Always Getting 10 Wrong in Sat Reading

Of the hundreds of emails that I receive, a large number of them deal with the SAT reading section and what I think is the best way to approach it. I've responded to those emails only in relevant bits and pieces, but I know a lot of y'all crave a more thorough outline of my process. Then finally, here it is.

Learning Vocabulary

"Give me vi hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the commencement 4 sharpening the axe." — Abraham Lincoln

In that location is no bespeak in doing any practice until you've memorized the 400 most frequent appearing SAT words.

Doing this will get you lot the biggest blindside for your buck. Without a strong vocabulary base, you'll just go murdered by the passages and answer choices yous don't sympathize.

Don't buy into the myth that the SAT no longer tests vocabulary. Flip through whatsoever practice test and yous'll see some really tough vocab words, non to mention Old English from the 1800s. The only way to go a adept handle on these passages is to memorize and understand the words comprising them.

And given that I've outlined the most painless way to memorize these words in record time (under a week) in a previous post, in that location's no excuse for not doing this showtime.

Observe Your Untimed Dictionary Score (UDS)

At present before you start practicing, you demand to figure out your untimed lexicon score (UDS).

Hither's how to find it:

1. Observe a practice test yous haven't done before.
2. Do the reading department untimed and with a dictionary app open.
3. Wait upwards the words you don't know in the passages and in the questions.
4. Really attempt to become every question right. Accept as much fourth dimension every bit you want.
5. One time y'all're done, summate your score using the scale for the examination.
6. This score is your untimed dictionary score (UDS).

At present why is your UDS important? Because it represents the score you currently could get if vocabulary and timing weren't an issue. Past factoring out vocabulary and timing, you go a true evaluation of your critical thinking skills. In other words, the gap between an 800 and your UDS reflects your lack of critical thinking skills.

Let's look at some possible scenarios and then yous see what I mean:

• Your UDS is an ~800. This means you lot're fully capable of getting a perfect score every bit long every bit you know the vocabulary and tin can reply the questions fast enough. Well, your priorities are clear— larn vocabulary and do timed practice tests.
• Your UDS is a ~700. This means that knowing all the words is still non enough for you to get a perfect score. You're missing something in your critical thinking and you're losing 100 points because of information technology. Maybe you lot're getting tricked past 2nd-best answer choices or making interpretations that aren't fully backed by the passage.
• Your UDS is a ~600. This means your comprehension and critical thinking skills need a lot of work. To improve, you should go on doing practice tests untimed and with a dictionary to fully dissect the mistakes in your thinking. I'll be outlining the specific steps you lot should take later on in this post.

The gap between your UDS and your actual score reflects your lack of vocabulary and speed. If your UDS is a 750 but your actual score under test conditions is a 600, then you're losing about 150 points due to vocabulary and timing.

The brilliance of the UDS lies in the confidence that a lot of students get when they find out they are in fact capable of a loftier score. Low-scorers who manage to become a high UDS commencement to believe in themselves one time they realize the only thing standing in their mode is vocabulary. They know that timing is easy to improve from at that place.

If you lot're a low-scorer with a high UDS (740+), y'all tin can ignore the rest of this post for now and but focus on building your vocabulary. But if you have a lower UDS (below 740), then read on to learn what yous should do to improve your disquisitional thinking skills.

My Approach to Improving Disquisitional Thinking on the Sabbatum Reading Section

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the style." — Marcus Aurelius

If you take a low UDS, then you need to acquire through exposure what it means to read critically. These next few steps are the long, grueling function, but if you actually follow these guidelines, you lot will start to improve at a ridiculous footstep. This role takes a lot of discipline and patience, only perfect scores don't come up through quick and dirty tricks; they come through difficult work. I improved by 220 points using the method prescribed below.

