So here’s what I’m going through right now.
I’m a sophomore, and per the recommendation of my friends and my SAT tutor, I decided to register for the SAT on May 2nd. My goal is to score at least a 2300; however, I feel that I’m not even close to that goal. Here’s a quick summary of how I’ve been doing:
On the SAT practice test #6 (from the Blue Book) I scored a 2170-2220 (no specific curve).
Math: Definitely the easiest section for me. I usually finish with 7-8 minutes to spare and get them all correct. Easy high 700 to possibly even 800.
On the practice test I scored a 780-800.
Writing: On the multiple choice section I’ll miss a few due to careless error and possibly thinking the sentence has no error. My main area of weakness is probably subject-verb agreement, not because I don’t understand it, but because I try to find some deeper, underlying error in the sentence when in fact it’s just a simple mistake of singular pronoun matched to plural verb.
I haven’t gotten an official score on an SAT essay since 8th grade (the last time I took it), but I expect to score around a 10, as my writing skills have generally improved. But then again I find that my performance largely depends on the prompt…
On the practice test I scored around 710-750.
Critical Reading: Now here’s where my mind turns fuzzy. CR is the section that I put the most effort in, yet it yields the smallest gain. I have yet to miss fewer than 10 questions on any SAT Critical Reading section. Not even a practice test. On vocab I usually miss around 1-3, but on the passage based reading I average around 3-4 wrong per section. I have no clue how people even manage to break 700 on this god forsaken mess of verbose passages, and believe me, I’ve been trying to crack the secret of this section longer than it should take.
On the practice test I scored a 670-680.
Compared to my previous endeavors on the SAT, I’ve come a long way:
7th grade math: 570 (+220 point gain)
7th grade writing: 540 (+170 point gain)
7th grade reading: 560 (+110 point gain)
I know that reading is the hardest section to improve, but my immense fear of doing poorly is pretty much grounded in the fact that CR is too much of a wild card for me. On the 9th and 10th grade PSAT I scored a 59 and 61 respectively, but on my 8th grade SAT I scored a 650. Basically, I feel like in a week I’ll just bomb CR and score as poorly as I did back in my middle school days. The variance in my CR scores is probably affecting my overall performance more than it should.
With that, are there any quick fixes to my approach to CR besides memorizing heaps of vocab? It’s really frustrating to see my other two sections well above the 700 mark, yet the section that seems to be the most intuitive is proving to be the barrier to my goal. Thanks for putting up with my SAT salt rampage, and any advice is gladly welcomed 
EDIT: I do time my practice tests, and I make sure to go back and analyze the problems that I miss.