SAT Reading Strategies To Score a 700+

Summary

In this video by Strategic Test Prep, Laura shares her personal journey of overcoming struggles with SAT reading passages. Having initially scored a 640 in English, she has since developed a set of strategies that transformed her score to a 1580 on a recent SAT, offering viewers valuable techniques to enhance their reading comprehension and efficiency. The video unveils practical tips for tackling SAT reading sections, from breaking passages into manageable blocks to avoiding common pitfalls like picking overly literal interpretations or making unwarranted inferences. Additionally, Laura teases an upcoming crash course with advanced strategies for those eager to further boost their scores.

Highlights

• Laura shares her SAT reading struggles and triumphs with a 1580 score! 🎓
• Strategies include starting at number 27 and working backwards! 🔄
• Use process of elimination to avoid SAT’s trap answers! 🚫
• Synonyms in answers and text can reveal the right choice! 🔎
• Adverbs like 'largely' or 'partly' significantly impact accuracy! 💡
• Opt for initials over difficult names to sustain reading flow! ☑️
• Context clues help deduce meanings of tough words! 🌟
• Keep annotations brief to save time during reading! ⏳
• Avoid inferences unless clearly stated as needed! 🚫
• Understand correlations in science passages to score higher! 🧪
• Be wary of literal interpretations in poetry and fiction! 📘
• Adapt to text tone to make smarter answer choices! 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Break reading into two blocks to maintain focus! 📚
• Eliminate three wrong answers instead of finding one right answer to avoid traps! ❌
• Look for synonyms between answer choices and text to identify correct answers! 🔍
• Adverbs of degree can change the meaning of an answer choice. 🎯
• Skip pronouncing hard names to maintain reading flow! 🏃‍♀️
• Contextual clues often clarify meaning of unknown big words! 🧠
• Annotation is useful but should be minimal to save time. ✍️
• Avoid making inferences unless the text clearly supports it! 🧠
• Know the difference between direct and indirect correlations in science passages! 🔬
• Literal interpretation often misses symbolic meanings in poems! 🌼
• Determine if texts are positive or negative to choose coherent answers! 👍/👎
• Flag difficult passages to revisit, maximizing time efficiency! ⏰

Overview

Feeling overwhelmed by the SAT reading section? You're not alone! Laura from Strategic Test Prep opens up about her past challenges, going from a 640 in English to a 1580 on her SAT. Her new video unpacks key strategies that helped her succeed, offering insightful strategies to help you navigate the tricky SAT reading waters. From managing your time to identifying trick answers, she’s got all the tips to help every student score higher.

Laura dives straight into her tried-and-tested methods: start the reading with number 27, uncover synonyms to decipher the right answers, and break down the reading section into chunks to maintain focus. She transforms complex strategies into easy, accessible guidance for students, emphasizing the importance of avoiding assumptions and recognizing textual correlations.

For those eager to delve deeper, Laura invites you to her reading crash course, promising to share her groundbreaking strategy that allegedly has the power to overhaul your SAT approach. Whether you're stuck on correlations in passages or deciphering poetic symbolism, Laura’s fun, engaging delivery ensures you’re equipped with all the right tools to conquer the SAT reading sections!

