<p>Here’s a few tips, hope I can help. I just got an 800 on CR.</p>
<p>1) Practice reading. This is easily one of the most important things. Read books, and possibly more importantly news articles. I don’t know if it works for everyone, but keeping up with current events and reading things like New York Times, Washington Post, and think tanks like the Brookings Institute helps me with various reading skills, from reading comprehension to seeing new vocabulary used in context. I didn’t do this specifically to study for the SAT, I just do this because I already follow news. The only books I really read are either political or governance related, but if you don’t want to follow news, reading any book helps with this.</p>
<p>2) Next importantly, practice taking the SAT CR test. Do a lot of CR sections in The Blue Book and other practice tests, then grade yourself and see exactly why you got things wrong. My first complaint with the CR section when I took it in December was that some answers seemed ambiguous, but the more you take it, the more you see where Collegeboard is leaning with some of the “ambiguous” questions. Nothing special here, just do more tests and you’ll see your score improve.</p>
<p>Now for things more specific to the test:</p>
<p>3) If finishing the section is your problem, start practicing your speed reading now. If you Google speed reading tools like Spreeder, you’ll find sites online where you can practice reading and comprehending faster. At first it will feel rushed, but with 3-4 months of practice you’ll actually be able to read and comprehend much more quickly.</p>
<p>4) People always talked about studying and memorizing 500, 1000 word vocabulary lists and it freaked me out, so I never studied a vocab list. Personally, I feel that it’s time inefficient to study a long list of words through a way where the meaning probably won’t sink in. Rather, the more important things are to one, learn your etymology and root words so you can infer a word’s meaning even if you’ve never seen it before, and two, read more so you can see the word used in context. Plus, after you take a lot of practice tests, you get an idea of the types of words you need to know for the real thing. Plus, your score report said you only missed 3 questions in sentence completion (vocab), so you’re pretty good at this section anyway.</p>
<p>5) When answering the passage based questions, I usually skim through the questions first and hastily mark in the passage the line numbers from the questions. Like, if a question says, “Line 12,” I underline it, if it says, “Paragraph 2,” I’ll draw a fast bracket. This takes thirty seconds max and lets you get a feel for the questions you’re considering before you start reading the CR passage.</p>
<p>6) READ THE PASSAGE. This seems obvious, but many people read it once and then answer the questions generally. Reread the specific parts of the text for each question. I did this on previous practice tests. If a question says, “In context, what does _______ on line 28 mean?” you won’t know unless you read the text. Another type is a question that says, “Why would Author 1 disagree with Author 2’s position on blahblahblah?” Many of the answer choices make sense logically, but only one is correct according to information actually present in the text.</p>
<p>7) It has to be present in the text to be correct. This helps you eliminate some of those iffy seeming answer choices. Eventually you realize that the CR isn’t truly that ambiguous because it has to be clearly in the text to be correct.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the biggest things are to take practice tests, read more texts that require you to be analytic, and take more practice tests.</p>