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<p>Right off the bat, MIT doesn’t care about the writing score, so don’t worry about that one. </p>
<p>With the math, is there ever a time where you didn’t know how to do a problem? Or did you just run out of time? If you ran out of time, maybe you need to improve your automaticity. That is, when you see a problem, you don’t have to sit and think how to do it. You know the next step by pattern recognition.</p>
<p>The problem is probably that you’re practicing for the SAT in isolation. You hear stories of people who scored 2300+ with “no” preparation, but then you’re not considering that they’ve in essence been preparing for it all their lives - building a killer vocabulary since grade school, good at math, making a point of sticking to good grammar, etc. If your vocabulary is just average, taking lots of practice tests won’t help you or improve your score beyond a certain ceiling.
Here’s my advice (I got a 2360): ditch the Barron’s and Peterson’s. Dig up a dictionary/old-fashioned word list book and learn new words. Read a couple of novels a few steps above your comfort zone (Dickens is good) and note any strange words you come across. Try to improve your math drill speed (I find it’s time, not difficulty, that does many people in). A bunch of friends and I even made a pact to stop using leetspeak in our texts - we wrote everything out in full, and we’d call each other out on grammatical errors. Rather than simply getting your SAT score up, you’ll also improve your basic skills, which would show through in other aspects of your app (dropping rare words or a neat turn of phrase into your essays, for instance). </p>
<p>Erica Meltzer has a great book on how to tackle the critical reading sections on the SAT. Larry Krieger has great books which lists many common SAT vocabulary words. Start with those. If you finish learning all those words then find more lists of words to study. I agree that reading books like Dickens is a great way to expand your vocabulary but I wouldn’t necessarily look up all strange words. Instead, enjoy the books and marvel at how many of the new words you have been studying you find there. I really think that studying lists of words while reading books with great vocabulary helps tremendously because finding the word in context helps cement that word into your memory moving it from your short term to your long term memory.
I don’t agree with dropping rare words into your essays though. Write essays that sound like you. Keeping them simple and clear are probably the best strategies I would give you. Unless jewelessien was referring to your SAT essay and not your college application essays in which case the college board seems to award more difficult vocabulary. However, when studying for the SAT, ignore focusing on the writing section. It is a rare college that actually cares at all about your writing score. </p>
<p>Good luck, I’m sure your hard work will pay off.</p>
<p>@rothstem, if those words really become part of your vocabulary, then they would sound like you if you used them in an essay. I use rare words in my writing all the time, and I’ve never heard anyone say my essays sounded off.
And when I say “rare word” I don’t necessarily mean “big” words like metanoia or petrichor.</p>