Hello everyone,
I’m a freshman who’s planning to take the SSAT in about a month. From the tests I have taken from the official SSAT practice tests online, I get perfect scores in math, but normally 25-30 in Reading and Mid 40s for verbal. Last year, I have taken the SSAT (When I was much worse at English) and got 30 for reading, and well…mid 20s for verbal. I’m concerned that I won’t get the best score this year, as my scores aren’t consistently increasing (for reading). Even considering that I’ve been living in an English speaking country for about 3 years (and 2 yrs of living in Korea in between), I don’t think I get safe scores.
Is there a way to dramatically increase my reading score (I score low on Fictions and Social studies), especially these types of questions:
“It can be inferred…”
“The passage answers all these questions except…”
“The author’s attitude”
And words in context.
Also, is the real test more or less difficult than the online practice tests?
I’d really appreciate if you could answer these questions, and thanks for reading this far.
Sincerely,
Randy Lee
I think my kids would say the SSAT online practice (we used the SSAT.org actual online materials, not third party) was a good measure for how hard the real test was.
I am a native english speaker and I thought that the SSAT reading/verbal questions were hard. The fact that they often use the second definition of a word when doing analogies, for instance, seemed crazy to me.
For international students, schools really want to see that you will be able to keep up with classes in English, so you need to appear competant, not outstanding.
Also, have you looked up the list of schools that are test optional this year?
P.S. If Randy Lee is your real name you should stop using it online.
@one1ofeach Thank you for the advice regarding the test. I’ve been using the official test as well as 5 other prep books, and I did find that it does resemble the ssat I took last year. However, this year’s practice tests seemed significantly more difficult. I hope I can manage to get a decent score on the real test.
“Randy” is my nickname which I prefer to be called, but thanks for the precaution. Since I can’t change my name, I’ll delete this account and create a new one (just for safety)
Perhaps @skieurope can assist.
I doubt there’s a magic “do X for a higher score”.
Contrary to popular (CC) belief, taking a test over and over doesn’t automatically yield “consistently increasing” scores. Once you’re comfortable with the test format, scores should cluster around your capability-based score.