How to Get a PERFECT Score on the SAT® Reading Section!

are you taking the SAT soon and wondering how you can totally crush the reading portion of the exam so in this video I'm gonna go through the steps that it takes to get a perfect score on SAT reading portion wondering who I am and it's Brooke I've been teaching the SAT for over a decade and a half I recently coach the student who is my private students to a perfect score so we're all on the SAT is 1600 we're gonna share with you some of my secrets and if you want even more secrets head to super tutor tv.com and you can check out the best SAT prep course ever if that's we're gonna go super in-depth I have like hours and hours upon hours of like all the little nooks and crannies of how this test works so if you wanna get inside that brain space that's the ticket you can also subscribe for mailing the super tutor to me Khan flash subscribe and you can check us out on Facebook Twitter Instagram all that kind of good stuff okay so the first thing I want to clarify is I'm gonna talk specifically in this video just about the reading portion the reading comprehension portion not necessarily about the writing and language section well maybe do another video on that at some point but I'm just talking about that 400 points that's part of that 800 reading and writing and language score but we're just gonna hone it in on the reading sections I think this is like the bane of some students existence I feel like this is the most challenging section for most students on the SAT so we're gonna try to dig deep and talk about all the ways that you can become super proficient on this exam my first tip is to start early thumbs up if you're taking the test in less than a week if so it doesn't mean that you can't take to heart some of the tips that I'm gonna give here but the truth is to build your reading skills taste time reading is not the fastest skill to improve in the world it's one of the most collective skills that we have it builds on itself over time so if it's something that you can start early on you're gonna be much better at it in the long run it doesn't mean you have to start prepping for the SAT but you can't start building some of the skills that I'm gonna talk about and that's like a basically baseline that you can build from to then really get an awesome score number two practice reading I know a lot of people say to prep for the SAT a good way to do it is to like read lots of articles and things like the New York Times and I agree with that especially if you're trying to build a foundation to get a super awesome score and especially if you've got time to do it now if your SATs next week don't go reading the New York Times and try study for the SAT take practice SAT you gotta look at where you are on the calendar in terms of how you're going to address your desire to improve but if you are younger if you're in like early high school or middle school or something like that cool I'm talking to you guys for you guys one of the best things that you can do to really get ready for the SAT is to familiarize yourself with the kinds of text that you're going to see on the exam so let's talk about what kind of material I mean now I know a lot of students at school are exposed to literature which is on the SAT so it's important that you have a good handle on literature and that you're comfortable reading literature one of the best things that you can do as a student to improve your comprehension of literature is to actually start reading the books that you're assigned in English class instead of just reading sparknotes if you're doing that kind of thing you might be putting yourself at a disservice maybe try reading both at the same time or listening to the audiobook or like getting used to the kind of language that you're gonna hear in those books so actually read your books in English class if you're not already but literature like I said sometimes that's a checkbox we did that in school okay I'm kind of comfortable with that second kind of text that you guys read in school you guys are reading text books well textbooks aren't on the SAT at all and textbooks are like this weird amalgamation of a bunch of information in a particular format that's dished up for high school students that's not what you're gonna read it all on the SAT and that's what throws students off a lot of the time because you're exposed to a type of material you're just not used to so if you really want to do well on this test one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get used to that kind of material that you're going to see and what is that kind of material here's I'm going to talk about first articles in modern magazines journals etc what kind of articles well for the social science component usually there's one social science passage or so but the Economist the New York Times Time magazine the Atlantic those are good sources that are gonna have the level of writing that you're looking at and then for science there's usually two science passages so actually my best advice is bulking up on science magazines and those articles are going to come from magazines like Smithsonian Science Daily MIT Technology Review New Scientist Wired magazine Scientific American science magazine American scientists or science news the second kind of material there find on your SAT is nonfiction books by scientists thinkers and social science researchers okay now these books are the kind of books that you could potentially find on a nonfiction New York Times bestseller list third kind of passage maybe a little less fun for some of you is what I call historical primary sources that's like writing straight up from people like Benjamin Franklin Thomas Paine Thomas Jefferson Alexis de Tocqueville Charles Darwin whoever it is historical kind of people are writing old-fashioned e sounding passages that I know make lots of students across America cringe but they don't have to be that bad and the more of them that you expose yourself to the better off you're gonna be these kind of passages you can also just practice them with like practice SAT exams or you can head over to Khan Academy and they've got some practice passages as well and that's also a good way to expose yourself to these especially if you're closer to the exam next tip number three practice with a ton of real materials one of the best things you can do to improve your SAT score and I know I say this all over the place all over my channel is use real tests there's nothing like a real SAT because they're statistically aligned to be a certain level of difficulty and so you can get your score gauge and you know how you're doing and you can't do that as well if you're pulling stuff from Kaplan or Princeton or whoever the College Board has released ten official tests occasionally two students are able to come up with what are called QA asses or question-and-answer service just be careful that you only are looking at officially released tests the goal is you want to be scoring perfectly on at least a couple practice tests before you go in the day off and if you're not it's pretty unlikely that it's gonna happen on test day does it it probably does to somebody have I already had a student score perfectly that never scored perfectly in a practice test no have I had students score perfectly and practice this and