SAT Critical Reading Score Not Improving

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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<p>I am sure that this topic has come up numerous times and I apologize in advance if I have happened to blatantly miss a discussion about this. </p>

<p>This is my first post here but I've been browsing through this site and the forums ever since the discussion of my college plans came up. I've found this place a unbelievably helpful source of information and I am glad to have stumbled upon this place. I have read upon the forums about certain SAT guides and how to improve on your scores, but I have come face to face with one infuriating problem of my Critical Reading Score stagnating or worse--dropping. </p>

<p>I have taken the SAT several times so far and I have attained perfect scores in Math and Writing. My Critical Reading prowess has not shown the same success. I have practiced and practiced exclusively on my Critical Reading Section for over two years and I have not seen a single inkling of improvement. My score is always around 630 and has been like this ever since I have stated preparing for the SAT. I have easily done over 50 (most likely more as I have stopped counting) practice tests and have added about 2000 words to my vocabulary since I started but I can't seem to improve my reading scores. I have also tried many different strategies in tackling the reading section but I have yet to see a difference in my results. </p>

<p>Something that really confuses me about this is when I took my PSAT my junior year, I attained a 77/80 score on Reading and around 60-ish for my writing score. It has completely flipped ever since I started prepping for the SAT.</p>

<p>I know only more practice will help me improve my situation but I am getting more discouraged everyday with the lack of results from the countless hours I've spent on fixing my critical reading score. I can't sometimes help asking myself now if success in the Critical Reading department is something innate.</p>

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<p>First, don’t despair over your score. In my experience, the SAT score is something that definitely can be improved significantly (though of course inherent ability is also a big factor; its the same with anything). Since you get nearly perfect scores in Math and Writing, that means you are good at at least some standardized tests, and I’m sure you can do well in Critical Reading.</p>

<p>You are most likely a good English speaker, and in my opinion you’re not doing it right. I think studying vocab is not an efficient way to get a better score. The SAT is designed so that anyone will come across words they don’t know, pretty much no matter how strong their vocab is. Also, many make any mistakes in the first few questions where vocab shouldn’t be an issue. If you do, those should be easy points if you know how to do them. Words can also have multiple definitions, which explains the questions that go like “the word ___ most nearly means…”. These vocab-related questions are designed to show how well you can understand from context clues. That’s what you need to practice.</p>

<p>Speaking of practice, just doing practice tests is not good either. Since you took so many tests, you probably did them, counted your score, and went on. You need to post-mortem the tests, to see exactly what went wrong, try the questions again without looking at the answers…etc. If you didn’t, then go ahead to do so for other tests or even go back to some of your past 50 tests. Also, understand the correct answer yourself, don’t rely too much on others’ justifications unless you’re completely confused. Usually, in a standardized test, the answer shouldn’t be debatable. For CR prompt questions, that means the answer is almost exactly quoted in the reading prompt itself.</p>

<p>Lastly, don’t care too much about the scores you get from practice tests. They are opportunities for practice, not glimpses at scores you will get at the real deal. They can be pretty demotivating, and motivation is very important. You should count the scores for some practices, though, to see if you get any progress.</p>

<p>Just my 2 cents. My CR score is 730.</p>

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<p>Has anyone here tried the princeton Review SAT classes? I would like to hear your experience with their classes and/or tutors. </p>

<p>They offer a guarantee that your score will increase 150 points, but we are wondering if they artificially lower your score on the first test to meet that. My daughter took the real SAT about a 18 months ago and score 110 points higher on the writing section (with a lower score on the essay) then she did on their writing section in the first diagnostic test. She scored 78 on the PSAT writing section last fall in a practice PSAT that her HS has everyone take. We were shocked at the score they said she made on the writing section, since that and CR are her biggest strengths.</p>

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<p>^PR is definitely not recommended. Search the forum; this has been discussed man times.</p>

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<p>Have you been able to establish a pattern on the mistakes you are making? With so many tests, I am afraid that you might simply repeating the same approach over and over without addressing the basic issues. </p>

<p>Do you lose points in the sentence completion or in the passages? What kind of questions do you end up missing or skipping? </p>

<p>This is something I’d try. Go back to the tests you took that are official tests (do not use the PR, Barrons, or other similar) and do NOT retake them. Read them with the answers in front of you and attempt to analyze why ONE answer is chose and why FOUR are totally wrong or … just a bit worse than the selected one. Try to evaluate the patterns of the test and see if you identify the LOCATION of your errors. </p>

<p>For instance, if you happen to miss the last questions in several sections, you might spend too much time rereading the passages or concentrating on the trivial parts. If you find yourself with many choices of TWO and cannot decide, you might have to work on restating your own questions. If you happen to discard the right answer in your first “cut” you might have to check a few strategies about making too many infererences or overthinking the texts. </p>

<p>With 800 scores next to your reading, your issues should not be technical in nature. You DO understand the test and its format. </p>

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<p>Yeah, I agree with @xiggi. If you’re not checking your answers you won’t know why you’re losing points. It’s the most important part.</p>

