Need to improve my Reading skills

<p>I am now a senior in high school. Even though I've been studying for the SAT for more than a year so far, I never get my reading score up to at least a 500. My highest reading score is 490. My sat score went from 1100s to 1300s then now to 1500s. 1500s is pretty much my limit now. I studied more than 800 vocabulary words and knew about the prefixes and suffixes. Most of the time i get stuck between two answers and ended up picking the wrong out of the two choices. </p>

<p>Any tips on improving my reading skills?</p>

<p>It is not all about vocabulary words, although practice tests can help. Presumably it is more about whether you have been reading a variety of “college level” things (books, texts, articles) over the previous months (years). Since you are already a senior, have you thought about just focusing on the type of questions you get wrong (presumably the longer passage based sections of the CR test) and less on general vocabulary? There are also multiple suggestions at this and similar threads on CC:</p>

<p><a href=“Is there really anyway to improve SAT Critical Reading scores?!? - Test Preparation - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-act-tests-test-preparation/473047-is-there-really-anyway-to-improve-sat-critical-reading-scores.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Then there is the ACT of course … if your SAT reading scores are staying below 500 even with practice, are you doing relatively better on the ACT? In particular does your ACT practice test show you getting above a 21, if so forget SAT prep and just focus on ACT since you are running out of time.</p>

<p>I suggest getting a tutor. </p>

<p>I took the act once but I kind of winged it since I didn’t study it much, I got a 19 composite score. I even took the summer prep class and we always took the SAT test every friday. I once got a 530 for reading but most of the time my scores go up and down probably because of the difficulty of the test.</p>

<p>Yes I had a tutor only for math actually because I wanted to improve it. However, my tutor is not available anymore and other tutors were too expensive since I took like 2 years of SAT prep classes with thousands of dollars of spending money.</p>