So The College Board has released 8+ past exams. You're going to take 4 of them and do the reading sections by post-obit these steps:

1. Learning to Read

Do not exercise the entire test or multiple sections at once. Do not time yourself. Take equally long as you need to figure out the passage. This process will look a lot like the one you went through to discover your UDS. As y'all go through each passage, you should be doing the post-obit:

• Read the background description in italics at the start of the passage.
• Underline and expect up any new vocabulary that will aid you lot sympathize the passage. Go along a dictionary app open while y'all're reading. Put those new words into Anki or any other flashcard organization you're using to learn SAT words.
• Reread as many times every bit you need to feel you have a solid grasp of the passage. Don't feel guilty if you zone out or lose your identify. Refocus and reread.
• At the end of the passage, state to yourself what you lot call up the author's master point is. A one word reply similar "dinosaurs" is not a chief point. A main betoken is an stance or argument, something like "The fact that we portray dinosaurs as fearsome creatures undermines our ability to understand their history." If it's a fiction passage, summarize what happens in a judgement or two.

This process may take 20+ minutes for each passage, merely fear not. Hard piece of work pays off even when you think information technology doesn't.

ii. Learning to Eliminate

"At this point, pick no longer liberates, just debilitates." — Barry Schwarz, The Paradox of Option

Once you lot've read and understood the passage, it's fourth dimension to expect at the questions. For each question, ever start past eliminating respond choices, the ones y'all know for sure are incorrect. Even if you spot the right answer immediately, look at the other choices and verbalize why it's wrong every bit you cross them out. DO NOT SKIP THIS PART. By verbalizing your reasoning, you lot'll strength yourself to call back about what characterizes bad answers. The reasons do non have to be complicated. Bad answers will typically:

• Not relate to the passage in any style
• Be related, but still exterior the telescopic of the passage or question
• Be too extreme
• Be true, but not backed up past the passage
• Not reflect the author's intent or master idea

These reasons themselves are a little vague. That'southward on purpose. The whole point of this practice is to get you lot to see the subtle distinctions betwixt good and bad answers and to make those distinctions more than specific for each question you encounter. This only comes through practice.

If you notice that you tin can't come up with a good reason to eliminate something, leave it as a potentially correct answer.

Continue in mind that your goal is Not to find the right answer. Don't even circle annihilation until you've done the crossing out. Your goal is to eliminate as many wrong ones as possible, as confidently as possible. Learning to identify the wrong answers is as important every bit being able to identify the correct answer considering it's those extra options that will make you lot outguess yourself. Once more, this is a skill that improves the more you exercise.

Once you lot've eliminated equally many choices every bit you tin can, but then should you endeavor to figure out the right respond from the leftover options. What you're doing is switching from "elimination" mode to "justification" mode, in which you come up upwards with reasons for why something is right rather than why it's wrong. Yous're training your brain to think in both ways.

Every bit you lot proceed doing more and more passages, you'll naturally get more and more aggressive in eliminating answers. At commencement, y'all might eliminate only one answer selection when you come beyond a tough question, but over time, you'll increase that to two or 3. Through this process, you'll acquire how to narrow down your options extremely rapidly.

Remember: The cardinal to improvement is not so much in finding the correct answers as in finding all the wrong ones.

3. Correction

Once you lot've completed the unabridged section, use the answer sail to star the right answers on each page.

Annotation that this is unlike from putting Ten'south adjacent to each question y'all got wrong. This pace is non about grading yourself. You lot'll exist looking at every question over again, whether y'all got it right or wrong.

4. Reflection (The Virtually Important Step)

"Follow constructive activeness with tranquility reflection. From the repose reflection will come up even more effective action." — Peter Drucker

At present that you've starred the correct answers, information technology's fourth dimension to review each question. How yous practice so depends on the scenario:

• You happen to become the right respond, but among several answer choices that yous couldn't eliminate. In other words, you got the question right merely you were unsure of yourself. Y'all had to choose between ii-3 "shut" answers or maybe you just lucked out. These questions are extremely important to review. Now's the time to look back at why those "shut" answers were in fact wrong and why the answer you picked turned out to exist right. Doing this exercise makes you aware of gaps in your disquisitional thinking and logic. Trust me. You will learn to think in the correct way for how the test is designed.
• You didn't become the correct answer but y'all also didn't eliminate it. This is the same scenario as the previous one, merely you got unlucky. Reflect on the divergence between your answer and the right one. What makes your respond wrong and the right 1 correct?
• You eliminated the correct answer. This is the worst instance and indicates some grade of misinterpretation on your office. Reflect on why you thought it was wrong and why it'southward actually correct in the context of the passage.
• You got the right reply, and y'all were able to eliminate all the other choices in getting in that location. This is the best case scenario—yous understood why the correct respond was correct and why all the wrong answers were wrong. You should not spend whatsoever time reviewing these questions.

