<p>Hi I'm a junior. I'm taking my first SAT ever in May but I plan to retake it during senior year more times so feel free to include long term study tips.</p>
<p>I have not studied at all for the SAT. I just took my first SAT practice test today to have a baseline for improvement and got a 1270/1860. R 640 M 630 W 590, assuming I'd get an 8 on the essay. Once I review all the questions on the test what should i do? </p>
<p>I own the blue book and barrons 2400, I'm guessing read through the blue book then the barrons book and take another test?</p>
<p>It is far better to understand how words are constructed in the English language. If you understand how words are constructed, you’ll be able to figure out the meaning of many words without ever having seen them before.</p>
<p>There are usually only a handful of vocab questions, which each test only a handful of words. You only need to know or guess the meaning of some of these words to correctly answer the questions.</p>
<p>Memorizing long lists of words is time-consuming, and odds are you might not even remember them come test day. Since only a few of those will be used - and since the words on the test might not even be on your list - it’s wasteful to memorize hundreds of words, and useless to memorize any less than that.</p>
<p>Bottom line: Don’t memorize words. Get a feel for how they’re constructed and guess your way through the vocab questions. It helps to be fairly well-read.</p>
<p>I studied a grand total of 0 vocabulary words and didn’t miss a single Writing multiple choice question.</p>
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<p>As for actual preparation strategies:</p>
<p>The biggest thing to do is to take lots and lots of practice tests and identify the types of questions you miss most often, then focus on the skills for those types of questions.</p>
<p>im not big on memorizing lots of vocab. I don’t see a huge improvement just yet. But I think studying direct hits is the best route to take. I have gotten the first volume and find it really useful, plus its not that much of a pain to remember the words since they make it so easy to remember</p>
<p>Well it only took me 3 weeks to memorize direct hits and a few more to know them almost instantly, so it wasn’t really time consuming for me. And vocab is in the critical reading section not writing O.o</p>
<p>Your scores aren’t low enough that I would suggest memorizing vocab. If you have the time and patience this summer, maybe that’s the route for you. But I find that recognizing patterns within the sentence helps me. Sometimes you can tell if a blank should be a + or - sounding word or you can use indicators such as “although or but” to decide if a word pair should be synonyms or antonyms. little things like that tend to help raise ones score. Personally it’s very hard for me to sit and memorize vocab because you may not recognize it on the test day when it is put into random context. the sentences can throw you off sometimes!</p>