<p>i need the tips
ive been stuck in 600~650 area for a few months
im taking june SAT and i need to be over 700
any tips other than reading newspapers and doing vocab?
im desperate for EFFECTIVE tips..</p>
<p>same boat. I guess “The Economist” and the Direct Hits list should suffice.</p>
<p>Have you taken many practice tests (BB)? That’s what helped me the most.</p>
<p>Is the Princeton 2009 book good enough???</p>
<p>Do you mean for practice tests or strategies?</p>
<p>For practice tests, pretty much everything is useless except official CB tests. Taking PR tests may not necessarily hurt you, but it’s not going to help you nearly as much as CB tests will.</p>
<p>For strategies, most people will tell you that PR/Kaplan/Barron’s are worthless; Rocket Review and Grubers (math) get much better reviews. But if PR’s strategies are working for you, then go with it.</p>
<p>yes, ive done whole lot of tests
so i need strategies</p>
<p>How do you approach the passages? Do you read them all at once, or go question by question?</p>
<p>i read until the whereever the first line-directed question refers to then do that problem…
then read on until another line-reference question and continue this then do all the overall passage problems. i often rush at the end cuz i run out of time. i also have to read some sentences several times to fully comprehend. And at times, i don even understand even after reading it several times. so what should i do? btw, i don have problem with sentence completitions…</p>
<p>the thing is… I did the BB twice and I need to change to something else. I doubt the PR is useless!!! I mean come on… its all ive been doing for a long time. Ive been told its good.</p>
<p>My advice is to read books, good ones and lots of them. Don’t try to cheat the test in some odd way, just try to become a better reader and writer! It will pay off bigtime in the long run.</p>
<p>It sounds like you’re problems aren’t so much with strategies but with comprehending the text. Since you have two full months until the test, I would recommend dropping the practice tests for the most part during April and just focus on reading difficult, sophisticated literature (not just newspapers) and then in May start taking practice tests again and see if you’ve improved.</p>
<p>We can deal with strategies after you’re able to comprehend passages quickly, but until then strategies aren’t going to be much help. Like anonymityyy said, being a good reader is ultimately what’s going to get you a good CR score.</p>
<p>I, on the other hand, will be taking the test in may. Its okay, I went out looking for books and I found this place that sells amazing books (SAT 2400 Barron’s) etc. sooo… we’ll see. im also memorizig vocab lists.</p>
<p>Lobzz, if you’re out of BB tests, there are two free tests on the CB website that you should use before you resort to PR.</p>
<p>BTW, I highly recommend the Barron’s 2400 method of dividing up long passages. It helped me a lot.</p>
<p>words.</p>
<p>Take a diagnostic test – you can find a lot of them for free online or you can buy a prep book and time yourself – and then when you check your answers, note which questions you consistently get wrong.</p>
<p>Is it the sentence completions? If it’s the SCs than vocabulary may be your issue. One strategy for SC is to fill in the blank in your head FIRST before looking at the multiple choice. That way, you don’t allow wrong answer choices to lure you away from what you know is right. If you come up with an approximate prediction (and it doesn’t have to be an SAT word; it can be as vague as “bad” or “happy”), it is easier to pick the right word out of a line-up. With lots of practice, you will find yourself predicting the actual SAT word! A lot of my students were amazed at how well this worked and how quickly they were predicting the answer before they even looked at the multiple choices.</p>
<p>If your problem is reading comprehension, this is a bit harder to target. If you are trying to take it in June, simply reading The Economist is not going to help you – you have a month and a half, roughly, to gear up. (I have heard many students suggest this after hearing it from tutors. I personally never suggested that my students read The Economist – I’m not even interested in economics! I’d bore myself to tears. Rather, the suggestion is to read college-level material in which YOU are personally interested, but that will have challenging ideas and vocabulary that gets you used to the SAT AND to college-level reading. Besides, reading The Economist is not a strategy. It is targeted reading of college-level material that helps.)</p>
<p>You need specific strategies. One of the strategies I teach (but don’t personally use, as it doesn’t work for me) is to read the questions before you read the passage, so that you already know what they’re asking and when you come across that question’s answer in the passage, you can mark it with your pencil. If you have a double passage, read the questions for the first one, read that passage, and then answer those questions; do the same thing for the second, and then answer the questions that refer to both passages. That way, details from passage 2 won’t confuse you when you’re answering passage 1.</p>
<p>If reading the passages second doesn’t appeal to you – it didn’t to me, either – take a moment after the passage-reading to summarize (in your head) what the passage was trying to say, the main points, the theme, a potential title. Forget about details – you can always refer back to the passage for the detail questions. Just think about the main themes. When you are reading double-passage problems, think about how the two passages relate to one another as well. Take a short pause between reading the first one and the second one so that you can, you know, breathe.</p>
<p>Also, omissions! You lose no points for omitting questions, and if you cannot eliminate at least two answers on the questions, just skip the question. Skip really hard questions and come back to them later. Easy and hard are worth the same amount of raw points (just one).</p>
<p>To me, as a test prep tutor Kaplan’s book was the easiest one to teach out of, but Barron’s was the best for preparing me.</p>
<p>wow, thanks for the help. To be succint, I miss alot of the SC questions. When it comes to Passages and stuff, I miss about 1-3 questions per section. So yeah, If I can do well on the SC then I think I can break 700… right???</p>
<p>i tend to do the CR section backwards. long passage to sentence completion. i got a 760.
I think it helps to go from a long section that’s hard to get through to short passages and short questions.</p>
<p>Try to take ACT.
My D. even couldn’t break 590 on SAT CR section ( with high 700s for two other sections) and got 36 out of 36 on ACT CR.</p>