Brooklyn Tutor

Test prep books and courses don’t do a very good job of improving student scores on the SAT Reading test. That doesn’t mean students can’t significantly improve those scores; it just means that practice sections, drills, and techniques (which sometimes do wonders in the Math section) can only get them so far. It also means that some strategies will be long-term. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll talk about a few ways to do better on the Reading section, both for crammers and for people with more time until the big day.

I’ll start with the most important piece of advice.

READ!

This is SO important. According to the 2000 Perfect Score study, the number-one difference between perfect and average scorers (really, the actual number-one reason, bigger even than family income and other factors that we know make too big a difference on the SAT) was hours the students read per week.

Read every day, or almost every day. Read for pleasure and read everything assigned for school.  Start by reading an extra hour a week—even this will make a big difference.

In coming weeks, I will talk a lot more about reading, including what to read (almost anything is okay, but I’ll get a bit more advice-y about it), how to read more critically, and what to do if even after reading more a student feels that he or she dreads reading.

Even for big readers, there is ALWAYS more to read.

And in general, no one should be caught without something to read. Once I was accidentally locked in a bathroom for an hour, and I had nothing to read.