Do you feel like you’ve hit a score ceiling on the SAT? Maybe you’re at a 690 or maybe you’re at a 750. Well, whoever you are, if you feel like you’re hitting a ceiling and you want to know what it takes at that last piece of the game to get to that 770+ SAT reading score and what is potentially holding you back, in this blog, I’m going to share with you what I share with my top students to help them get past their score ceilings. I have been working with students for over 20 years on this test, so I’ve seen it all. High scores tend to be my wheelhouse. So, if you are looking for support with this, there are a lot of other tutors at SuperTutor in addition to myself, and we can help support you in that. We also have group classes!
You Have to Learn Vocabulary
But first, let’s get into some of my tips for how to break that score ceiling. My first tip is that at a certain point, you have to learn vocabulary. And I know it’s not what you want to hear. But what I would say of my students who are topping out at a 690, 710, or 730 is that oftentimes 30 to 60 points of what they seem to be missing has to do with words they don’t know. Now, obviously, vocabulary rears its head in the words-in-context questions. So what exactly are words in context questions?
This following question is from the online question bank from the College Board, which is a resource you can use to drill things down.
Science fiction has long served as a _____ real-world technological advancements. Indeed, from Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon inspiring developments in aerospace engineering to the television show Star Trek sparking the design of the ancestor of today’s smartphones, these narratives have spurred many actual innovations.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A. constraint to
B. sponsor of
C. catalyst of
D. diversion from
And essentially the issue with these kinds of questions is often that there could be a word, maybe in the question but oftentimes in the answer choices, that you’re not familiar with. And so you pick ‘diversion from’ because you didn’t know what ‘diversion’ meant.
But oftentimes, vocabulary rears its head on questions that are not words-in-context. This is a central ideas and details question:
In episodes of high heat, corals expel symbiotic zooxanthellae from their tissues, leading to coral bleaching and heightened coral mortality. Some researchers have proposed a mitigation strategy of identifying, rearing, and disseminating corals that have evolved strong resistance to heat, but as Nia S. Walker et al. note, if genes conferring such resistance were exclusively advantageous, they should have already propagated through coral populations. Indeed, Walker et al. show that strongly heat-resistant corals display much less growth after heat stress than do moderately heat-resistant corals.
Based on the text, Walker et al. would most likely agree with which statement about the strategy some researchers have proposed?
A. It would involve promoting a trait that protects corals against high heat but that is associated with reduced thriving after episodes of high heat.
B. It would favor a trait that is advantageous now but would be disadvantageous if episodes of high heat become as infrequent as has been predicted.
C. It would benefit corals that are frequently exposed to episodes of high heat but would harm corals that are frequently exposed to episodes of moderate heat.
D. It would require manipulating a trait that is poorly understood and that may be linked to increased coral mortality during episodes of high heat.
And you can see here there are two words here that might be unknown: mitigation and disseminating. A student I was working with didn’t know either of those words, and that made it much more challenging for him to understand the passage. Now, one of the rules of thumb I have is that if vocabulary is getting in your way, one of the best things to do is focus on what you know, not on what you don’t know. Oftentimes, you can infer what things mean or what the right answer is just by ignoring the things that you don’t get and not pretending that you know what they mean. Pretending you know what they mean can be really dangerous. But above all, you’ve got to learn vocabulary.
Now, let’s talk about why students often don’t want to learn vocabulary and why they haven’t been working on vocabulary on their rise from a 600 to a 700 or whatever their original score was. When it comes to learning vocabulary, as I like to say, you’ve probably got to review a word list of about 2,000 words to get to a 90% coverage rate of the words that could appear on the SAT. For most of my students that have strong GPAs and pretty good reading skills overall to begin with, that’s a lot of words. Now, I have some students with stronger vocabularies, and that might mean that if they look at a word list of 500 words, they probably already know 250 of them. For those students, this process can go a little bit faster. So, it all comes down to what is your starting point. If you have a stronger vocabulary to start, covering all these vocabulary words can be much faster and more efficient. If your vocabulary is weaker, it can take a lot longer. In fact, it might take 40 hours to pick up 20 or 30 points, and that can feel sort of low ROI. What I mean by that is oftentimes with other topics such as learning colons or learning dashes, if you learn how to use colons and dashes, you’ve instantly probably picked up 40 points on the exam. And maybe it only took you two hours to learn those rules. So, your hours per point is a much better ratio than memorizing, let’s say, 2,000 words. If it takes you an hour to learn 20 words because you really know zero of them, we’re talking about 100 hours of prep. Again, most of my students don’t know zero words on the list. And you don’t have to do 2,000 to improve your score. I would say learning somewhere between 500 and 800 words is probably going to put you in the sweet spot of highest yield and still improve your score. But like I said, at a certain point you have got to bite the bullet.
