<p>I'm tutoring a sophomore for the SAT (she is planning to take it as a junior), and I was just wondering if any of you might have some advice about how to go about doing this. When I studied for the SAT, I mostly just did practice sections and went over what I got wrong, but I don't think she's paying me to watch her do practice sections and read the book's answer explanations out loud.</p>
<p>I'm going to be tutoring her for two weeks, five days per week, two hours per day, kind of like an SAT intensive winter camp. We're using her older sister's Barron's book. I'd like to borrow the College Board book from the library or something, but I'm not sure if it's necessary considering it's only two weeks.</p>
<p>She's smart (goes to the regional magnet school, 190-something on PSAT), her problem section is critical reading, and she wants to work on writing, too. The thing with critical reading is that my score in it went up automatically when I studied for the SAT Literature, and I was always a stickler for grammar. Since I didn't study for these much, I'm not sure how to help besides giving bits of advice/tips and forcing her to do lots of practice sections. :p Which won't fill 20 hours!</p>
<p>So, if any of you have experience with this, please help! :)</p>
<p>I’d do two practice tests, with the answers in front of her making sure she knows how to do every problem. Make notes of everything she got wrong and after the two tests teach her all the topics she got wrong. Then after that have her take a practice test, no time limits, without the answers. Carefully go over them, and teach her about everything that she got wrong. Finally, I would hae her take a real official practice test under timed conditions. Go over the ones she got wrong.</p>
<p>You figure that they will take about two weeks, and on the last day give her some vocab lists to study from to do well on the SAT (rocket review, majortests, etc).</p>
<p>I’ve done tutoring before with some decent success, with score increases from 50-290. I recommend first doing a test with her, helping guide her and taking notes on what she is having difficulty with. You can then focus on these topics. When she is having trouble with a question, go over it with her and “think out loud”; presumably, you did well on the SAT, so your method of thinking over the problem is likely to be effective.</p>
<p>I’d then go invest in Kaplan SAT flashcards, or have her do it or something. Or make some yourself. Basically, the Kaplan SAT flashcards cover a lot of the basic vocabulary you need for at least a decent score on the CR, and also have neat sentences with errors (or no errors) in them, without any underlining, to help recognize sentence and grammatical errors. You can make them yourself, but the Kaplan ones are convenient.</p>
<p>If her vocab is already strong, then you’d be advised to make your own by quizzing her from a book and putting all the ones she doesn’t know into flashcards. Do your best to help her memorize, whether it be through mnemonics or however you do it. </p>
<p>You should also advise her on stuff like getting a good night’s sleep, eating a nutritious breakfast, maybe getting some caffeine via coffee, etc.</p>
<p>I think it’s helpful to create a sort of formula for answering questions (not on how to eliminate answers, because that’s just time-consuming, but on how to approach certain kinds of problems). For the second week, you’d probably want to focus on taking practice tests and reviewing, finding solutions to the things she got wrong.</p>
<p>CR is tough to tutor, Vocab flashcards are helpful learning words but it’s those are a crapshoot because there are a lot of obscure words out there… Some of the techniques that I used in the passages were to summarize each paragraph into one short sentence or less (which I did in the exam itself). That proved very helpful in everything except for fiction.</p>
<p>On CR, I read through all the questions for a passage first, looking for specific lines - like “what is the purpose of the author mentioning blah blah blah (lines 22-24)?” I would draw brackets around those lines with the word “purpose” written next to it. I did that for all the questions, and then went back to read through the passage, paying special attention to the brackets. It helps!</p>
<p>Thanks, guys! 
I appreciate your well thought-out responses.</p>