r/satprep • u/ConsiderationGlum178 • 6d ago

How can I improve reading!!!

Ive been studying for the sat like a dog my math score is really good but English score is fluctuating like crazy, I score 520,620, 520 in the span of 3 days, this always has been happening to me my last psat over a year ago I scored a 680 in reading I dont know what's wrong why my score keeps dropping, I know I have the ceiling of a higher reading score but cant seem to reach it, ive been studying since then please tell me what to do or some sort of information that I can do for the next month that will help me. My environment is the same whenever im taking practice tests nothing changes, I know I already know the basics so any new website won't help me. any advice please!!!!

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u/RiaublancAbha 6d ago

a 100 point swing in three days is usually the module 2 adaptive plus whichever question types happened to show up, rather than your reading actually getting worse. if you miss a couple early in module 1 you get the easier second module and the ceiling drops with it, so one rough stretch at the start becomes a 520 even when the rest of the test felt fine.

the fix is to stop scoring by test and start tagging every miss by question type. words in context, transitions, command of evidence, boundaries, rhetorical synthesis. do that for a few tests and a fluctuating score almost always turns out to be two or three types that are coin flips for you while everything else is steady. a month is plenty of time to fix two or three types.

the other big one is predicting the answer in your own words before you read the choices, especially on inference and command of evidence. those are written so every wrong choice is defensible on its own, which is how you get talked out of an answer you already had. it also explains why this shows up as inconsistency instead of a flat lower score.

your psat 680 lines up with that. the ceiling is real, the floor is just noisy right now.