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8 Essential Tips to Boost your SAT Reading and SAT Writing Scores During the Summer

test taking hand-250x300Okay, so it’s summer – and many of you have just scrubbed off the last of the school year in the shower.  We know all you want right now is to be out in the park with friends – we want that too!  But we also know that October is right around the corner, and for many of you, that means the next SAT.  And we know that the verbal sections of the SAT (particularly the reading comprehension, simply because the answers are necessarily more equivocal) are often the most difficult to study for in a short period of time.  So to ensure you don’t find yourself at the beginning of the next school year, juggling all your new classes while simultaneously cramming for the SAT, we’ve compiled a few suggestions for the summer, so that you can begin studying with plenty of time to spare.  If you can set aside just two or three hours a week to study, you’ll be well ahead of the game.  Here are our top suggestions:

 

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Average SAT Scores for the Class of 2012 Remains Steady

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More than 1.66 million students took the SAT in 2012, the largest group to have taken the test, and according to the College Board, the most diverse as 45 percent of test takers were minority students. This year’s scores averages are virtually unchanged from previous years.

Average SAT scores for the class of 2012 in critical reading and writing each decreased by one point; the average scores for math, however, remained steady. Read More »Average SAT Scores for the Class of 2012 Remains Steady

5 Ways to Learn SAT Vocabulary with (Apparently) Little Effort

My experience with helping students study for the SAT is that vocabulary tends to fall by the wayside. Students generally come to me needing verbal help because they’re worried about comprehension in the Critical Reading sections or because they think their grammar skills aren’t up to par. But consider this: there are three Critical Reading sections on every SAT exam, two of which begin with five or six questions that are specifically vocabulary-based (these are known as “sentence completion” questions), and one of which begins with eight. In addition, each of these Critical Reading sections contains at least 2-3 questions that require you understand the vocabulary involved: the College Board will either ask you about a word as it appears in context (“In line 34, the word “cloudy” most likely means: a) muddy b) overcast c) nebulous d) lackluster”), or it will present you with answer options that contain some demanding words (“The author of passage 1 would most likely assert that the position of the theorist in line 19 is: a) atypical b) perspicacious c) haughty d) unpretentious”).

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8 Helpful Hints for the SAT Essay

The SAT essay is – for good reason – always one of my students’ hugest concerns. I say “for good reason” on a number of grounds. In the first place, students sit down to the SAT writing section after years of high school English classes that have instilled in them the process and practice of writing a meticulously organized exposition – one that takes multiple drafts, demands countless hours of editing, and occasionally requires a sleepless night or two. Suddenly they are faced with a 25-minute window in which their first instinct is to squeeze that whole working-and-reworking process into a significantly shorter period of time. Of course, this isn’t humanly possible – nor will it be expected of you. In the second place, the essay is the only section of the SAT that is scored – let’s admit it – subjectively. Read More »8 Helpful Hints for the SAT Essay