<p>@"aunt bea" That’s completely inappropriate. You are talking to a child.</p>
<p>OP, taking the SAT over and over again will not strengthen your CR skills. The texts they use are generally all of the same difficulty. The only way to improve your CR skills to sit down and open a real book. Read some Shakespeare or some Chaucer. Reading one page passages over and over again will just shorten your endurance as a reader. Read full books. That is how you will really challenge yourself. You most definitely should not be using an exam to find your happiness and worth. What will you do when the exam changes? </p>
<p>Pl let me make it straight, I am in no intention to boast around, I am reading to generally build my vocab because my vocab is low. I do the SAT to see how I do in terms of vocab. Ppl like aunt bea take the wrong meaning. I do not mean to blame her, but she drew conclusions irrelevant and insulting to me. I kindly want to put a STOP to this discussion. It can go on, but I will not respon. I thank you all for your help. I certainly shouldn’t have posted this In the first place… But anyways, thanks…</p>
<p>I don’t know if you will continue reading this, but I think most of the people on here really do want you to be successful and happy. But we see a lot of kids, particularly kids of immigrant parents, who are placed under enormous and unnecessary stress when it comes to these tests. It’s partly because they don’t understand that test scores are used differently in this country than in their home country, that plenty of opportunities are available to students with lower test scores that would probably be closed off in their home, and that while top scores are helpful, they are no guarantee of acceptance. Top schools are looking for kids with true intellectual passion and achievements outside the school, not just the kids with the highest SAT scores.</p>
<p>It saddens me to see kids as young as you are stressing about the SAT. I am trying to give you the best advice I can for your happiness, education and testing success. All of these are important. The more interaction you have with native speakers, the better. Sitting home poring over test questions and vocab lists that are being phased out in the test you will actually take is, in my opinion, not the best plan for either your happiness or developing your English fluency. Reading a wide variety of quality materials–news, nonfiction, and fiction–will educate you in a way that no test prep book can and hopefully help your reading comprehension, writing style, and vocab. </p>
<p>I personally think that for a kid who is aiming for a high score and is willing to put a lot of effort into test prep, a good time to start is the summer after 9th grade and continue during the summer after 10th grade. That is what I advised my own daughter to do and she is now a National Merit scholar. </p>
<p>Annie, I agree that I was harsh, and I didn’t mean to insult the child, just trying to hit him with reality of trying to do more than what he should be doing for his age. ^^^^ Agree with mathy^^^^</p>
<p>Just use the practice test as exercise. Do not put much attention in the score for now. Do go through the answers on the questions you have missed. The test format and scoring will be changed but the general knowledge you will learn from the practice will remain useful. My young D also started using SAT/ACT practice test in 7th or 8th grade as daily exercise. She never do a full test or even a full section at a time. We just use that to gauge her improvement over time, from missing most of the questions, to missing a few in a section. Some middle school students actually took the real SAT test already for different reasons. So start doing SAT practice in 8th grade is not that unusual. However, it is not necessary to put too much pressure early on. If you want to get a practice score, you would need to do a timed practice test.that you need to apply your knowledge and test skills. At this point, it is far more important to build up your knowledge than the test skill as that would depend on the format and scoring of the test that have not yet been defined.</p>