These are some of Brooke’s best vocabulary resources:
- Robert’s Extremely Nerdy Guide to SAT Vocabulary (affiliate link)
- 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary (affiliate link)
- Roots2Words SAT Vocabulary Audit
The other thing that I will say about vocabulary is I certainly have had students just switch to the ACT. I talked to them about how much time it’s going to take them to memorize all these words, and they decided to switch to the ACT because you’re going to get rid of a lot of this SAT vocabulary burden. And honestly, I’ve had students work with me for 3 to 4 weeks between their last SAT and an ACT and walked out with a 35. Now, they did a bunch of prep with me on the SAT before they went in for their SAT, but they just feel like their reading score is getting stuck around 700, 720, or somewhere in that range. And their practice test scores honestly sometimes pop 750 or 760, but that’s because they got lucky on the words. If you don’t get lucky on those vocabulary words, their score suffers more. So, we switched to the ACT. And they’re in a little bit of a better position there. So, that’s the other option if you don’t want to study vocabulary for 40 to 80 hours, depending on where your word knowledge is.
Start at Question 15
Tip number two is to start at question number 15. I know some of you say that your practice test scores are always higher than your actual score, so what gives? And while it is true that the official test is a little bit harder than the Blue Book tests, there’s also something to be said for performance. And what I mean by that is when you show up on test day, you have to be on your game. You have to perform at your best. And doing that means avoiding spending too much time on a particular question, pacing yourself so that you can get to every question, and spending time on the questions that you are more likely to get right. And given that scenario, I really love the idea of starting in the middle. And here are a few reasons why.
When it comes to the test, a lot of people look at it and say, “Okay, I have 27 questions and I have 32 minutes to do this.” So if I have 27 questions and 32 minutes, here’s a good pace. 60 seconds for a question, five minutes at the end to go over things. Great. I love that plan, too. But here’s the problem. Every question on the SAT is not created equally in terms of how long it’s going to take you to do it. Generally, our grammar questions—which include things like boundaries, form, structure, and sense—tend to be much easier to perform quickly and accurately than some of the other types of questions that are more involved. Likewise, transitions are pretty straightforward in the way that we approach them. And then bullet point questions also tend to be very straightforward in the way that you approach them. And a lot of my students don’t struggle with those question types as much. Same with words-in-context. When my students struggle with those, it tends to be more about the vocabulary that they don’t know than it is about the question being challenging in and of itself. So hypothetically, because the hardest, most time-consuming questions tend to be things like text structure and purpose, main ideas and details, command of evidence—whether it’s quantitative, illustrate, claim, or support/weaken—inference, and cross text connections, they’re the most likely questions to be derailed on, meaning that you spend way too much time on them, you screw up your pacing, and then you’re screwed for the rest of the test. We like to do them last because if you’re going to derail your pacing, guess when I want you to do it? At the end of the test. If you have really time-consuming questions, guess when I want you to do them? At the end of the test.
Here’s why: Psychologically, it doesn’t feel good when you get through these hardest questions and then you start, at about question 15, on your grammar questions, and you have 10-12 minutes left to do 12 questions. But if you do the fastest questions first and then you end up rolling into question 6 and you have about 11 questions left and maybe you’ve got 15 minutes or 20 minutes, you feel pretty good. Because you have over a minute per question. You have more than average. The other thing that it does is it helps you kind of pace. It’s much easier to pace when you have fewer questions to worry about that you have left. You know how much time you have, and you know how many questions you have at any given time. And it’s a little bit easier to manage psychologically pacing-wise when there are fewer of them to deal with. So that’s why I like to start at question 15. It allows for my students to basically lock in the points on the questions that they typically get right. Again, bullet points are typically a question type that most of my students get right, unless they run out of time. I don’t want you running out of time on bullet points because I think you’re more likely to get those right than inference, which tends to be around question 14 or 15, or command of evidence quantitative, which is stupidly time-consuming. You could even start at question 16 if you want, or you can even kind of play it by ear. Leave those inference questions for last, and that’s just going to help you manage your time and make sure that these kinds of psychological elements have less of a chance at affecting your score.
