<p>Just took a practice test, scored a 690, analyzed it, found these mistakes: </p>
<p>-On a Which Situation is Most Analogous question, I didn't take in the entire context. When you come across general situation questions, do you look back at the lines and try to come up with a general feel of that situation?</p>
<p>-In general, when you look at an answer choice, do you always try to find evidence in the text? A general stereotype got me in which one choice(reclusive and lonely) took priority over the right choice of discontent for poets. Of course the test played on your stereotype of poets as lonely people when the passage said that they weren't as happy as they could be, so the discontent would have been right. So when you look at an answer choice, do you search rigorously for evidence? Usually I take out the 2-3 choices that I know are wrong, and then choosing between the last 2-3 is the real challenge in which textual evidence sometimes doesn't always give explicit evidence. </p>
<p>-Other than that, vocab is a huge part, and had I known the right vocab, I would have scored in the 700s.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Haven't done enough of these questions to say. Some of these questions refer to specific incidents, even specific lines, so I usually look at a few lines around it though.</p></li>
<li><p>Yes, but I don't always look for concrete and explicit evidence. If a sentence or phrase implies or suggests the stereotype, I will usually choose it unless there is evidence for another answer choice, which in that case I'll scrutinize further. I'm not sure if this is a good strategy.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Also, on one section, the 1st of a double passage was so hard to understand that when I skimmed it, I missed too many details to understand it. When I read it too slowly, there were too many details. When you have a hard time reading a passage that doesn't really interest you much or is about a very complicated subject, what do you do?</p>
<p>I dunno, that's a real problem with CR. I'm sure you already do this so it probably won't be of much help, but I do specific line and vocab-in-context questions first and maybe read a little around them to get a general idea of the passage.</p>
<p>Another suggestion which I think may help but haven't tried personally would be to try and mentally summarize each paragraph in 1-2 sentences. If you have the general flow of ideas and organization in your head, you'll at least know where to look for specific details. But again, I have not done this myself personally, so if it works or if it doesn't help lemme know because I'm tutoring an ESL student who I can't for the life of me teach him how to score well on CR.</p>
<p>(But to be honest with you, the two SATs I took, I had an extremely hard time with the two long passage section in both tests. I bombed the first one, and the second one I was racing against the clock, picking stereotypes and going with my gut and somehow getting them all correct)</p>
<p>On the march sat, I got 1 vocab wrong and 4 cr reading questions wrong and got a 700. I think that the vocab had a HUGE part in my getting that score. My advice is to use word smart.</p>