<p>Hello, I am a candidate for the Air Force Academy and I will be a senior in high school this year. </p>
<p>I am very strong academically by being in the top 3% out of a class of 422 with Honors and APs. </p>
<p>I took the SATs in Nov and got a 1710 w/ 570 CR, 580 M, and 560 W.
I then had a class from Sylvan and raised my scores to 1930 in March w/ 600 CR, 700 M, and 630 W.
I took the test again in May and got a 1920 w/ 590 CR, 700 M, and 630 W. My class helped me a lot in M and W, but not much in CR.
I am satisfied with my M and W score, and do not wish to spend much time studying those areas. </p>
<p>For the class of 2013 the averages were 639 in CR and 664 in M. </p>
<p>Of course I am not shooting for 650 in CR as my max, but I will be satisfied with that score.
I had an even point breakdown with sentence completions vs passages.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any advice how I can boost those 50+ points in CR?</p>
<p>Math and Writing skills can be improved on considerably with a couple of months of intense study and practice. For example, knowing the Pythagorean theorem is likely to improve your math score while not knowing it will probably lower it. Unfortunately, the ability to read a difficult written passage and correctly answer somewhat subtle and ambiguous questions about it is a skill that is developed over a lifetime of reading. The ability to read and understand written material is also probably to a certain extent genetically determined. There is very little you can do in a few months to remedy the first problem and nothing you can do to remedy the second. As you can see your CR scores have been very consistent in your three attempts so far; 570, 600, 590, a range of 30 points. Increasing your score by 50 points over your best effort and 60 points over your most recent attempt may not be feasible. I would work on raising your math and writing scores even higher to get a higher total score.</p>
<p>Acquiring a vocabulary is a process that is well on its way by the time you are two years old. Those who acquire an extensive vocabulary are somehow able over the next 15 years, through reading many different types of materials and listening to educated adults converse, master new words and the context they are used in and incorporate these words into their own written and spoken vocabulary. The human brain seems to develop in a way that between infancy and adolescence we are able to effortlessly learn thousands of new words and how to use them. By the time one is 17 or 18 years old this process is largely complete and expanding one’s vocabulary after that becomes progressively more difficult. This is seen most dramatically in learning a foreign language. Children learn new languages fairly easily but for adults learning a new language is extremely difficult.</p>
<p>Your vocabulary is most likely a combination of your innate verbal ability, the amount of reading and conversing with educated adults you did as a child and incorporating new words into your own written and spoken vocabulary. Through this process, by the time you are 18 you are a person with either a good, an average or a poor vocabulary and this does not change much in adulthood. Trying to memorize new vocabulary from lists of words, that you do not already normally use, from a book for a few months is not going to make up for deficiencies in vocabulary that developed over the formative language learning years. I do not think you have a deficient vocabulary, a CR score of 600 is well above average, but the fact that you have taken the SAT three times with pretty much the same score each time in CR indicates that you have probably reached the limit of what you are capable of and while an increase to 650 is not impossible, It is unlikely and I do not think spending hours studying vocabulary lists is a particularly productive use of your time. You have a much better chance of increasing your math or writing scores by 50 points or more if you spent that time practicing writing and doing math problems.</p>