I am a rising senior and I will be taking the SAT next October. I got a 1960 (650 CR, 710 MR, 600 WS, 6 Essay) the first time I took the test. Any suggestions on how I should prepare over the next two months? I want to get my score up to a 2250, which will be tough, but I am hopeful that I can do it. I am studying tactics from the Barron’s, PR and Collegeboard blue book. I also have the Gruber’s complete guide. Would you suggest that I go through the math portions of Gruber’s?
I am also learning wordlists and roots of words. Do these really help? Any advice on writing the essay will also be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
It will definitely be tough to raise your score by ~300 points in 2 months, but it can be done. As far as advice goes, I’ll repeat what everyone else always says: practice tests, practice tests, practice tests, and more practice tests. I’m sure you’ve been doing this already, but just keep doing 1 or 2 practice tests a week, and a few sections everyday between those. Don’t just do 5 practice tests back to back; it doesn’t help. Understand what you got wrong after a practice test, the work that entire week to improve your mistakes. Then next week do another practice test, and repeat the process.
It seems like you missed 3-5 questions in math (idk if you took the June one or not)… the math on the SAT is very very easy, it’s just the small things that can trip you up and cost you 30 points per. READ CAREFULLY, ESPECIALLY ON THE LAST FEW QUESTIONS OF EACH MATH SECTION. Everything you need will be in the books that you mentioned in your post. It is rather easy to improve a 600 on writing, though much harder to improve your essay score (since I don’t think you have access to an SAT grader). Focus on those verb tense subject agreements, spot out ambiguity in the phrases, and all of that good stuff. For critical reading, if you’re missing several of the sentence completion questions, then you are going to have to put in a TON of work to improve your score. The problem is with studying roots and vocab lists (I recommend Direct Hits) is that there are just so many possible difficult words that can appear on the SAT. Because you only have two months, I don’t know how much studying those lists will help, but the roots might. Speaking from personal experience, I barely studied any vocab/roots and I didn’t miss any sentence completions the two times I took the SAT, so I can’t say much more about whether or not you should study from a vocab list. If you’re having trouble with the passages, just make sure you remember that everything you need to answer the question will be IN THE PASSAGE. Don’t go assuming things, spot out answer choices that are too extreme or seemingly unrelated to the passage. As for the essay, use at least 2 examples per body paragraph, and develop them well. These examples should have either historical significance or be from books you’ve read. Switch up the your syntax and diction, the SAT graders love variety (throw in a semicolon or a dash here and there). Avoid personal examples unless you have a REALLY good one.