always ONE answer that is better than all other choices. If a student has to guess in the math section, chances are that he or she missed an important clue or simply does not matter the basic knowledge. The same applies to the reading questions as two (or more) choices usually indicate an improper technique or understanding of the words.
This said, there are times that a reading question APPEARS to have more than one plausible answer when the reader relies on outside knowledge or overthinks the context of the passages. In other cases, the student DID eliminate the correct answer and is looking at two answers that are equally wrong! When two answers are very similar, chances are that both are wrong!
Just as for math, the answer for the lesser gifted student is to rely on practice and more practice with official tests. Lastly, I do NOT believe that time management is the main source for low scores. Struggling students will struggle with double the time if they do not improve their techniques.
As far as CR experts, I have yet to find someone who explains it better (and in simple terms) than Mike Barrett. But that is just a personal opinion.
(620R, 800M, 710W, dahm -2 = 710!) Will not qualify for NMSF, missed by 3 points