<p>@Jellybae I may have asked you this but what’s your strategy for passage based questions? especially for ones where they don’t give you line numbers</p>
<p>@sat2014 i dunno if I should give you advice since I struggle with the questions a lot. Anyway, I have a hard time retaining anything I read. It takes me some time before I truly understand what I just read on a page. That’s why after the SAT I truly get what each passage was talking about lol sigh. To combat this, I skim the questions for line references and mark up the passage so I know what I need to look for. I then work paragraph by paragraph, answering questions that don’t require the whole passage’s context and writing a small summary beside each paragraph. As soon as I get the tone of the passage (especially if it’s a double passage), I put a plus, minus or equal sign at the too so I mark the author’s attitude. After that, I answer the main idea questions and to be sure I have it right I read over the notes I made per paragraph. Then I go back over the questions I answered paragraph by paragraph to see if it also goes with the main idea of the passage just in case reading the lines alone was not enough. </p>
<p>My strategy works very well for me when I practice (I almost always score between (700- 760) but on the test I get so jittery and panicky and my plan goes to poo and I basically just rush through everything 
when I take fully timed practice tests my problem is staying focused. I noticed that by the 2nd cr section I get distracted easily and screw up a lot since I don’t focus. By the 3rd section I get back on track but still. </p>
<p>You should definitely try what I do if you’re like me and have a hard time processing what you read/focusing. I also always pretend to be interested in the passage during practices and sometimes read them in funny voices (I always forget to do this on the actual test tho). One main thing you need to know about cr is that the answer is right there in the passage. Don’t infer. Try to think like the author and take what the person says seriously. Also, make sure your answer choice can be supported with evidence directly from the passage (not from your inference!) Hope this helps!</p>
<p>@Jarjarbinks23 my original dream school has always been Wharton so it’s actually way more competitive than stern :(</p>
<p>@Jellybae thanks, I have the same problem. the timing pressures me to read faster which is where I skip vital information. I personally am not a fan of dual passages. I struggle with inference questions and vocab in context questions. i score anywhere from 580-620 on my practice test for CR. thanks for advice. what do you think you got on this recent CR?</p>
<p>@sat2014 Idk. I either did really well or really badly. I can’t tell since I didn’t omit any questions 
I’m expecting either the same 600 or a 650</p>
<p>I’m not really sure what score to expect for my essay, but I felt that it was pretty solid; I was able to use a personal and a literary example and I was able to fill up all of the space. I know it is impossible to accurately predict a score with this description…but what scores do essays similar to this usually get? Could I get 10-12?</p>
<p>@Kreig01 not to say you did but an 8 is still possible if you just threw up the examples on the paper… as in you listed them but you didn’t connect them to the thesis whatsoever.</p>
<p>I’d say the range is a 9-12, depending on how well you connect your examples with the thesis and body paragraphs’ topic sentences.</p>
<p>@Kreig01 it’s entirely possible! however just know that I’ve had many friends who have gotten 8s with 2 examples while filling up the entire space even when they were expecting much higher scores. It is much easier to get a high 10-12 score if you write 3 shorter examples. The readers just skim, honestly; the SAT essay is not about quality but the semblance of quality. On my last essay I made up a historical example, an example about Holden caufield (which was based on a litcharts read over from the nigh before), and something about 1984 which I barely remembered and still got a 10. actual quality is really not a priority in my opinion - though I suppose it might also depend on your reader.</p>
<p>@presque " It is much easier to get a high 10-12 score if you write 3 shorter examples."</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s necessarily true. My tutor (who helped a few students get 2200+ on the SATs with 10 or higher on the essay) said it’s much better to write 2 clear, detailed answers, if you want a higher chance at getting a 10 (which is harder than it seems to get).</p>