It's important that you come out of these review sessions with concrete, specific reflections on what went wrong for each question. A tutor can assist during this phase.

Make sure y'all give yourself enough time to truly understand your mistakes. If you're scoring beneath a 650, y'all should be spending at to the lowest degree 20 minutes in this reflection step for each reading section that you do.

5. Ramping Up

After yous've repeated the steps above for four practice exams (4 reading sections), information technology'due south time to put your skills to the test. By now, y'all should have quite a few Saturday words under your belt and you should feel much more than comfortable with the passages.

For the remaining practice exams you have, you're all the same going to take the sections one at a time, but y'all're going to practise them timed. Exact same procedure. No dictionary.

The timing may throw yous off at commencement. That'south ok. Practice going faster.

If you nonetheless experience like a fish out of water on these sections, become back to taking the sections untimed with a lexicon. Your vocabulary and reading skills however aren't strong plenty however, but that'due south ok. The time it takes for things to click is different for everyone. Keep memorizing words and practicing.

The Finish Line

You should exist keeping upwardly with your vocabulary flashcards quite frequently, learning new words as they come.

By the end of this unabridged process, yous should have washed the reading sections of:

• All viii exams officially released by the College Lath
• The April 2022 School Day SAT test (basically another practice test)
• The 2 PSATs released by The College Board
• Khanacademy or the Official Saturday Daily Practice App (for additional practise)

You can find the resources higher up on the resource folio or through a google search.

A Method for the Madness

"The person who says information technology cannot exist washed should not interrupt the person who is doing information technology." — Chinese Saying

This method works. Information technology worked for me and countless other students who had the field of study to stick with it. Over the years, I've seen and experimented with approaches that say underline this or summarize that, and what I've found is that those approaches piece of work for some students and not others. I've fifty-fifty come across people who claim vocabulary is unnecessary and a waste of time. Really? Well, let's put that to the test. Endeavor reading this Ralph Waldo Emerson essay which showed up on a previous examination and ask yourself if it's truly possible to empathize information technology without a good vocabulary.

If yous've establish something that works for y'all, by all means run with information technology. But yous know what approach has e'er worked?

Knowing exactly what to do and how to exercise information technology.

If you know what all the words mean instead of trying to guess, if you take the fourth dimension to sympathise the passage instead of trying to skim, if y'all larn to distinguish between bad answers and expert ones instead of playing games in your head, y'all will be unstoppable. But this conviction is only something you get by DOING.

Getting an 800 is not as hard as we recall. We often seek complex explanations for complex feats. "It tin can't exist that simple," we say. But it is, if simply we stick to the proven framework. Seeking alternatives is one manner we distract ourselves from the hard work. Information technology's easier to read about how to do something than it is to actually go out and exercise it. If there were truthful shortcuts to an 800, anybody would get a perfect score. It's my firm conventionalities that loftier scorers are fabricated, not born. The Sat isn't an IQ test. There are merely besides many examples of students who started out with a ~1180 and worked their way upward to a ~1560 for me to always believe otherwise.

Consider this your kick in the ass. It's time to get busy.

FAQ

1. Should I read the passage commencement or jump to the questions?

If you lot're following the method above, you volition read the passage first. If you're doing well by jumping direct to the questions, you lot're probably a solid reader already and y'all're succeeding despite your strategy, not considering of information technology.

2. This seems to be a long-term plan. What if my examination is in 2 weeks?

That'due south right. I believe in a long-term approach. If your exam is in 2 weeks, then this unabridged postal service is irrelevant. In this case, you might need to resort to tactics like jumping straight to the questions for passages you don't actually understand. Anyhow, a brusque-term approach is beyond the scope of this postal service, and then I won't get into it here. My best advice would just be to practice as much as you can.

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