How to Ace the Reading Section of the Sat

Of the hundreds of emails that I receive, a large number of them deal with the SAT reading department and what I think is the all-time way to arroyo it. I've responded to those emails only in relevant bits and pieces, but I know a lot of yous crave a more than thorough outline of my process. So finally, hither it is.

Learning Vocabulary

"Requite me six hours to chop downwardly a tree and I volition spend the first iv sharpening the axe." — Abraham Lincoln

There is no point in doing whatsoever practice until you've memorized the 400 most frequent appearing Sat words.

Doing this volition get you the biggest bang for your cadet. Without a stiff vocabulary base of operations, you'll simply go murdered by the passages and reply choices you don't sympathize.

Don't buy into the myth that the SAT no longer tests vocabulary. Flip through whatsoever practice test and you lot'll come across some really tough vocab words, not to mention One-time English from the 1800s. The only way to get a skillful 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 fourth dimension (under a week) in a previous post, there'southward no alibi for not doing this first.

Find Your Untimed Dictionary Score (UDS)

Now before yous offset practicing, you need to effigy out your untimed lexicon score (UDS).

Hither'southward how to find it:

1. Find a practice exam you oasis't done before.
2. Exercise the reading section 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 get every question right. Take equally much time every bit you lot want.
5. One time you're done, calculate your score using the scale for the exam.
6. This score is your untimed lexicon score (UDS).

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

Allow'southward look at some possible scenarios so you see what I mean:

• Your UDS is an ~800. This means y'all're fully capable of getting a perfect score equally long as you lot know the vocabulary and tin can answer 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 not plenty 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. Peradventure you're getting tricked by second-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 meliorate, y'all should continue doing exercise tests untimed and with a lexicon to fully dissect the mistakes in your thinking. I'll be outlining the specific steps yous should take later on in this post.

The gap betwixt your UDS and your actual score reflects your lack of vocabulary and speed. If your UDS is a 750 but your actual score nether exam conditions is a 600, and then yous'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 detect out they are in fact capable of a high score. Low-scorers who manage to get a loftier UDS start to believe in themselves once they realize the merely thing continuing in their way is vocabulary. They know that timing is easy to meliorate from there.

If you're a depression-scorer with a high UDS (740+), you can ignore the rest of this post for now and just focus on building your vocabulary. Only if yous take a lower UDS (below 740), then read on to acquire what you should do to meliorate your critical thinking skills.

My Approach to Improving Disquisitional Thinking on the SAT Reading Section

"The impediment to activeness advances activity. What stands in the way becomes the way." — Marcus Aurelius

If yous have a low UDS, and then you lot need to learn through exposure what it means to read critically. These adjacent few steps are the long, grueling part, but if you really follow these guidelines, you volition start to improve at a ridiculous pace. This part takes a lot of discipline and patience, but perfect scores don't come through quick and dirty tricks; they come through hard piece of work. I improved past 220 points using the method prescribed below.

Then The College Board has released 8+ past exams. Yous're going to take 4 of them and practise the reading sections past following these steps:

one. Learning to Read

Do non do the entire exam or multiple sections at once. Do not fourth dimension yourself. Take as long as you lot need to effigy out the passage. This process will await a lot like the one you went through to notice your UDS. As you get through each passage, you should exist doing the post-obit:

• Read the background description in italics at the start of the passage.
• Underline and wait up any new vocabulary that volition help you understand the passage. Proceed a dictionary app open while y'all're reading. Put those new words into Anki or any other flashcard system you're using to learn Sat words.
• Reread as many times equally you need to feel you lot accept a solid grasp of the passage. Don't experience guilty if you lot zone out or lose your place. Refocus and reread.
• At the cease of the passage, state to yourself what you think the author'south main bespeak is. A one word answer like "dinosaurs" is not a main point. A chief point is an opinion or statement, something like "The fact that we portray dinosaurs every bit fearsome creatures undermines our ability to understand their history." If it's a fiction passage, summarize what happens in a judgement or two.

This procedure may accept 20+ minutes for each passage, but fear non. Hard work pays off even when you think it doesn't.

2. Learning to Eliminate

"At this point, selection no longer liberates, but debilitates." — Barry Schwarz, The Paradox of Choice

Once you've read and understood the passage, it's fourth dimension to look at the questions. For each question, always start by eliminating answer choices, the ones y'all know for certain are incorrect. Even if yous spot the correct respond immediately, look at the other choices and verbalize why it'due south wrong as you cantankerous them out. DO Non SKIP THIS Part. Past verbalizing your reasoning, you'll strength yourself to remember about what characterizes bad answers. The reasons practise not take to be complicated. Bad answers will typically:

• Not relate to the passage in whatsoever way
• Be related, but still outside the scope of the passage or question
• Be too extreme
• Exist true, but not backed upward by the passage
• Not reflect the author's intent or main idea

These reasons themselves are a little vague. That'southward on purpose. The whole indicate of this exercise is to get yous to run into the subtle distinctions between proficient and bad answers and to make those distinctions more specific for each question you run into. This just comes through practice.

If y'all find that yous can't come upwardly with a good reason to eliminate something, leave it as a potentially correct answer.

Go on in mind that your goal is Not to discover the right answer. Don't even circumvolve anything until y'all've done the crossing out. Your goal is to eliminate as many incorrect ones as possible, as confidently equally possible. Learning to place the wrong answers is equally important as being able to identify the correct answer because information technology's those extra options that will make you outguess yourself. Once again, this is a skill that improves the more than you lot practice.