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Personal Story The chapter titled 'Introduction and Personal Story' begins with the speaker asking readers if they face challenges with SAT reading passages or if they struggle with time management during the English module. The speaker, Laura from STP, shares her personal difficulties with the SAT, mentioning her high school scores where she excelled in math but found English particularly challenging. Her difficulties with SAT reading passages motivated her to address these struggles, which eventually led to her founding her own initiative.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Overview of SAT Reading Strategies The chapter covers top SAT reading strategies to boost confidence and reduce stress while taking the test. The strategies explained are those that the author personally uses and finds effective, as demonstrated by their experience with the recent November SAT.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Strategy 1: Execution Strategy The chapter 'Strategy 1: Execution Strategy' discusses the personal experience of the speaker who found the provided strategies very effective and enjoyable. The speaker mentions achieving a score of 1580 in an official test taken in June. The expectation set is that these strategies, when applied to reading passages, can lead to significant score improvements for others as well.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Strategy 2: Process of Elimination The second strategy discussed is the 'Process of Elimination,' aimed at improving performance on the SAT English section. This method contrasts an 'execution strategy' which involves approaching questions in reverse order, though this is not elaborated on further as it is reserved for another discussion. The chapter underscores the significance of maintaining focus and suggests the process of elimination as a solution for those struggling with concentration during SAT reading.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Strategy 3: Synonyms in Text and Answers The chapter discusses a strategic approach for handling passages more effectively by breaking them into manageable sections. The method involves tackling passages in two separate blocks, starting with questions 1 to 10, then skipping to address grammar questions 15 to 27. After completing these, it is advised to return to questions 11 to 14. This technique is particularly useful for maintaining focus and ensuring that attention is optimally distributed across the material.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Strategy 4: Adverbs of Degree This chapter explains Strategy 4: Adverbs of Degree, which is crucial for standardized test preparation, particularly the SAT. The focus is on reframing one's approach from finding the right answers to identifying wrong ones first to avoid trap answers. It stresses the importance of critical thinking and the process of elimination to discover the correct option through identifying synonyms in answer choices.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Strategy 5: Handling Hard-to-Pronounce Names This chapter, 'Strategy 5: Handling Hard-to-Pronounce Names,' seems to be missing a complete transcript and description relevant to its handling of names. The provided text discusses test-taking strategies for the SAT, emphasizing recognizing synonymous phrases to improve reading comprehension and performance. There's also mention of adverbs of degree, suggesting a focus on grammatical details to help in understanding test questions and answers more effectively. Given the transition from discussing synonyms to adverbs, it implies a broader context of linguistic tools and strategies in test preparation.
• 07:00 - 08:00: Strategy 6: Skipping Unknown Big Words This chapter focuses on the importance of adverbs of degree in influencing the correctness of answers in tests. Adverbs like 'largely,' 'partly,' and 'significantly' can determine whether an answer is correct or incorrect. The chapter also touches upon strategy 5, which involves dealing with difficult-to-pronounce names while reading.
• 08:00 - 09:00: Strategy 7: Simplifying the Passage This chapter, "Strategy 7: Simplifying the Passage," advises readers to simplify their reading process by using initials for difficult-to-pronounce names, whether referring to people, cities, or other entities. The idea is to maintain the flow of reading and comprehension instead of being disrupted by trying to pronounce difficult names. Additionally, the chapter emphasizes the importance of not getting stuck on large, unfamiliar words, suggesting that missing one big word is unlikely to drastically impact the overall understanding of the passage.
• 09:00 - 10:00: Strategy 8: Annotation The chapter focuses on Strategy 8: Annotation. It emphasizes the importance of using context clues to understand difficult words in passages, specifically for SAT preparation. The strategy involves simplifying seemingly complicated passages by identifying and focusing on keywords and phrases that are comprehensible, rather than trying to understand every single word. The chapter includes a brief mention of liking, subscribing, and enabling notifications for future SAT-related content.
• 10:00 - 11:00: Strategy 9: Avoiding Inferences Chapter 9 discusses the strategy of avoiding inferences when reading or analyzing texts. It advises the identification of key phrases and words that will typically lead you to the correct answer. Additionally, it introduces Strategy 8, which involves making minimal annotations to help you keep track when you are lost. The emphasis is on minimal use of annotations, recommending one or two instances in a module as annotations can be time-consuming.
• 11:00 - 13:00: Strategy 10: Understanding Correlations This chapter discusses the best practices for annotating texts efficiently. It emphasizes the use of symbols and shorthand in annotations to save time. The advice includes preferring scrap paper over digital annotation tools due to visibility issues, as digital notes may not be readily visible without user interaction.
• 13:00 - 14:00: Strategy 11: Avoiding Literal Interpretations This chapter discusses the importance of not falling into the trap of literal interpretations when answering SAT questions. It emphasizes the need to rely on the information explicitly provided in the text rather than making assumptions or picking answers that could be true but aren't definitively supported by the text. The strategy helps students identify and avoid trap answers by encouraging critical thinking and careful reading of the given material.
• 14:00 - 15:00: Strategy 12: Positive and Negative Tone The chapter "Strategy 12: Positive and Negative Tone" discusses how readers often make inferences, where they interpret or conclude something that is not explicitly stated in the text, potentially leading to misunderstandings. An example is provided through a scenario involving a student reading a fiction passage about two characters on a ship. One character, the narrator, is described as observing another man who seemingly never leaves his seat during the voyage to America. This might lead readers to draw unwarranted conclusions about the man's character or circumstances due to the lack of explicit information in the text, demonstrating how tone and inference can shape interpretation.
• 15:00 - 17:00: Conclusion and Crash Course Promotion The chapter revolves around a teaching moment where the instructor discusses with a student their choice of words when characterizing a man's behavior as lazy. The student initially believes the man is lazy because he doesn’t get up from his seat. The instructor encourages the student to consider alternative reasons for the man's behavior, prompting a deeper understanding of the situation.
• 17:00 - 18:30: Final Remarks and Call to Action The chapter discusses the importance of not making inferences when analyzing text, emphasizing that conclusions should be drawn directly from the text unless it's explicitly an inference question. The speaker shares an example where someone inaccurately inferred laziness due to inferences about age or disability, highlighting the importance of sticking to the provided information. The chapter ends with a call to action, encouraging viewers to like the video if they find it helpful.

