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Are you a high scorer on the SAT? If you already have a 2000 or above, the below tips will help you bump up your mark even more.

Critical Reading

To score better on sentence completion questions, you simply need to put your nose to the grindstone and memorize SAT vocab. Studying etymology, or the prefixes, suffixes, and roots of words, will enhance your ability to decipher unfamiliar vocabulary.

Reading comprehension passages on the SAT can be divided into four types: humanities, social science, science, and literature. Most students can cope with the humanities and social sciences passages; it’s the science and literature passages, especially the long ones, that tend to trip up test-takers.  Figure out which passage types you are weaker in, and focus your test prep on those!

Particularly for the science passages, don’t be intimidated by the looooong words or technical jargon. You probably don’t need to understand their exact meanings to answer the questions correctly.

When working on the narrative, or literature, passages, pay attention to character development and why people do what they do.

If reading speed is an issue, concentrate your efforts on the first third or fourth of the passage, and read at least the first sentence of each subsequent paragraph.

The good news is that the most difficult passages are paired with easier questions. Keep your focus on the big picture, that is, on the main ideas of the passage when reading. Remember that you can always go back to the passage if presented with tougher specific questions.

Writing

Many SAT students feel that reading comprehension is the toughest section of the SAT on which to improve. Acing the multiple-choice part of the writing section, however, is very possible with concentrated study. Like you can memorize formulas, rules, and tricks to score well in math, you can learn grammar rules and idioms to beat the writing section!

Brush up on these specific grammar topics:

Tenses – especially subjective mood and the differences between present perfect, past simple, and past perfect

Dangling and misplaced modifiers

Subjects versus objects

Parallelism and comparisons

Punctuation such as semicolons and colons

Verb, noun and pronoun agreement

In terms of which idioms you need to learn - sorry readers, but you’ll need to attend one of our classes or crack open a book. Although the number of idioms you need to study is limited, there are still too many idioms to write in the space of this blog!

Memorizing and learning to use grammar rules and idioms is, however, not enough. Read identifying errors and improving sentences questions in the writing section carefully, not only using your ears to spot errors, but also ticking through the usage errors we just listed for you. What sounds right to your ears in everyday speech is not necessarily considered correct in writing.

Finally, eliminate answer choices that are obviously wrong or include grammar errors to narrow down and improve your chances of getting the question right.

Math

After you’ve memorized all the formulas you know might appear on the big day, focus your practice on math topics that you tend to score poorly in. For example, some school curricula do not spend much time on combinations or probabilities. Some students are champs when it comes to algebraic functions, but panic on lengthy word problems.

Speaking of word problems, tackle them sentence by sentence to avoid confusion! Put the information you extract into numbers, equations, and other visual representations such as graphs.

Math problems become more difficult later in the section. Tackle the earlier, easy questions swiftly  – but not so swiftly that you make careless mistakes and fall into the traps that the Collegeboard sets for you! If a question late into the section seems too easy, you might have misunderstood it. In this case, stop and re-read the question.

If a question is so abstract you can’t make heads or tails of it, try plugging in numbers.

Be particularly meticulous about grid-in questions. Although you won’t get any points deducted for wrong answers, you need to make sure your answer is exactly right in order to get the point.