<p>@Jarjarbinks23 sure! I’m just speaking from experience as I’ve never had a tutor. Because I’m a senior, I know the specifics of many of my peers’ SAT scores and I’ve never known anyone who’s written three examples+two pages and NOT gotten a 10-12. These same people have all gotten 2200+ on their SATs, so I’m just going to give them the same authority as your tutor. On the other hand i know plenty of people who have gotten 7-8 with 2 examples+2 pages and been utterly confused because they’re really comprehensive writers which I can absolutely vouch for. As a result, my friends and I have been telling them to use 3 examples and it’s worked so far with the 2 students whom we’ve told. </p>
<p>Different tutors will tell people different things. However, I truly believe that if you have 3 examples your grader looks at your essay and feels like you did a better job of structuring your time than other people. In the case of the SAT, it tends to be quantity of over quality.</p>
<p>@presque do you think the significance of the essay examples (like using important literary and historical figures) boosts higher score chances?</p>
<p>Because it seems as if the examples using yourself or real-life examples revolving around you tend to be the hardest to nail.</p>
<p>I’m not sure presque In March I used two very weak examples and only filled up 1.1 pages and still got an 8. I did use vocab though.</p>
<p>I’m sure if I wrote more with more substance I would have gotten an 11 or 12</p>
<p>I mean if you look at the collegeboard website…</p>
<p>An essay that got a 6/6 from one of the graders was only 3 paragraphs. </p>
<p>Personally I would emphasize the 2-example method since you can definitely fill 2 pages with meaningful work, but the “3 examples” method would work just as well.</p>
<p>Can anyone answer this really tough math question: it was found in the May 2004 SAT:</p>
<p>A triangle is inserted into a parabola with equation y=1/2x^2 + 10x - c and y> 0. A polygon with four faces is then placed perpendicular to the positive slope of the parabola. The line y=3x+ 3 is placed tangent to a circle with a radius of 5.3 inside the parabola. The parabola is then mirrored y=x. If the 10x is then cubed, what will the c value be?</p>
<p>Less than 6 days!</p>
<p>I mean they’re both viable ways of going about it! </p>
<p>@Jellybae that is a great score congrats! You must’ve presented your thoughts really coherently in that limited amount of space. Though I would say breaking the double digits would be your greatest challenge now.</p>
<p>As for examples… I think the issue with personal examples is they absolutely cannot be vague and they have to have the same significance as a literary/historical example would have. I actually never used a personal example before until this June so I’m really eager to see how this essay turned out so I can see if personal examples are as viable. In January I used 2 literary, 1 (made up) historical. This time I used 1 historical, 1 literary, and 1 personal! That being said, I would not have used a personal example except for the fact that in this essay I was able to use my dad’s upbringing in a communist society and explain it well. That’s what I mean by similar significance. Not like “oh my friend wouldn’t tell me the truth because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings but I found out anyways and I was angry at her.”</p>
<p>That’s honestly just my personal philosophy though. Lots of writers are able to pull off things that I cannot and still score in the double digits - I just try to walk in there with a plan because 25 min to write an essay is abysmal and the more organized you feel the better you will do.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what to expect with my essay. I used up the full two pages (I actually ended up having to squeeze some in at the bottom) but I underestimated how much space my first example would take up. Although the writing was still very good, my second example was still substantially shorter than my first and I had no conclusion. Is there any chance of me still getting at least a 10? </p>
<p>On my first SAT I took I filled up all the space and used 3 examples which were not very good I felt like and I got an 8. I feel much better about my examples this time but only had 2, but I explained them better. Hopefully I can get that 10.</p>
<p>I am curious to see what you guys think about the correlation between overconfidence and lower test scores. For my test back in January, I was super confident, thinking that I had gotten an 800 in CR and W. I ended up getting only a 710 in each. This time around, I wouldn’t say I feel not confident about my scores, but I am not confident to the degree that I was last test. Do any of you have stories that relate to this or know of people who have received top tier scores (2200-2400) but were not overconfident about their results beforehand? </p>
<p>just curious but after the essay, what section do you prefer to see first? i like to get the writing out of the way first and got it last time.</p>