SAT Reading Strategies To Score a 700+ Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 do you struggle on Sat reading passages do you run out of time on English module 2 or do you find that you read the same thing over and over again and you just still don't understand what it's saying guys Laura here with STP I've been in your shoes before when I was in high school I scored a 780 in math and a 640 in English so I had a really really tough time with the SAT reading passages with those struggles that I already just mentioned and so when I founded
• 00:30 - 01:00 STP my mission was to create strategies that make the process so much easier for you guys so you have so much more confidence in the test and you're just not as stressed out as you were before so in this video I'm actually going to cover our top sat reading strategies these are strategies I use myself when I take the test and I just recently went in and took the November sat and I will tell you it was a vastly different
• 01:00 - 01:30 experience for me so enjoyable I really feel like all of these strategies are clicking and I'm excited to share them with you and I really hope that you put them into practice using these strategies now lands me a 1580 um I got that on an official test in June so I'm hoping that you will see the same score Improvement that I saw after learning how to do the reading passages more efficiently and effectively [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 all right my first strategy strategy number one is actually an execution strategy so there's different execution strategies you can employ on the SAT English I personally really like starting at number 27 and working backwards that's for another video and I can explain that one but if you have a tough time staying focused on the SAT reading
• 02:00 - 02:30 passages one thing I would recommend is breaking it up into two blocks so start at number one work up to number 10 and then skip to the grammar do 15 to number 27 and then loop back and do number 11 to 14 this breaks up the reading into two blocks like I already said so you're doing like number six through 10 in one chunk and then number 11 through 14 another chunk it's a great thing when you can't stay FOC focused strategy
• 02:30 - 03:00 number two I want you to find three wrong answers instead of one right answer if you approach the SAT reading passages trying to find a right answer you will likely pick a trap answer so you have to reframe your thinking because they make a lot of the answer choices sound really really good so think critically and use process of elimination to get down to the right one all right strategy number three is a big one I want you to look for synonyms in the answer chart choices to synonyms in
• 03:00 - 03:30 the text so the text and the answer Choice that's correct will say the same thing in different ways and it's very subtle but if you get good at pinpointing a phrase and then another phrase that means the same thing you are likely to earn more points on the SAT reading all right strategy number four I want you to pay attention to adverbs of degree so adverbs are those ly words that are used to describe verbs and
• 03:30 - 04:00 adverbs of degree are words like largely partly significantly um uniformly so these adverbs of degree are really important because they can change whether an answer choice is right or not I have seen an adverb of degree in an answer Choice make the entire answer Choice incorrect even though the rust of it was completely accurate all right strategy number five when you're reading if you come across a a hard name to pronounce
• 04:00 - 04:30 whether it's a person or a city or something else just call that person or thing by their initials okay there's no sense in trying to pronounce a really tough name it's going to break up the flow of your reading and your comprehension all right strategy number six I want you to skip over big words you don't know I promise you that one big word will probably not make or break your understanding of the passage so you
• 04:30 - 05:00 could get enough context clues without understanding the difficult word all right guys if you're liking this video so far make sure to smash that subscribe button and notification Bell below so you don't miss out on future content for me to help you get ready for the SAT all right strategy number seven I want you to basically simplify what seems like a complicated passage by pulling out the keywords and phrases that you do understand you don't have to understand every single thing on the passage if you
• 05:00 - 05:30 can pinpoint those keywords and phrases that typically will be enough to help you match up to a right answer all right strategy number eight I want you to annotate when you're getting completely lost while you're reading now guys use The annotation strategy minimally though so one or two times I'm module to Max because when you do annotations it takes a lot of time and you can't AF for to spend so much
• 05:30 - 06:00 time annotating but when you do annotate try to use symbols use a lot of shorthand don't write long- winded sentences that's also going to waste time and I would recommend using your scrap paper instead of The annotation tool in Blue Book because the issue with The annotation tool in Blue Book is once you take a note on a certain part of the text you can't visibly see the note it disappears unless you hover over it
• 06:00 - 06:30 so I find that it's just easier to take notes on the paper and then I can see it all in one place and it's just easier to process my thoughts that way all right strategy number nine if the text doesn't say it please don't pick it so there are a lot of trap answers on the SAT that are basically answers that could be true but there's not enough information so you might find yourself sometimes naring it down to two and picking the wrong one right we all have there if you're doing
