<p>I took SAT in last October and scored 2020.</p>
<p>CR 630
M 690
W 700</p>
<p>and after all practices I took since then, I'm getting</p>
<p>CR fluctuating from 600-630 (no improvement)
M 720-740
W 740-800</p>
<p>I'm memorizing vocabs and reading magazines whenever I can.
For Math, it's just that I'm making some dumb mistakes.
For Writing, I guess I just need to continue practicing.</p>
<p>SO, I'm just wondering how you guys improved from 2000 to 2200+.
Any daily SAT routines? test strategies?</p>
<p>The College Board's SAT Question of the Day is a must have. I also subscribe to Dictionary.com's Word of the Day, although they're usually not SAT Quality. </p>
<p>For vocab, I use Princeton's Hit Parade (that's pretty awesome) along with Rocket Review's SAT words. For the latter, there's a link to a free .pdf file somewhere on this forum, too tired to search for it now. </p>
<p>Reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" gave me a vocab boost I think; it also improved my CR skills. Something tells me that reading some of the Federalist Papers for government class also helped my CR. Reading Paulo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" helped me a LOT in CR, but it's impossible to go through without a teacher. Also, read nytimes.com a lot, particularly financial/national/world news. </p>
<p>Writing: continue practicing! Learn the patterns in the questions. And a tip: once you figure out a prepositional phrase is correct, cross it out. Half the time that makes finding the answer twice as easy. </p>
<p>Didn't do so well on math and essay, so someone else would be better at giving you advice.</p>
<p>Which books are you using? I used PR's Cracking the SAT 2009 (covers all the basics, probably saved my math score) and Kaplan's SAT 2400 2008 (useful tips for hard questions).</p>
<p>Bring a snack; I brought something like trail mix. Go to sleep earlier on the nights of the week before the exam. Don't cram; for a test like the SAT it's not going to work.</p>
<p>i went from a 1920 to a 1960 to a 2210. I never took the first two tests seriously but for my third one i buckled down and studied. Here's what I did:</p>
<p>CR: practice sections, one a day, go over questions and answers, read magazine/newspaper articles, memorize vocab (although i didn't memorize enough and got 2 sentence completions wrong). For CR, I also tried really hard to be completely focused during my reading. Usually some people read while bouncing their leg up and down or twirling a pen but I wanted to be completely absorbed by the passage, so it truly took a great deal of mental preparation. For Math, I was lucky to be a math/science person so I spent little time preparing for this because I knew it would come down to how calm I could keep myself and also double checking answers. For writing, definitely look over grammar rules in Princeton Review or Barron's and do practice sections. For all my writing sections I scored around 680 but on the day of the exam I got a 770 (with a 9 essay, 1 MC wrong). I think it just had to do with the fact that I didn't have any pressure for writing. My last score was a 590 (600 superscored) and I was already doing way better on practice tests so I was relatively calm. But my greatest advice would be to just practice. practice until you become extremely familiar with each section's questions. studying vocabulary and practicing sections is much more important than reading news articles, I realized. (improving your reading through advanced articles would probably take at least a year).</p>
<p>my method has not worked for anyone yet, but you never know, it's by far the laziest one. I started with a 1980 630/800/550. Then i just bought a book and read the grammar rules. Make sue you understand them, so that they become logical. I prepared an index card of stuff for the essay and just memorized everything i could write about. Even if you dont write about those things it really helps. I didn't really do anything for reading, which was my mistake, but this worked for me in writing, ended up with 2240 660/800/780. The key is to really really know it, not just memorize it. And in math, i worked really slowly to prevent any stupid mistakes.</p>
<p>for CR, i think just practicing and reading more books helps. I never had a method. I basically just read the passage, and answer based on the passage, and never get more than 1-2 wrong in CR practice tests. But remember, think logically about the answers. If there are two answers you arent sure about, study the wording closely. If you think "hmmm thats not NECESSARILY true" or something like that, the answer is probably wrong. Correct answers are 100% correct and supported by the text.</p>