Focus on Scope
My third tip is to focus on scope. So scope is the idea of staying within the boundaries of what we’re talking about. It’s really important when you have super tough questions. Sometimes they’re really tough, and it’s hard to even understand what they mean. And I’m going to show you guys a question that one of my students this week misinterpreted when she read it. But then if you stay in scope, you can still get it right even if you don’t understand the question. So that’s why I love scope because it sometimes can save you even if things are so complicated and so hard that you don’t 100% know what’s going on. So what is scope exactly? Well, first it involves figuring out what the topic is and boiling down your paragraph to a much simpler understanding of the most important ideas. Now this also overlaps some with my ideas on keywords, which you may have seen in some of my other videos that are aimed at top scores that you can check out on our channel. But essentially, once I kind of figure out the zone of what it’s talking about, I want to stay in that zone, especially on inference questions. I know it has the word “inference” in it, so you think you’re supposed to infer. No, you’re supposed to infer as little as possible and really stay in the neighborhood of what is being talked about. Make sure your keywords are plugging in in ways that keep you connected to the ideas. And so, I’m going to show you an example question really quickly. The College Board recently dumped 300 practice questions, and I love it because I think some of them are wicked hard, and that’s fun, and they allow you to see some of these strategies in action. This is a question about duckweed, and the question ID is 8e6a96f5 if you want to look it up in the question bank. It’s a hard question.
Duckweed is a small freshwater plant that is often exposed to zinc pollution. Sofia Vamos and colleagues collected samples of four duckweed ecotypes (genetically and geographically distinct populations within a species), along with water from each ecotype’s habitat. Hypothesizing that each ecotype is adapted to its local conditions in ways that bolster its growth and resistance to pollutants, the researchers grew each ecotype in all four water samples and with three levels of zinc (none, low, high). (The researchers did not replicate local differences in light or temperature.) They found that the ecotypes grew equally well in all four water samples and that adding zinc consistently enhanced growth, regardless of concentration, suggesting that _______.
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. while the ecotypes are genetically and geographically distinct, those differences do not represent adaptations to local environmental conditions.
B. there may not be significant differences in the water that each ecotype inhabits, but there are significant differences in each ecotype’s resistance to zinc pollution.
C. if each ecotype is indeed locally adapted as the researchers hypothesized, those adaptations are to other environmental conditions than the water each ecotype inhabits.
D. although the researchers’ hypothesis does not appear to be supported, this may be because the levels of zinc exposure the plants in the experiment received did not match the exposure in their natural environments.
And so when you read this, one of the things that I ask my students to do is try to summarize what’s going on. So, we got these four duckweeds from ecotypes, and they’re adapted to their local conditions, and they believe the hypothesis is that because they’re well adapted, these four are well adapted to their specific areas where they live, which bolsters their growth and resistance to pollutants. And so they grew these in four different water samples with three different levels of zinc. Now it notes the researchers did not replicate local differences in light or temperature. So we’re only looking at water and we’re not looking at light or temperature. Basically, there is some part of the environment that has not been replicated. So, we’re leaving out something here, but we’re looking at these four water samples. We’re putting them in four different water samples, with different levels of zinc. And we’re testing different water and different zinc. And they found that they grew equally well in all the water samples. So, it didn’t matter what kind of water they put it in, and it didn’t matter what kind of zinc levels they had, except that the zinc consistently enhanced growth no matter what water sample they had. So basically all of these plants behaved basically the same in any of the water and more zinc was better. And that’s about all we know. I have not clued you into some of the specifics that I know in this passage that help you understand it at a deeper level. And I’ve done that on purpose because I want to talk about the idea of scope, which is, what do I have? We’re talking about water samples and levels of zinc. That’s what we’re testing. And we’re not talking about light and temperature. That is scope. When you understand what’s inbounds and what’s out of bounds, that’s scope. And that’s what I really want to hone in on.
