I am taking the SAT in October without the essay. Last time I took the SAT was in June without the essay and got 800 out of 1600. It’s really bad. My english and math grades are good but it’s just this exam that’s so hard for me. I study everyday with the SAT book and even use scrap paper for notes. I had a tutor but she wouldn’t help me solve math problems with knowing the steps. How should I study for this exam? I have only a few weeks of this month and next month and then it’s the exam. Please help.
@akadream assuming you have taken enough courses (e.g. up to algebra II, and a few reading/analysis courses), you should be able to do well on the SAT. The rest is knowing how the test works and different strategies for math/reading. Some of them are SAT/ACT-specific and may involve a slightly different skillset than in HS.
Make sure you read and understand the explanations given in the book for questions you got wrong, and even on some that you get right (particularly if you guessed or weren’t confident in your answer).
@MITer94 I will do that! For math, I can even find more examples that are similar to the book problems from their topics. But what about english? On the reading section I read the passage and get only about 4 questions right out of 10 or 11. I can’t study the answers obviously but how can I make my english reading score higher?
@akadream I’m not too familiar with the new SAT in terms of format and question types, but on the old SAT, many reading questions could be solved by eliminating choices that were either wrong/unsupported, or even half-wrong. I haven’t looked at any reading sections from the new SAT.
For math, it seems like the best way to prepare a certain topic is to just solve lots of problems involving that topic. If it’s a new topic/theorem (ex. the quadratic formula), I find it helpful to try to derive/prove it before applying it repeatedly - this helps prevent blindly memorizing formulae with no understanding.
A common example is the so-called “distance formula” - a lot of students try to memorize D = sqrt((x2 - x1)^2 + (y2 - y1)^2) and fail to realize it is exactly the same as the Pythagorean theorem.
In terms of finding math problems, official CB resources are probably your best bet. You can also solve problems in your alg/geometry textbooks for more practice.
If you’re international student and don’t do reading section well,try to read a lot first.
For literary passages,read classics,fiction books;for social science and science passages read articles in www.scientificamerican.com and www.economist.com.I think then you can read passages easily and make your reading score higher.
@mehralizadeh I’m not a international student. I just don’t do the critical reading well. They ask a question about the reading like “What made him/her take the decision?” (sorry this is a bad example). And then the next question is, “Which sentence proved this?” Then there’s four sentence choices as answers. That’s my main struggle.
In this questions try to find previous question’s answer in next question that asks evidence.