then not on the day of yes first anxiety it happens to all of us the next thing that you have to do if you want to score perfectly on the SAT is you've got to get your approach down it I liken this to if you're taking tennis lessons it's like getting your swing right you know in the same way understand that you're going to have to find tactics to address this test that aren't necessarily the same tactics you use in the real world know that the SPT is not a test like the test your English teacher gives you every week at class it's a totally different beast it's open book it's different and so you want to hone your approach some skills that I like to teach my students that it's good for them to master when it comes to mastering the approach one you've got to learn how to really read the passage well how do you get the most out of that passage read so that you're not wasting time so that you're mapping things out and what I mean by that is you know what is where you know like what's in this paragraph what's in this paragraph like what's my you know outline if I give an outline of the passage bullet points what would that be so that I know where things aren't it makes it really easy for me to go back and forth between the questions in the passage number two the second thing that I like to do with approach is I always want to be trying to find perfect answers before I look down I don't want to look at the answer choices too fast if I do I can start to confuse myself and convince myself of wrong answers so I always want to have like that pure mind I want to avoid the power of suggestions so I always like read the question try to figure out what the answer is before I look down right so this is part of my approach you know knowing like okay the first time I read the answer choices I'm going to read fast and the second time I'm gonna read slow because if a question is easy you don't waste a ton of time investigating the answer choice you think might be right when the answer choice is like a bell from heaven and if you just got down to it you would have known instantly it was right in any case my point is is you've got to have an approach you've got to have this is how I'm going to walk through each question and know what it is and be able to tackle it right just like a tennis player has their swing right you've got to get your approach down and that takes practice okay number five you got to learn the personality of the test as I say in some of my other videos the SAT has a personality and that means it has particular quirks it has like weird things about it that are particular to it and to no other test in the multiverse a couple of weird preferences that SAT has one weird preference of the SAT cause and effect has to be explicit so if you have two things that both occur simultaneously it doesn't mean one cause the other you have to explicitly see in the passage that one causes the other even if you know from out any information one causes the other that's not enough has to say it in the passage so that's one kind of thing that you can't infer on the SAT that a lot of people might not be aware of but it's a weird preference to the test in any case you need to learn the personality of the SAT why is one answer better than the other that's like when you get down to two answer choices and then you think they both look almost identical right and you're like oh now what right that's the point at which really understanding the Preferences of a FCT and all its little idiosyncrasies is going to really help you out that's so necessary to get that perfect square you've got to know this test and it's not empirical knowledge it's not like anything that you would get by taking any other test or by doing anything else in your life or by being super smart or anything for the most part it's stuff that you learned because this is the way the SAT works cool cool number six pace yourself so I know it seems kind of weird that like a top student would really need to pace themselves but I honestly think this is one of the things that sometimes throws students off at the last minute you can know all the content you can be super perfect you know how to do everything but if you don't keep moving on the reading section you can totally get like slimed and trapped and screw things up it doesn't necessarily happen that often to somebody who's a really strong reader but it can happen so always use a watch don't be above the watch don't expect there to be a clock in the room do not rely on the proctor to be super reliable the time you should keep your own timekeeping device inevitably the reading section is hard and even I almost every test have one or two questions where you have a moment where I go oh my gosh I have no idea all the answer choices look like oh my goodness this is so hard right I get that feeling too so when you get that feeling you have to know what you're going to do I cannot let myself get stuck in the muck of the mire of a single question or two questions well I'm midstream I have to keep moving that doesn't mean I'm not going to come back and fight for the answer I am but I'm gonna leave that for the end of the test the SAT is paced well enough that usually you can finish the thing with enough time at the end and then go back to the hard ones and I find that that's like a best strategy for people who are really aiming for that near perfect score because you're gonna have a couple of like oh crap questions or really hard questions and that's fine and if you're gonna wrestle with them wrestle with them but wrestle with them at the end because otherwise you might over wrestle and then you're gonna miss manage your time and sometimes it's just like really problematic okay number seven my last tip is more of a long game we just build your vocabulary though the SAT does not test vocabulary super heavily not nearly as heavily as the old test used to pre 2016 if you're aiming to get a perfect score on the reading portion I occasionally see that vocabulary is like the last straw that that dings a couple of points off on some of my best students what's tough is there's only one or two really intense vocabulary words probably per SAT they're not common so not necessarily the most important thing to up your score for everyone but it is important if you're trying to be flawless so how do you increase your vocabulary well again this is a long game thing if you can start early that's awesome there's a few books that I like I like six weeks two words of power I like 30 days to more powerful vocabulary I like verbal advantage in any case you've got to have an awesome vocabulary if you really want those last few questions on the SAT and I think that's about it so I hope you guys like this video hopefully was a little bit helpful in terms of knowing kind of all the pieces that need to come together for you to completely crush the reading section of the exam subscribe to our Channel and go watch some more videos there's more tips where this came from and I'll see you guys next time thanks for watching

Channel: SupertutorTV

Views: 213,418

Keywords: SAT, ACT, Brooke, Brooke Hanson, Hanson, prep, SAT prep, ACT prep, college, harvard, princeton, yale, supertutortv, tv, super tutor, admissions, high school, learning, tutor, tutoring

Id: AW03PPStgLk

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019