<p>I am awfully annoyed that I received such low scores on the PSAT and the Aspire Exam (Practice ACT). I got a 1370 on the PSAT and a 21 composite on the Aspire exam. I noticed there would be section that would be half finished. Even with skipping the answers that I didn't know, I'd be running out of time with multiple reading passages incomplete. I'm beyond a slow test-taker, always the last to finish. My reading speed is 110 words per second (wps) which is 90 wps below average. I know that I can do far better if I had the time to answer every question. I ask if anyone has ANY advice on how to improve my test-taking speed. I feel incredibly dumb when my chemistry teacher asks me questions like, "Why did it take you so long to finish?" and I respond by saying, "I'm just a slow thinker." I know that I have the skills to get over 2000 because I didn't get many questions wrong on the PSAT, I just left half the section blank because I didn't get up to the next passages.</p>
<p>Look, College Boards book and The Real SAT are superb because they reuse old exams. Doesn’t get more real than that. Barron’s Books is fantastic for tips… seriously those bastards cover everything… only problem is that there practice exams are significantly harder than the other two… Princeton review is somewhat similar to real exams… but also different in an ineffible way. Honest Opinion, do them all. You’ve got the time! Start with Barrons (for the info and tips), and then ignore the tests… then go for the other three book’s tests… THEN go back to Barrons to do the tests to solidify your info. Doing all of that should do the trick! Good luck buddy!</p>
<p>@NexusLover Thanks so much! I really appreciate your input. My christmas list is filled with SAT books, and the ones that you mentioned are on that list. I will be taking your advice in starting with the Barron’s book and I’m going to finish off with the College Board’s blue book for the 2016 test. It isn’t available for purchase yet, but I hear it’s the only book that will truly prepare someone for the new SAT, which the College Board is calling “the redesigned Sat.” I just figured that I should master the old sat before learning new topics on the redesigned sat. What do you think?</p>
<p>Words per minute right? 110 wps is insanely fast.</p>
<p>Also, a good reading strategy for longer passages is to look at the questions first, and for each question (e.g. in line 2, what…), read around it and try to answer. At the end, go back to the very general “what is the main idea of this passage”-type questions that can only be answered upon reading the whole passage. </p>
<p>I agree with @MITer94. Read the questions first THEN read the sentences correlating to them. Leave main idea questions till the end, by that time you will have read enough of the passage to get a rough idea of the whole passage.</p>