Do you have any tips for the SAT Reading Comprehension?

Help for SAT reading!?

• I need a score of 700+, however, I'm only scoring around 600 each practice test, which is abysmal! I can get steady, decent scores in math and writing, but this one section is really starting to hurt my score. Please help me by offering some tips to improving reading comprehension scores; even if it's a specific tip for certain sections, I would greatly appreciate it! I have about a year, more or less, before I take my first SAT in my junior year, so I have a little bit of time. One trend I've noticed is that now and then I get the last 3 sentence-completion questions in a section wrong, which is very detrimental to my score. It's most often because of my vocab, but I can't possibly memorize every single SAT vocab word, and the trap answers get me often! Another concern is that I'm really not certain on how exactly to tackle the big reading passages. Should I read the passage first, then answer the questions? Or answer questions as I read, saving the "The general message of this passage is, etc." questions for last? Any advice here would be greatly appreciated! One last issue is the timing for passage-based reading. I've read that the best way to determine the optimal speed during reading passages is simply by doing many practice tests. Are there any other tips to reading quickly while still being able to analyze the passage well? Thank you very much :}!

• Answer:

  First off you can't think of it as "memorizing" SAT vocab words b/c memorizing is not effective. You need to LEARN those words and incorporate them into your vocabulary naturally. The way to do that is to learn them in context (so don't make flashcards with just the definitions, also include a sentence where you USE the word correctly, and then try to actually USE them in your everyday life) I believe the Princeton Review's list of common SAT words has 250, that's less than one a day if you have a year to go before the test. One trick for sentence completions is to read the question and think of your answer before reading the answer choices, then looking for the word that's closest to the answer you came up with. This will save you time and keep you from falling for "trap" words that look good but don't make sense. As far as the reading passages, DO NOT READ THE WHOLE THING before looking at the questions- that's a terrible use of your time. You don't get points for reading well, you get points for answering the questions- so you'd be spending time reading stuff that might not come up in any of the ?'s! Skim to get an idea, then look in the passage for the answers to the questions. Any good prep book will have vocab and strategies like this. Kaplan or Princeton Review are good. Lots of practice tests too to perfect some of their techniques. Something super useful in those books are charts telling you how many questions you should even be ATTEMPTING based on the score you want. Contrary to most ppl's conventional wisdom, you don't want to answer every question, necessarily, since wrong answers will bring your score down. You can do better answering fewer but getting more right. If you want above a 700 that'd mean leaving only a few blank but still, you should never be rushing to finish a section just to finish it...