<p>Hi I've took 4 PSAT one every saturday and I got 480 470 470 470 on the cr section. What could I do to improve that ? </p>
<p>Please help</p>
<p>Definitely get cracking on the vocab, if nothing else! Try the books direct hits or just princeton review’s flash cards. The vocab is one thing on the SAT that you actually can control your score on!</p>
<p>Im currently enrolled in a SAT prep school (c2) and I have to know like 1000+ vocab and it doesnt seem like to be improving my school at all</p>
<p>Reading higher level material will definitely help with vocab, and possibly with the reading comprehension too. If reading is a habit, good for you! You get a head start. However for those who do not read in their spare time, or have not developed a sophisticated vocabulary, then memorising is the way to go.
Have you actually memorised the 1000+ vocab? Because if you did it will increase your score.
BUT, looking at your score it seems like you’re lacking some fundamental skills. Your prep school will help you with that.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How could anyone actually memorize 1000 words that they have never seen before? If you have that kind of memory, you already would have a fantastic vocabulary.</p>
<p>Thanks and yes ! I memorized 1000+ words in a spam of a few weeks. And my prep school helped a little over the past few weeks but I didnt see any results but thanks alot anyways</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you did that for 4 weeks, 5 days a week, for 2 hours per day, you would be memorizing one word every 2.4 minutes. Incredible!</p>
<p>With a memory like that, if you had done much reading during your life, you already should have a gigantic vocabulary, so I don’t know if you would need to add another 1000 words (or if you could even find 1000 words that you didn’t already know).</p>
<p>It seems as if you are focusing on the wrong things. Your CR score is stable… so you are where you ought to be. </p>
<p>Now, you need to focus less on tactic and more on real knowledge.</p>
<p>Vocab is fine, of course, but you should really focus on paraphrasing.</p>
<p>In that, I mean whenever you read a sentence completion or reading comp sentence/paragraph/passage you’ll need to fundamentally understand what is being said.</p>
<p>For SC, make sure you truly know “who/what this sentence is about & what about them/it”. If you can come up with your own phrase, you get it. Then it’s just vocab elimination.</p>
<p>For RC, you should not focus on techniques… elimination and scanning and all that. Instead, spend the rest of the summer actually reading these passages and mapping them. </p>
<p>Write 1 sentence per paragraph that summarizes exactly what’s going on. But don’t just rehash what you read verbatim… that’s not paraphrasing. Nor should you write many sentences. That’s not paraphrasing. Instead, pretend you have to teach it to someone. You are not allowed to use any of the words that are in the passage. How would you do it?</p>
<p>And the end of the sentence/paragraph/passage, write down what this thing is all about and why it was written.</p>
<p>And take your time… your goal now is to get the questions correct. <500 means you have a lot of room for improvement. It also means there is something that you ‘don’t get’. </p>
<p>You should take this time trying to ‘get it’.</p>
<p>Craig</p>
<p>Two suggestions:
- Memorize 1000 vocab words. Now you may scoff at this idea, but from experience, IT HELPS. Since you have three months from the PSAT you should memorize around 35 words a day. This should guarantee good sentence completion score.
- For passage reading, remember that every answer IS SUPPORTED BY THE TEXT. DONT MAKE ANY ASSUMPTIONS. Always choose the supported answer. Dumb supported answer>Logical unsupported answer</p>
<p>If you can follow these two, then your CR score should improve immensely.</p>
<p>BTW for the 1000 vocab, if you don’t consistently review, then you WILL forget it.</p>