How to conquer SAT verbal section

By Jun Lee

Jun Lee is the director of Aim High SAT Academy located at Norcross

Due to the rapid population growth in the state of Georgia, schools like Georgia Tech, Emory, and University of Georgia have improved their quality of education dramatically.  It has been good news for those who have graduated from certain colleges, but not much pleasing to high school students who desire to apply for such colleges.  How can we prepare for the admission of those colleges when we know their standard for qualifying freshman becomes more difficult every year? We need to start from conquering SAT verbal and math section.

1. Read, read, read!

  Students must read good stories in order to write good stories.  It doesn't have to be complicated journal or magazine articles that are usually recommended.  Find the proper books to read at your level and try to read two or three books in a month.  Refer to the list of the recommended books to read by public high schools and check out the best sellers of the month at Barnes and noble website.

2. Focus on memorizing SAT vocabularies for the next ten months!

  It is not too bad to memorize 10~20 words per day.  Try to read the given sentence from a dictionary in order to understand how such word can be used and do not forget to review the words in 3 days, 7 days, 15 days and finally 30 days later. (gradually increase your memory cycle.)  Continue to do this just for about ten months (six days in a week) to reach 5000~6000 words overall, and the student will soon find himself knowing most of the vocabularies in any reading section of the SAT.  Knowing vocabularies will help you understand the sentence completion and the reading comprehension of the SAT.  It also helps you become a better writer.

3. Develop a habit of summarizing on your own after reading a passage.

 Try to summarize in one or two sentences after reading a paragraph, and focus on figuring out what the purpose of this writing is.  Do not be concerned about one or two sentences that cannot be understood.  Instead, remember to understand a bigger picture of thesis and the author's intention of the passage.  After certain amount of time, student will become an excellent reader who has tremendous concentration when he reads any passage.

4.  Concentrate on improving your score for grammatical error section!

  If the student is at least a junior in high school and he doesn’t have time to rebuild his fundamental aspect, then he/she should focus on grammatical error questions of the SAT writing section.  Known as the quickest way to improve the overall score, grammatical error sections will have about 12~15 patterns that will be repeated in each writing section of SAT. Look for writing practice books published by Kaplan, Barrron, and Princeton Review, and try to understand the pattern of each question.  Be familiar with subject-verb relationship, Infinitives, Gerund, parallelism, tense error, and shifting point of view. 

1.    What types of questions appear on the reading section of the ACT?

            ACT reading section is made up of forty multiple choice questions based on four reading passages. Students will have to answer ten questions for each passage. There is always one ACT passage that is a prose passage, one passage that is a humanities passage, one passage that is based on social science and one passage that is a natural science passage. However, ACT reading is not an exam to test your knowledge on these backgrounds.  Students are expected to read efficiently and answer the questions within time frame. Students need to prove they have understood author’s intention, purpose, tone of the passage and so forth.

2.    What's the secret to getting a great score on the ACT reading section?

            It has been found that many students fail to pace themselves while they attempt to solve reading questions.  Students have many questions to answer in a very limited amount of time (35 min). In terms of an overall reading strategy, I would suggest reading the passage quickly, but answering the questions slowly. These passages are fairly long on the ACT, so you want to get through the passage on that initial read pretty quickly. Just get a sense of the main idea and where all the information is located. You'll want to spend most of your time dealing with the questions, and with each question, you want to read the question stem itself, and then go back in the passage and find the answer. Now what can be a little tricky about ACT passages is that many of the questions don't have line references. So there's a lot more hunting around for the right answer than you may be comfortable with.

3.    How can I eliminate wrong answer choices on the ACT reading section?

            If you can't find the correct answer in the reading passage, there are ways eliminating all incorrect answer choices. You want to get rid of any answer choice that's not mentioned in the passage. You want to get rid of any answer choice that contradicts what's in the passage. Also you want to get rid of any answer choice that sounds too extreme or makes too broad a generalization like: "All students do 'this'" or "Every person is known as this'". Those answer choices tend not to be correct on an ACT reading passage.

4.    What are the most common mistakes students make on the ACT reading section?

            The most common mistake students make on the ACT Reading section is timing.  They take way too long to read the passage and then rush through the questions. You actually want to do the opposite. Remember, you want to read the passage quickly but answer the questions slowly. Also, students tend to get stuck in one or two questions and therefore eat up a lot of valuable time. With any question, you want to read the question, find the answer in the passage, and then look for the answer choice that matches what's in the passage. If you don't find the answer choice that works, get rid of as many incorrect answer choices as possible, then guess and move on to the next question. Don’t forget ACT does not have any penalty for wrong answer.

1.    What types of questions appear in the science reasoning sections of the ACT?

            The ACT science test includes seven sets of scientific information followed by five multiple-choice questions each. The scientific information is conveyed in three basic ways: research summaries, data representation, and conflicting viewpoints.  ACT science section is not an exam to test your specific knowledge on chemistry, biology or physics although the topics are derived from these subjects.

2.    What's the secret to getting a great score on the ACT science reasoning section?

            Students should be familiar with the format and the directions of the science test. While students do not need any specific science knowledge, a general background in science and science concepts can be helpful in deciphering many of the scientific setups that students are presented with. Compared to SAT, ACT is an easier exam to be conquered after vast amount of practice.

3.    What are the most common mistakes students make on the ACT science section?

            The science section of the ACT can be tricky and intimidating at first sight. Students are presented with a plethora of charts and graphs-- a lot of information that students don’t see from school science classes. Don't be intimidated. The ACT questions themselves are very straightforward and are basically just going back and looking up the answer in one of the charts or tables. Be confident and try many different examples.  Don’t forget to pace yourself.