<p>I'm stuck in the High 500's low 600s range.</p>
<p>I've read 4 SAT books tips on the Critical Reading sections.
My issues isn't vocabulary as much as it is the Reading sections.</p>
<p>For sentence completions I've gathered:</p>
<p>Thinking of a word first, finding context clues, assigning positive or negative values, and saying the sentence to yourself.</p>
<p>For Passage based reading I've got:</p>
<p>Underline, respond to the passage with symbols or side comments.</p>
<p>There were several various suggestions for CR like read the questions first, don't read the questions first, read the passage in parts, etc. that weren't consistent with each other.</p>
<p>Does anyone have some amazing, crazy improvement tips for the CR section?
Something new and innovative? haha. </p>
<p>What broke the barrier for you from 600s to 700s?</p>
<p>For those already in the 700s, what is your approach to the passages?</p>
<p>Or is the Critical Reading section really all about practice?</p>
<p>Black roses, I think the CR section really is all about practice. In addition to doing practice passages, read articles every day and I mean EVERY day. While you’re reading them, try and read them faster every time, but at the same time try and maintain comprehension as if you were reading them slower. At first, I really had to try very hard to concentrate and try to grasp all of the details/concepts while reading, but after a while it becomes easier. Ever since I’ve been doing this along with CR practices everyday, I’ve been improving my CR scores a lot. Right now I usually miss anywhere from 0 to 4 questions on the passage based reading compared to the 8-9 I used to miss. With a little more fine tuning, I think I can work my way to a higher score.</p>
<p>Remember, the more you read, the better your speed and comprehension will be.</p>
<p>I think the CR section IS all about practice not in that reading anything and everything equals a higher CR score, but in that once you do enough of them, you get to know the type of questions they ask, and the type of answers they like to put on the test.</p>
<p>Read good book and think about their meaning.</p>
<p>Practice sections is what will do it.</p>
<p>Reading for the sake of improving your CR score probably won’t work unless you’re really interested in the material.</p>
<p>I think for CR, something will suddenly “click” with you. After doing enough sections the answers will just pop out at you.</p>
<p>The critical reading section is what the name implies: it has a lot to do with being able to analyze readings for their meaning as well as have a decent grasp of vocabulary, two things which can be done in two ways. The first way is intense studying, memorizing a bajillion vocab words and do reading passages from every CR prep book in existence. The other way is just to read a lot and have exposure to readings. </p>
<p>Jamesford is right; after a while, the answers will start to pop out at you. I highly suggest subscribing to some magazine like Time or Newsweek, reading the articles, then thinking about what the articles mean. Other helpful things to do for critical reading are to memorize Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes (hey, it’s a lot less than a 3k list of vocabulary words) and to read everything that hits you. Try and figure out how to be interested in what you read too.</p>