<p>Predator:</p>
<p>First of all, my scores were similar to yours as a Sophomore. As a junior my math score stayed just about the same, but my verbal score went way up. I won a National Merit Scholarship coming from New York-- where the competition is pretty fierce. (By the way, don't listen to all those folks trying to put you down. It doesn't matter what they say--- the PSAT DOES matter, and there is no reason why you can't work on improving your score.)</p>
<p>The few things I can suggest to increase your scores-- especially verbal--- are:</p>
<p>(1) The most obvious one is to take practice test after practice test. I might recommend taking old SAT tests too. Start now and work a little consistantly until the next test.</p>
<p>(2) Increase your vocabulary. This isn't quite as important as it used to be since they did away with the analogy section, but I still think it's VERY important-- and it's the ONE thing you can actually WORK on and make improvements on if you have time. (Plus, if you ever want to go to grad school, the GRE still does have analogies, and is heavily vocab based.) If you have about six months to work on this, you can make MAJOR improvements. The books which really helped me are: "Word Smart: Building an Educated Vocabulary" by Adam Robinson (Princeton Review) "WordSmart II" by Katzman and "WordSmart:Genius Edition" by Freedman. I would go right to the back of these books where the authors have a "SAT Frequency List" and "GRE Frequency List" where they list the words that appear most frequently on the SAT/GRE. I would go through these lists-- both of them-- and see which words you don't know then start memorizing them. The other book I would HIGHLY recommend you get is "Gruber's Complete Preparation for the SAT" by Gary Gruber. This is the ABSOLUTE BEST SAT prep guide-- and Chapter 8-- the vocab building section--- is the BEST. This guy Gary Gruber is the absolute best-- better than any of the review companies. I recommend learning the prefix and root words he suggests, and doing everything he suggests in Chapter 8 on vocab building. You can get most of these books used on AMAZON for like 3 bucks each. If you can learn five works a day, in six months you will have made enough improvement that it will actually make a difference on your score. You probably wouldn't need to memorize more than 500 words. Kind of painful, I know, but very very doable-- and surprisingly, it will actually come in handy in your real life and in college. These are the best vocab and test prep books I know of. For the GRE they helped me raise my vocab score like 100 points. </p>
<p>(3) Increase your reading speed. There are a lot of training programs out there on speed reading and so on. You don't have to become like a superstar, but you definitely can train yourself to read 10-50% faster by practice. This will help a LOT in the reading sections. Here are a few programs you might want to look at. Some are computer based and pretty fun. You can definitely increase your reading speed and reading comprehension through these types of programs and through training. If you can increase your reading speed by only 20% this will translate to major improvements in your reading scores. I know this sounds stupid, but it will REALLY help.</p>
<p>VisionTrain:
<a href="http://www.e-speedreading.com/eyeq_comparison.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.e-speedreading.com/eyeq_comparison.htm</a></p>
<p>Eye-Q (they have a demo on their website)
<a href="http://www.infmind.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.infmind.com/</a></p>
<p>SpeedYourRead
<a href="http://www.speedyourread.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.speedyourread.com/</a></p>
<p>There are also some interesting speed reading books out there. Look around. Even if you only improve your speed by 20% this will still make a MAJOR difference.</p>
<p>As far as increasing your math scores, I have no specific suggestions other than to look at Gary Gruber's book-- and take a lot of practice tests! </p>
<p>If you are just a Sophomore now, you still have a lot of time, and can make MAJOR improvements-- especially in the verbal section-- if you start now.</p>
<p>I hope this was somewhat helpful.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>-greg</p>