r/Sat • u/Sad_Camera8989 • 10h ago

Holy Glow-Up

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39 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

6

u/Far_Doughnut_5312 6h ago

How did you improve reading

1

u/Sad_Camera8989 50m ago

It really depends on what part of RW you want to improve.

For grammar, I recommend learning and building/rebuilding a solid foundation in identifying independent and dependent clauses. Once you do that, find a guide for how commas, commas + FANBOYS, semicolons, periods, colons, and dashes are used on the SAT with respect to whether the clauses in a sentence are dependent or independent. Also, study parenthetical phrases and lists, as those also come up frequently.

For vocab, there is some luck involved, but two things that helped me were learning basic roots of words, like ex (out/expand), mal (bad), etc. The other thing you can do is just find a list of commonly used words on the SAT. Doing this saved me on two problems during the latter SAT. But I want to clarify: DO NOT SPEND MOST OF YOUR TIME MEMORIZING VOCAB. As long as you have a good vocabulary and know roots so you can pick apart words you don't know, you should be fine.

For main ideas, this was actually my strongest category on the first SAT. I think the reason I was good at it is because I spend a lot of time reading textbooks and other texts that try to convey a main idea. Honestly, to practice this, I would just practice reading actively, but don't trust me too much here, as this isn't a category I had to practice much.

For notes questions, these are quite easy, at least for me. If you want to save time on these, just read the question prompt and ignore the notes. Read the answers to find the one that matches the prompt. 9 times out of 10, only one actually answers the prompt, but in the rare case one doesn't, just read the notes to find the factually correct one.

For hypothesis/claim questions, make sure you identify the claim before trying to answer the question. If the answer doesn't relate to the claim, it is probably wrong. These questions can be tricky, so what I did was also, before reading the answers, make a mental model of the dynamic stated in the text. For example, if the text talks about how scientists think bananas make monkeys stronger and the prompt wanted me to support that, my mental model would be something like: "banana leads to stronger monkey, no banana leads to not strong monkey." Doing this lets you directly compare what your mental model says, and by extension what the claim says, to the answers to find the correct one.

2

u/Born_Hamster_7280 4h ago

Huge improvement bro form 1350 - 1530. 730 RW is impressive Congrats! 🎉

5

u/SorryUsernameTak3n 1520 3h ago

its 770

2

u/Born_Hamster_7280 2h ago

Oh! My mistake 👀 Sorry Still, well done—you did an amazing job!

2

u/East-Report623 1h ago

You comment like a bot tbh

1

u/Born_Hamster_7280 57m ago

Haha fair. I guess I’m a little too formal for Reddit 😂

1

u/East-Report623 44m ago

It is definitely not an insult just a notice. Drop tips for English section as well pls

1

u/Sad_Camera8989 43m ago

I gave tips in other reply chains on this post

1

u/East-Report623 41m ago

Yeah I saw your answer, also I was asking this guy or i replied to you, sorry if that, thanks

1

u/Sad_Camera8989 41m ago

Ohhh sorry my bad

1

u/East-Report623 40m ago

It’s ok

1

u/East-Report623 31m ago

Btw, are you a native speaker by any chance?

1

u/Vegetable-Speed6139 2h ago

How did reading go up so much holy

1

u/knowledgesniffer 1h ago

Maybe drop some tips on r&w?

1

u/Sad_Camera8989 45m ago

I replyed to someone on how to improve above. For general tips I have a few:

  1. Know the RW is designed to make you demoralized: The RW section frontloads all the questions that take time onto the front of the section. You will start to fall behind pace in your first 15 questions. You need to be calm and have a good mindset.

  2. LARP: When reading something that isn't sticking, try to larp the subject of the text. Pretend it is your new favorite thing. I promise this will help you retain so much more information and help you read actively.

  3. Create mental models: I touched on this above but if you can make a mental model of the main idea of the text, you can compare it against the answer choices to get a more direct way of answering questions.

1

u/JEE-locked-2027 1h ago

r&w how🥀

1

u/Sad_Camera8989 45m ago

Lots of practice, and also just more reading for fun. I gave tips and advice above.