Let’s read some of the answer choices, and I’m going to show you how scope interacts with them. Choice A has: “While the eco types are genetically and geographically distinct, those differences do not represent adaptations to local environmental conditions.” So, it does say up here that the hypothesis is that each ecotype is adapted to its local conditions. But we also had this line that there were two conditions, light and temperature, that were not replicated. The only local conditions we’re looking at are water and zinc. So my problem here is that the scope at the end here is broader than water and zinc. Do you see how this is more than water and zinc? And so I’m a little bit iffy about this answer because I think the scope is broader than it should be. And that’s the idea of scope; it’s about what the boundaries are and what the edges of what I need are. Choice B says, “There may not be significant differences in the water that each ecotype inhabits, but there are significant differences in the resistance to zinc pollution.” It says that the ecotypes grew equally well, so that means the ecotype’s resistance to zinc pollution is not creating significant differences. This is the opposite of what the text is saying. “Grew equally well” is the opposite of “significant differences.” This is just wrong. Choice C states, “If each ecotype is indeed locally adapted as the researchers hypothesized, those adaptations are to other environmental conditions than the water each ecotype inhabits.” Again, we had water samples. That’s the scope. We’re varying the water samples, not light and temperature, and I know that that’s not replicated. And so, these adaptations might be light or temperature. Okay, that could be true because we didn’t test light and temperature. And so, C, I’m okay with. Let’s look at D: “although the researchers’ hypothesis does not appear to be supported, this may be because the levels of zinc exposure the plants in the experiment received did not match the exposure in their natural environments.” So, here’s something that we don’t talk about. Levels of zinc in the plants don’t match the levels of zinc in nature. It says none, low, and high. There is no indication here. This is what I call out of scope. It’s not in scope because we didn’t talk about it. They never talk about how much the zinc that they’re replicating is different than it was in the local actual conditions. Nowhere does it say this. It just says they did not replicate local differences in light and temperature. It just says they replicated water samples and the zinc. So, I don’t have any evidence that this is true because this is not really part of the scope that the zinc exposures are different. That’s not something that was pointed out. This scope is too broad.
Now, I want to point something out in the passage that if you understood it better, this might have clicked faster. And that’s this: they collected samples of four duckweed ecotypes. That means their distinct populations A, B, C, and D, along with water from each ecotype’s habitat. So they basically have A’s home water, B’s home water, C’s home water, and D’s home water. They hypothesize that each ecotype is adapted to its local conditions. And this is what I didn’t explain the first time, and I did that on purpose because I want to show you how scope works even when you don’t fully deeply understand it. I’m now going to help you fully deeply understand this. And maybe you saw it when you read it on your own, and maybe you didn’t. When we say it’s adapted to its local conditions in ways that bolster growth and resistance to pollutants, what they’re implying is that A’s water is going to help A grow more. B’s water might help B grow more. C’s water might help C grow more. D’s water might help D grow more. And their hypothesis probably indicated that if the water was the environmental factor that led to their resistance to bad stuff, then A would do better in A’s water, B would do better in B’s water, C would do better in C’s water, and D would do better in D’s water. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t matter what water they were in; they were cool in all the waters. All that mattered is the more zinc, the better they do. It’s that simple. So when we more deeply understand that idea of the swapping of waters, which is subtle, it makes it easier to understand that choice A is too broad. Because all we did was talk about the water sample, not about the light and temperature. And it makes it easier to understand, like stated in Choice C, that the water cannot be the culprit because the water didn’t create any differences. So again, when you have a deep understanding, that’s obviously the best. If you don’t have a deep understanding, though, if you can just figure out what the lane that we’re talking about or that the experiment was done in is and can you stay in that lane, you’re going to be able to use scope to get hard questions right.
Learn What Wrong Answers Look Like
My fourth tip is to learn what wrong answers look like. Now, I talked about this in my other tip video for high scores, and I shared one of my flags. What do I mean by flags? I mean, this is the kind of information that the College Board often uses to make wrong answer choices. And the more of this kind of information that the College Board uses to make answer choices wrong that you’re aware of, the better you get at double-checking the specific parts of the answer choice that could be wrong and not wasting your time on all those other words in the answer choices. You’re just focusing on the words that are most iffy. And that’s what I’m doing when I read an answer choice. I’m honing in on the one, two, or three words that are dodgy. When we learn flags, when we memorize the ways that the test is trying to get you, we can identify that kind of iffy information more quickly.
So, in my other video, I share another one of these tips. You can check that video out on YouTube, but in this one, I’m going to use a different flag. And the flag that I’m going to talk about today is cause and effect. So, I’m going to pull up a question really quickly. We’re going to look at a Shakespeare passage. This is a central ideas and details question.
