As an advanced student, you probably already know that scoring high is good. But it's important to know why an 800 Reading and Writing score is useful, since this will fuel your motivation to get a high score.
This guide has been updated for the New 2016 SAT, so you can be sure my advice works for the test you're about to take.
Final note: in this guide, I talk mainly about getting to a 800. But if your goal is a 700, these strategies still equally apply.
Understand the Stakes: Why an 800 SAT Reading + Writing?
为什你需要拿到满分800分?
Let's make something clear: a 1530+ on an SAT is equivalent to a perfect 1600. No top college is going to give you more credit for a 1590 than a 1540. You've already crossed their score threshold, and whether you get in now depends on the rest of your application.
So if you're already scoring a 1550, don't waste your time studying trying to get a 1600. You're already set for the top colleges, and it's time to work on the rest of your application.
But if you're scoring a 1520 or below AND you want to go to a top 10 college, it's worth your time to push your score up to a 1530 or above.(如果你已经能够得到1520或者稍低的分数，并且你的女神校是top10，那就值得你花些时间把分数提高到1530或更高) There's a big difference between a 1470 and a 1560, largely because it's easy to get a 1470 (and a lot more applicants do) and a lot harder to get a 1560.
A 1500 places you right around average at Harvard and Princeton, and being average is bad in terms of Ivy League-level admissions, since the admissions rate is typically below 10%.
So why get an 800 on SAT Reading+Writing? Because it helps you compensate for weaknesses in other sections. By and large, schools consider your composite score moreso than your inpidual section scores. If you can get a perfect 40 in SAT Reading, you can get a 38 in SAT Writing (for a total of 780 in Reading + Writing) and a 750 in SAT Math and still be confident about your test scores. This gives you a lot more flexibility.
There's another scenario where an 800 in SAT Reading is really important. First is if you're planning to apply as a humanities or social science major (like English, political science, communications) to a top school.
Here's the reason: college admissions is all about comparisons between applicants. The school wants to admit the best, and you're competing with other people in the same "bucket" as you.
By applying as a humanities/social science major, you're competing against other humanities/social science folks: people for whom SAT Reading is easy. Really easy.
Here are a few examples from schools. For Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and U Chicago, the 75th percentile SAT Reading score is an 800. That means at least 25% of all students at these schools have an 800 in SAT Reading.
But if you can work your way to an 800, you show that you're at an equal level (at least on this metric). Even if it takes you a ton of work, all that matters is the score you achieve at the end.
I'll be honest - SAT Reading wasn't my strong suit in high school. When I started studying, I was scoring around the 700 range. I was always stronger in math and science.
But I learned the tricks of the test, and I developed the strategies below to raise my score to an 800. Now I'm sharing them with you.
This isn't just some fuzzy feel-good message you see on the back of a Starbucks cup.
I mean, literally, you and every other reasonably intelligent student can score a perfect SAT Reading score.(事实上，每个人都能够拿到一个完美的SAT成绩)
The reason most people don't is they don't try hard enough or they don't study the right way.
Even if language isn't your strongest suit, or you got a B+ in AP English, you're capable of this.
Because I know that more than anything else, your SAT score is a reflection of how hard you work and how smartly you study.
SAT Reading is Designed to Trick You. You Need to Learn How
识破SAT的计谋!
Here's why: the SAT is a weird test. When you take it, don't you get the sense that the questions are nothing like what you've seen in school?
I bet you've had this problem: in SAT Reading passages, you often miss questions because of an 'unlucky guess.' You'll try to eliminate a few answer choices, and the remaining answer choices will all sound equally good to you.
Well, you throw up your hands and randomly guess.
This was one of the major issues for myself when I was studying SAT Reading, and I know it affects thousands of my students at PrepScholar.
The SAT is purposely designed this way to confuse you. Literally millions of other students have the exact same problem you do. And the SAT knows this.
Normally in your school's English class, the teacher tells you that all interpretations of the text are valid. You can write an essay about anything you want, and English teachers aren't (usually) allowed to tell you that your opinion is wrong. This is because they can get in trouble for telling you what to think, especially for complex issues like slavery or poverty.
But the SAT has an entirely different problem. It's a national test, which means it needs a level playing field for all students around the country. It needs a solid test to compare students with each other. Every question needs a single, unambiguously, 100% correct answer.(每个问题都有一个绝对明确的正确答案)
Imagine if this weren't the case. Imagine that each reading answer had two answer choices that might each be plausibly correct. When the scores came out, every single student who got the question wrong would complain to the College Board about the test being wrong.
If this were true, the College Board would then have to invalidate the question, which weakens the power of the test.
The College Board wants to avoid this nightmare scenario. Therefore, every single Reading passage question has only one, single correct answer.
But the SAT disguises this fact. It asks questions like:
The author would most likely agree with which of the following statements?
The first paragraph primarily serves to:
In line 20, 'dark' most nearly means:
Notice a pattern here? The SAT always disguises the fact that there's always one unambiguous answer. (SAT经常掩盖每个问题都会有一个明确答案的真相)
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It tries to MAKE you waver between two or three answer choices that are most likely.And then you guess randomly.
And then you get it wrong.
You can bet that students fall for this. Millions of times every year.
Students who don't prepare for the SAT in the right way don't appreciate this. BUT if you prepare for the SAT in the right way, you'll learn the tricks the SAT plays on you. And you'll raise your score.
The SAT Reading section is full of patterns like these. To improve your score, you just need to:
learn the types of questions that the SAT tests, like the one above
learn strategies to solve these questions, using skills you already know
practice on a lot of questions so you learn from your mistakes
The point is that you can learn these skills, even if you don't consider yourself a good reader or a great English student. I'll go into more detail about exactly how to do this.
One last point: let's make sure we understand how many questions we can miss to score an 800.
What It Takes to Get A Perfect 40 in Reading
如何拿到完美的40分?
If we have a target score in mind, it helps to understand what you need to get that score on the actual test. There are 52 questions in the Reading section, and how many questions you miss determines your scaled score out of 40.
From the Official SAT Practice Tests, I've taken the raw score to scaled score conversion tables from 4 tests. (If you could use a refresher on how the SAT is scored and how raw scores are calculated, read this.)
These grading scales are harsh. For tests 2 and 4, if you miss just ONE question, you get dropped down to a 39. This means your maximum Reading + Writing score is a 790.
For tests 1 and 3, if you miss one question, you're still at a perfect 40, but miss another and you drop down to a 39.
The scoring chart curve depends on the difficulty of the test. The harder the test, the easier the curve. But you can't predict what kind of test you're going to get on test day.
The safest thing to do is to aim for perfection. On every practice test, you need to aim for a perfect raw score for an 800.
Whatever you're scoring now, take note of the difference you need to get to a 800. For example, if you're scoring a 35 raw score, you need to answer 6-7 more questions right to get to a perfect 40 and an 800.
OK - so we've covered why scoring a higher Reading score is important, why you specifically are capable of improving your score, and the raw score you need to get to your target.
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