3 Steps to Boosting Your SAT Score

1. Take a Diagnostic Test

The Critical Reading and Writing Skills sections comprise half of the SAT. Questions in these sections require several related, but different skills: vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar and usage. And all these categories can be further subdivided.

Administering a diagnostic test is crucial for revealing the student’s areas of strength and weakness. After computing the student’s overall Critical Reading score, the tester should find the score for each of the individual skills before designing an educational approach to prepare for the Exam. You might think that the best strategy is to focus on improving the student’s weaknesses, but as you will see, this depends on a number of other factors.

2. How much time do you have until your Exam date?/What was your overall score on the PSAT?

If you begin your preparation with a long lead time to the Exam or if your PSAT score is already high, then you would do well to spend a significant portion of your time on shoring up your weak areas with study, practice, and additional testing. But, if your score is low or if your lead time to the Exam is short, say less than three months, you might gain more by focusing more of your time on areas where you already have learned the basics. With a limited time frame or weak skills, you may add more points to your score by getting better at what you are already good at. But, before you make that decision, there is one more factor to consider.

3. Were you able to finish the Exam within the time limit?

Each portion of the Exam is timed. For most students who don’t have enough time to complete the Exam, it’s the Reading Comprehension that slows them down. In general, when taking the SAT, you want to apportion your time to your advantage. This might mean leaving some hard questions for the end and focusing first on those you have the best chance of getting correct.

Likewise in your preparation, find the areas where you can easily add to your score before going after the harder points. Learning, reviewing, and drilling some common rules of grammar and usage might yield points more easily and quickly than learning how to infer ideas from a lengthy passage. In addition, the Exam also tests you on shorter reading passages that put less of an emphasis on interpretive skills.