Hi, I took the PSAT my freshman and sophomore years, and I am aiming to be a NMSF as a junior. My scores as a freshman were Math: 80, Reading: 60, Writing: 62, and a total of 202. This year (my sophomore year) I got these: Math: 76, Reading: 63, Writing: 68, for a total of 207. I’m from Tennessee, so I’m not sure if I can get around a 212 by next year. I posted something like this last year, and people gave me advice to read more to improve my English and Writing scores, which I did and my scores improved. I missed a question on the math section because of something stupid, so hopefully I can get an 80 on that next year, but I will still need to further pull up my English or Writing scores to get a 212. If you guys have any advice on how to improve my scores enough to be semifinalist, or if you think I should or shouldn’t be able to improve that much by next year, that would be great.
I got a 78 in PSAT Writing, so I’ll try to give you some tips there. Learn the grammar rules cold, don’t just go off what “sounds” right. Look for “either/or” and “neither/nor” errors. Either goes with or and neither goes with nor. So, if you have a sentence that says, “Neither the boy sledding down the hill or the distracted mother saw the speeding car,” you know that that the “or” is wrong - it should be “nor.”
Also, do you know about prepositional phrases? It can help to cross them out because it helps you see the vital parts of the sentence, i.e., the nouns/pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and direct objects. Know the proper forms for adverbs and adjectives, for instance, a man does not walk slow, he walks slowly.
The Writing portion of the PSAT really tests the grammar you know.
The only real tip I can give you on the Critical Reading is that the answers really are in the text, thought it may not seems so at first glance. I got a 69 on the PSAT CR and a 700 on the SAT CR as I am not good at vocabulary.
A 207 to 212 is not an impossible jump by any means. You math is great, just practice that to keep yourself sharp. I could never score that well on math. I got a 211 in my Junior year, never took it in freshman or sophomore years, but I took practice tests in the 2 weeks prior to the exam. My state’s cutoff is 210, and I knew I would either barely make it or barely miss it judging by my practice scores. Luckily, I made it.
Was the math question you missed the one with the Chinese speakers?
@mac423
Nope, it was the one with the 2 absolute values asking what were the possible values for abs(B-C)