• 06:30 - 07:00 that there's a really high likelihood you're making an inference and your brain is trying to connect the dots when the text did not say what the answer choice is saying at all so to give you an example I was working with a student and we were reading a fiction passage it was about a narrator and another man that met on a ship when they were going to America and the narrator basically described the man as never getting up from his seat
• 07:00 - 07:30 so my student was asked how to characterize the man and they picked an answer that said he was lazy so of course it was a wrong answer and I asked my student well why did you pick that why did you say he was lazy and my student of course says well he never got up from his seat I'm like yes but what are some other reasons the man may not have gotten up from his seat besides being lazy and my student thought about it for a little bit and they started
• 07:30 - 08:00 listing off other things oh he was old or he was disabled and so they realized oh shoot I was making an inference here the text didn't actually say he was lazy I came to that conclusion and made that assumption on my own so unless it's an inferences question which is a little bit of a different story most of the questions you do not want to make an inference and you just need to stick to the text all right guys if you're finding this video helpful so far show me some love hit the like button below
• 08:00 - 08:30 all right strategy number 10 is important especially on the science passages it's good for you to understand the difference between an a direct and an indirect correlation so let's just talk about that briefly a direct correlation is when one thing directly affects another thing so to give you an example let's say I have a population of Dusky sharks and Dusky sharks eat stingrays so
• 08:30 - 09:00 if the Dusky shark population goes up it will directly affect the stingray population which is going to go down because if there's more Dusky sharks they're going to eat more stingrays now if stingrays eat oysters right the Dusky sharks will indirectly affect the oysters because if the Dusky shark population goes up then the stingray population is going to go down which then causes the oyster population
• 09:00 - 09:30 to go up so the Dusky sharks indirectly affect the oysters so there are going to be science passages that deal with these indirect correlations where there's a middleman in between and it's important that you can pinpoint and recognize that it's also key for you to know the difference between a positive and a negative correlation so a positive correlation is when one thing goes up the other thing goes up or when one thing goes down the other thing goes down a negative correlation means the
• 09:30 - 10:00 opposite happens so when one goes up the other goes down lots and lots of science questions on this or passages that mention these types of correlations so please make sure you have a handle on that all right strategy number 11 is a pretty simple one but when you have a poem or a fiction passage please avoid picking answer choices that are too literal so for instance if your poem is talking about a beating drum please don't pick an answer
• 10:00 - 10:30 that mentions a beating drum because I promise you there's something symbolic or metaphorical going on that's a little deeper than the literal meaning all right my last strategy is play positive negative so if you're not sure and you're having a hard time following the passage and you need to move on just determine is this passage positive sounding or negative sounding and make sure you pick an answer that goes with that so if the passage sounds positive
• 10:30 - 11:00 in tone don't pick a negative sounding answer I mean that's not going to be right so just try to keep it simple as much as possible in worst case scenario if you really are stuck on a reading passage please just flag it to come back to because there is no sense spending three or four minutes on a passage it's going to really rob you of the opportunity to pick up as many points as possible which is the entire point of a standardized time test
• 11:00 - 11:30 so that being said I've actually formulated a amazing reading strategy I think I've cracked the code you guys and I used it on the November test and it went really really well it's such an amazing strategy I don't even want to share it in this video because I'm afraid that if everybody catches wind of it College Board is going to switch things up and it works so so well so that being said I am holding a reading crash course it's a 2-hour crash course
• 11:30 - 12:00 at the end of the month before the December sat so if you're watching this video um surely after the filming of it then you probably can sign up for this crash course I will link it up here right now if you're watching this video at a later dat and you missed a crash course I'm sorry but please check our events page because we run sat classes where we'll cover this strategy we also have self-paced courses I'll link up here to our events page so you can go check out what's going on on right now
• 12:00 - 12:30 all right guys that's it for this video I hope you found it helpful please comment below and let me know what your biggest struggle is with the SAT reading and maybe if you have an idea for a future video that I can make to help you get even better at this really tricky area of the SAT all right guys until next time happy prepping [Music]