<p>Im a rising senior and I desparately want to stop taking the SAT so that I can focus on other things. I got a 650 CR on the Jan. SAT and Im hoping to improve to around 750 CR. Lately, Ive been going untimed on the CR sections and I find that I am very accurate (for example, I got 30/31 in short CR section on page 80 or so in the BB2). The problem is that when it comes to taking the CR section timed, I feel that I am too rushed and I can't complete about three or four passage based questions. Does any1 have advice on how I can improve on timing.</p>
<p>Jan. SAT CR breakdown
Passage Based questions:
43 right 5 wrong
Sentence Completions:
13 right 6 wrong</p>
<p><em>Im not really worried about Sentence completions because I usually dont miss more than 3 and I also have both volumes of DH</em></p>
<p>How many minutes do you spend per section on SC? I gained a lot of extra passage time by cutting the time I spent on SC down to three minutes or so. Of course, if you don’t know all the vocab, it’s harder.</p>
<p>Since you are missing more sentence completion than passage questions, you should brush up on your vocab. Those are the easiest points to gain. In all honesty, you don’t even need a great vocabulary (or a great vocab book for that matter) to get most of the questions right.</p>
<p>As for advice pertaining ONLY to PBQs and not CR as a whole…I would have to say the only real way to improve speed is to do practice. It doesn’t matter which method you use (It seems like the method you are using right now is fine in terms of getting the job done). Just keep practicing with time. Maybe start at 30 minutes, then work your way down to 23-24 minutes. It will come with practice. However, if it is the method that you are using that is slowing you down, then that might be a little more of an issue. </p>
<p>If it makes you feel any better, I used to be really slow at passages, but now I’ve worked my way to usually being able to complete the sections within 23 minutes. In fact, I omitted about 6 questions on the last PSAT (ouch!).</p>
<p>Perhaps your strategy isn’t the one that fits you the best. I had problem with timing too. Well, my problem was that my skimming wasn’t very good so I often had to re-read some parts of the passage again for harder questions (Inference, whether one author would agree/disagree to each other and etc…)</p>
<p>Have you gone through Barron’s 2400? They have 2-3 strategies for passage-based reading. You should go through lots of prep books just to look at the long-reading strategies. What I did was go to one of the big bookstores and just start going through all the books as if pretending to look through for quality. (not local stores… you may be warned publically and get really embarrassed – Reference: A friend’s experience in which I was present… and laughed xD) </p>
<p>Or…</p>
<p>I solved questions from Barron’s books coz they are way harder than the real test. Yeah I know… People say they are unreliable because you can lose the feeling for the real test and panic on the test day. Has happened to me in writing after doing tests from PR 11 practice tests. But after solving Barron’s books (in my case the critical reading workbook) I got a lot faster. Now I can finish all questions with the same accuracy. But be aware that this does have some risk.</p>
<p>The one thing NOT to do is to try to read the passages faster than your normal reading rate. It may seem like a way to reduce your time, but you will miss important information and end up wasting time hunting back through the passage to answer the questions. If you read the passage thoroughly the first time around, you’ll more than make up for it as you answer the questions. Read briskly, but don’t rush yourself in an attempt to save time.</p>
<p>Another possibility is to limit yourself to 20 minutes per section and force yourself to answer every question. When you go back to 25 minutes, it will feel like you have a lot of time.</p>