Raising The Score!

Unequivocally, the best method for increasing a student’s score on the critical reading section of the SAT is to learn more vocabulary.  While vocabulary only makes up about a third of the questions, learning has an impact on a student’s performance on the entire section in four important ways:

A frequently asked question about the SAT Critical Reading section is: “Do I need to study vocabulary in order to do well on this portion of the test?” The short answer is “Yes.” Although the focus of your preparation for the Critical Reading should certainly be on strategy, excelling on this part of the test does require that you are familiar with some difficult words. Very often you will be able to use process of elimination (the most powerful strategy for sentence completion questions) to narrow a question down to 2 or 3 answer choices, in which case you should guess. However, the most challenging questions will often include extremely difficult words for all 5 answer choices, so studying SAT vocabulary is a good investment of time that is linked directly to a higher score.