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<p>xiggi’s advice is spot-on.</p>

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<p>@xiggi That’s really good advice. I have been struggling to raise my CR score as well. I’m stuck in the 670s-690s. Rarely a 700. But according to my previous test results, I have been getting the last few questions wrong for each section. It’s because I run out of time and I rush the last few question. I’ve never really saw it that way, but now I see what I need to work on.</p>

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<p>Thanks to everyone for their replies</p>

<p>@JubilantJerry, I have, for the most part, have "post-mortem"ed the tests that i could. However, there were around 10-15 that I couldn’t find answer explanations for–only the questions and the right answers were given. I have tried to reason by myself why certain answer choices were right or wrong but this led to several questions that I still needed further explanation on. I have looked to my parents for some assistance but English is their second language and although inquiries about these questions have led to some useful discussion, i still remained stumped on many of these questions. Fretful that I may be wasting too much time on just one question (I try to reason with myself or with my parents on a particular question for at least an hour before “giving up”), I simply try to make the best answer explanation I can to myself (not knowing whether its right or wrong) and move on–this may be one of my main problems with just moving past these questions without a firm understanding of the whole thing.</p>

<p>I am all for trying my old practice tests again, but the reason why I have refrained from doing so is because when I have tried this tactic before, I simply remembered the answers to most of the questions (I would always remember the answers to the questions that I had spent much time on) and it felt like I wasn’t making progress. I may give this another go, however.</p>

<p>And I won’t take too much consideration into these practice scores. You are right, these are opportunities for practice and their goal isn’t to demotivate you. I understand that motivation is key.</p>

<p>@xiggi I haven’t really been able to establish a pattern on the mistakes I was making. My incorrect answers seem to be all over the place. Most of them could be inference questions on one test or the big idea questions on the other. The closest thing to a pattern that I have been able to find is that most of the wrong answer choices I have selected in Kaplan’s 12 Practice Tests for the SAT 2014 have been labeled as a “distortion”–I’m not sure if this is going to help.</p>

<p>I have zero problems with the sentence completion part, all my troubles lie in the passages.</p>

<p>I will give your suggestion a try.</p>

<p>With regards to this statement: If you find yourself with many choices of TWO and cannot decide, you might have to work on restating your own questions-- This is a situation that I find myself in most of the time. Is there anyway I can work on restating my own questions?</p>

<p>In conclusion, my main problem seems to be my inability to have a complete understanding of some of the questions I get wrong on the practice tests. Even if there are answer explanations provided, for some of these questions I have trouble accepting some of these answer explanations or simply do not understand them. This leads to further frustration for I am forced to be complacent with my own incomplete answer explanation as I can’t get another explanation that helps me fully apprehend the question and the passage.</p>

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<p>“This is a situation that I find myself in most of the time. Is there anyway I can work on restating my own questions?”</p>

<p>I often come across this situation when both answer choices sound intuitively correct based on the main gist of the paragraph. If almost always the correct answer is among the two that you’re having trouble choosing between, then your intuition is quite good, and that’s great. This choose-between-2 situation means it’s time to get strict.</p>

<p>In my experience, the main killer between the correct and wrong answer is that the answers must be completely supported by the paragraph, with nothing extra. The wrong answer often sounds good enough that you wouldn’t be surprised if the author of the passage indeed thinks in the same way. But the wrong answer might have one piece of information that isn’t inside the passage. Sometimes this is as detailed as one word, like “unique” vs. “special” (the answer choice that mentions “unique” would be wrong in a passage about some remarkable skill that never states “no one else has it”, even if that’s factually true). It’s not always this hard though. </p>

<p>Another case where I have trouble choosing between two choices is something like tone questions. There might be two moods that sound suitable for the author, but sometimes by checking the kinds of verbs or adjectives the passage uses, you might favor one over the other. For things like “the big idea”, the wrong answer is often an idea that is mentioned briefly in the passage, but isn’t what the author really cares about. Almost every paragraph in the passage can be somehow related to the idea that the author cares about. It might help to do them after trying all the questions with specific line citations, so you’d know what each paragraph is about. That depends on you, not everyone takes the test the same way.</p>

<p>I think “distortion” means the answer choice somehow messed up what the passage is trying to say, and stuff like making unsupported inferences, or using the same evidence to conclude something different from the passage, count. An undistorted answer states exactly what the passage is trying to say. Just my opinion.</p>

<p>Lastly, you used official tests from the ‘blue book,’ right? Tests from other books can feel kind of different, even if the average score for people taking either is the same. It’s possible that a made-up unofficial test could have pairs of answer choices that are arguably both correct, and are both completely (or both not completely) supported by the passage. If it’s indeed an official test, then among any two answers that both sound correct, one of them must have a big flaw that no person can appeal against.</p>

<p>Hope this can help you better distinguish the correct answers from the wrong ones!</p>

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<p>“Critical Reading prowess” lmao. You sound like a neeeeeeeerd. NEEEEEEERD!</p>

<p>Yours,</p>

<p>charmander127</p>