Once you lot've eliminated as many choices as you tin can, only then should y'all try to figure out the correct reply from the leftover options. What y'all're doing is switching from "emptying" mode to "justification" mode, in which you come up with reasons for why something is correct rather than why it's wrong. You're training your encephalon to retrieve in both ways.

As you proceed doing more than and more than passages, yous'll naturally get more and more ambitious in eliminating answers. At first, you might eliminate only one answer choice when you come across a tough question, but over time, you'll increase that to two or three. Through this process, you'll learn how to narrow down your options extremely quickly.

Call up: The key to improvement is non so much in finding the right answers as in finding all the wrong ones.

3. Correction

Once you've completed the entire section, utilise the answer canvass to star the right answers on each page.

Annotation that this is different from putting Ten'southward next to each question you got wrong. This step is non about grading yourself. You'll be looking at every question again, whether you got it correct or incorrect.

four. Reflection (The Most Important Step)

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

Now that you've starred the right answers, it'southward time to review each question. How you do so depends on the scenario:

• Yous happen to get the right reply, just among several answer choices that yous couldn't eliminate. In other words, yous got the question right but you were unsure of yourself. You had to choose between two-3 "close" answers or possibly you just lucked out. These questions are extremely of import to review. At present's the time to wait back at why those "close" answers were in fact wrong and why the answer you picked turned out to be right. Doing this exercise makes you enlightened of gaps in your critical thinking and logic. Trust me. Yous volition acquire to retrieve in the right mode for how the test is designed.
• You didn't go the correct respond but yous besides didn't eliminate it. This is the aforementioned scenario as the previous one, but you got unlucky. Reflect on the difference between your answer and the correct ane. What makes your answer wrong and the correct 1 right?
• You eliminated the correct answer. This is the worst case and indicates some course of misinterpretation on your part. Reflect on why you thought it was wrong and why it's actually right in the context of the passage.
• You got the right answer, and yous were able to eliminate all the other choices in getting at that place. This is the best example scenario—you understood why the right respond was right and why all the wrong answers were wrong. You should not spend any 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 help during this phase.

Make sure you give yourself enough time to truly empathize your mistakes. If yous're scoring below a 650, you should be spending at least 20 minutes in this reflection step for each reading department that yous do.

5. Ramping Upwards

Afterwards y'all've repeated the steps higher up for four practice exams (4 reading sections), information technology'south time to put your skills to the test. Past at present, y'all should accept quite a few Sabbatum words nether your belt and you lot should feel much more comfortable with the passages.

For the remaining practice exams you have, you lot're even so going to have the sections one at a time, merely you're going to practice them timed. Verbal same procedure. No dictionary.

The timing may throw you off at first. That's ok. Practice going faster.

If y'all still feel like a fish out of water on these sections, go dorsum to taking the sections untimed with a dictionary. Your vocabulary and reading skills still aren't strong enough yet, but that'south ok. The fourth dimension it takes for things to click is dissimilar for everyone. Continue memorizing words and practicing.

The Finish Line

Yous should be keeping upward with your vocabulary flashcards quite frequently, learning new words every bit they come up.

By the end of this entire procedure, you should have washed the reading sections of:

• All 8 exams officially released by the College Board
• The April 2017 School Twenty-four hour period SAT test (basically another practice test)
• The ii PSATs released by The College Lath
• Khanacademy or the Official SAT Daily Practice App (for boosted practice)

You tin can detect the resources to a higher place on the resources page or through a google search.

A Method for the Madness

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it." — Chinese Proverb

This method works. It worked for me and countless other students who had the bailiwick 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 even come across people who claim vocabulary is unnecessary and a waste of time. Really? Well, permit'southward put that to the test. Try reading this Ralph Waldo Emerson essay which showed up on a previous exam and enquire yourself if it's truly possible to understand it without a skilful vocabulary.

If you lot've establish something that works for you, past all means run with it. But y'all know what approach has always worked?

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

If you know what all the words mean instead of trying to guess, if you take the fourth dimension to understand the passage instead of trying to skim, if you learn to distinguish between bad answers and good ones instead of playing games in your head, you will exist unstoppable. But this confidence is only something you get by DOING.

Getting an 800 is non as hard as nosotros call back. We often seek circuitous explanations for complex feats. "It can't be that uncomplicated," nosotros say. But it is, if only we stick to the proven framework. Seeking alternatives is one mode we distract ourselves from the hard piece of work. It's easier to read about how to do something than it is to actually leave and practice it. If there were truthful shortcuts to an 800, everyone would get a perfect score. It's my firm belief that loftier scorers are made, not born. The SAT isn't an IQ exam. There are just too many examples of students who started out with a ~1180 and worked their way up to a ~1560 for me to e'er believe otherwise.

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

FAQ

1. Should I read the passage first or spring to the questions?

If you lot're following the method to a higher place, you lot will read the passage beginning. If you're doing well by jumping straight to the questions, you're probably a solid reader already and you're succeeding despite your strategy, non considering of it.

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

That'due south right. I believe in a long-term approach. If your test is in 2 weeks, so this entire post is irrelevant. In this case, you might need to resort to tactics similar jumping straight to the questions for passages you lot don't really understand. Anyway, a curt-term arroyo is beyond the scope of this post, so I won't get into it here. My best advice would only be to practise every bit much as you lot can.

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Source: https://thecollegepanda.com/get-800-sat-reading/

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