Help with Second SAT Prep - Intl Student

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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<p>Hey everyone!</p>

<p>I took my first SAT Reasoning in May, but I definitely didn't achieve an Ivy League score as you guys can see:</p>

<p>Overall: 2140
Math: 790
CR: 700
Writing: 650 (Essay 9)</p>

<p>I'm Brazilian and I'll be going to the US to visit some universities and do a Summer Institutue at Georgetown University. As I want to attend top schools like U of Chicago, Princeton, Duke, etc, I know I need to boost my scores by at least 150 or so... But it's very hard for a non-native to do magnificently well on such a test. Even though many people say Standardized Tests don't count that much and that one should be really preocupated regarding Essays rather than those tests, I feel that as I'm an intl student those tests will be undoubtly important when it comes down to comparing me to a native american citizen. So I wanted to know if anyone has a favorite prep book for Critical Reading and Writing. I thought about Barron's CR and Writing Workbook, so I wuld be able to develop my skills in actual exercises instead of reading excessively all those enormous "How to nail the SATs bla bla bla" books. What do you guys think?</p>

<p>Thanks for the help =D</p>

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<p>I am also an international student that is planning on raising SAT scores over the summer. I’ve heard good things about the Barron’s workbooks, and I also recommend buying Direct Hits Vocabulary 1&2. Both of those are relatively short, and they help a lot especially for us that don’t have such a wide vocabulary. Since the scores you most need to improve are CR and W I also suggest reading as much as you can this summer, from classic books to magazines and newspapers.</p>

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<p>I’ll be pretty busy this summer, but I will indeed try to boost my reading time, so I can develop sentence structuring abilities…</p>

<p>Well, I’m almost sure I’ll be buying Barron’s… Just gotta look through this Direct Hits one… I’ve already studied 1000 SAT words (according to Spark Notes, the most common ones), but it’s always good to practice more and more =D</p>

<p>Thanks so far for the answer!</p>