<p>Hi guys.
I would like to share my frustration with you guys, and I need some help.
I am gonna be taking my LAST sat this coming October, and my reading score needs to go up.
On my last SAT, I got 580 reading, 800 math, 680 writing (missed 3, essay 8).
On my PSAT, i got 570 reading. On my very first SAT, I got 620 reading.
And I have been studying every day since the beginning of July, doing at least 2~3 reading sections per day. Still, when I time myself, I end up missing average of 6 questions in each section which will, again, get me around 600 range. I miss vocab questions once in awhile, so they aren't that big of a problem compared to the passage problems.
So here is my question..
What do I have to do to actually see improvement in my critical reading section?
I am aiming for at least 700 on reading.</p>
<p>Don’t be content with getting ALMOST all of the SC correct. Study more vocabulary so that you will be able to get every SC-related question right, or one at most. Seriously, it helps. Reading helped me get from the 500s to the 700s, but that extra vocab study helped me get to 800 on my last two practice tests. </p>
<p>And review your questions, even if you got them right. After you take each practice test, go over EVERY question thoroughly and look through the passage to find the correct answer. Often, the answer to each question can be found in the passage. Whenever I look back at a wrong answer, I feel stupid because the real answer was in the passage blatantly staring at me… I just didn’t realize it. Go over the ones you missed especially, and make sure you understand them before you move on. What may also help is reading the news. Also, don’t try to over-analyze anything. I think this became one of my biggest problems, because during sophomore year my teacher was obsessed with over-analyzing (she would get a piece of poetry, choose one word, and tell us a bajillion different ways that it could mean something extremely obscure and irrelevant). Keep things simple, and when you try to narrow down your answer choices, think of why an answer would be wrong, not why an answer would be “more right”. Don’t have an answer bias before you’re finished with the question. Review each question thoroughly when you’re taking the test so that you don’t miss anything key. If you choose an answer without having justified it with the text, then you may be wrong. If you continue to think that the answer you chose is correct while you double-check your questions, then not good. Don’t be too confident, but also try not to be too paranoid. You should be fairly sure with your answers, but always leave a /little/ bit of room for doubt on the hard questions just to make sure you are doing things correctly.</p>
<p>Always, always, always prove your answer with the text. </p>
<p>Also how are you taking the practice sections? I know that when I was scoring really low (my lowest score ever was like, a 490 lol) I never read the passage. I looked over the questions, and looked at pieces of the passage as I went along.</p>