The following text is adapted from William Shakespeare’s 1597 play The Tragedy of King Richard III. Richard is reflecting on the recent arrest of his brother, the Duke of Clarence, on suspicion of treason against King Edward IV. Derby, Hastings, Buckingham, Rivers, Dorset, and Grey are also members of the English nobility.
RICHARD: I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.
The secret mischiefs that I set [flowing]
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.
Clarence, whom I indeed have cast in darkness,
I do beweep to many simple [gullible people],
Namely, to Derby, Hastings, Buckingham;
And tell them ’tis the Queen and her allies
That stir the King against the Duke my brother.
Now they believe it, and withal whet me
To be revenged on Rivers, Dorset, Grey.
Which choice best describes what happens in the text?
A. Richard describes having wept as he informed Derby, Hastings, and Buckingham that the queen and her allies convinced the king to act against Clarence, and says that the earnestness of his grief caused them to accept his version of events.
B. Richard attributes Clarence’s troubles to both his own secret plotting and the distrust of Clarence that the queen and her allies Derby, Hastings, and Buckingham have planted in the king’s mind.
C. Richard indicates that he has pretended to be aggrieved about Clarence’s situation and has proclaimed it to be the fault of the queen and her allies, but in reality, he has caused the hostility the king feels toward Clarence.
D. Richard acknowledges that his mischievous nature has spurred him to commit misdeeds in the past, including instigating enmity between the king and Clarence, but he reports that he has hitherto not lost the trust of the queen and her allies.
So, now what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you in these answer choices my flag of cause and effect. Now, just because there’s cause and effect doesn’t make it wrong, but it is something I need to double-check. Every time there’s cause-and-effect language, I need to check it. I need to say, is that supported? Is there evidence for it? And evidence for it generally is cause-and-effect language, not coexistence, and not correlation. Choice A has “caused.” Then in Choice B, we have “attributes” his “troubles to”. So, there’s cause and effect. All these answer choices have cause and effect, but my point is the cause and effect is the piece that you have to check. In Choice C, it says “he has caused,” so it’s his fault he did it. In Choice D, it says “instigating enmity,” so he caused enmity, which is fighting. There’s vocabulary again. See, I told you guys you had to learn words. It also has “spurred,” which is another cause-and-effect word.
When I go after each of these answer choices, one of the first places I go is my flags. I go to the cause and effect first because that is potentially the most likely little piece that could be wrong. So, I’m going to go through this really quickly, and I’m going to look for cause and effect. He says, “I do the wrong and first begin to brawl.” So, he’s saying he’s bad. Next, he says, “The secret mischiefs that I set flowing, I lay under the grievous charge of other,” so, basically, he’s blaming other people for his wrongs. Thus, that means he did something wrong. Moving on, we have “Clarence who, I indeed have cast in darkness,” and “I do beweep to many simple gullible people. Namely,” and he lists some people.” This might be a little bit hard to understand, but he’s calling these simple or gullible people—Derby, Hastings, and Buckingham—and “tell them ‘tis the queen and her allies that stir the king against the Duke my brother.” Then, we have “Now they believe it and whital whet me to be revenged on Rivers, Dorset, Grey.” Some of this is confusing; it’s Shakespeare. It’s really hard. I’m not going to understand all of it, but I can at least get to some of this.
Choice A says, “The earnestness of his grief caused them to accept his version of the events.” It never says that he was really earnest and that his grief caused these guys to believe him. He says they’re simple, gullible people. Do you see how the earnestness of his grief caused them to accept his version? No. The fact that he called them gullible is why they believed him because they’re stupid and they’re gullible and they’re simple. So, A is wrong. Because of this cause and effect, I have direct evidence that it’s wrong. Choice B says that “Richard attributes Clarence’s troubles to both his own secret plotting and the distrust of Clarence that the queen and her allies have planted in the king’s mind.” No, he isn’t saying that. He’s saying his own secret plotting has troubled Clarence, because he cast Clarence in darkness. That’s all we have for evidence. We do not have evidence that the queen cast him in darkness. He’s telling these gullible people this story, and now they believe it. So again, it’s only 50% right. And 50% right is not right.
Choice C states, “Richard indicates that he has pretended to be aggrieved about Clarence’s situation and has proclaimed it to be the fault of the queen, but in reality, he has caused the hostility the king feels to Clarence.” Now, I know this is 100% true. He caused it. He threw Clarence in the mud. He has pretended to be sad about Clarence’s situation. He definitely has proclaimed it to be the fault of the queen, but he caused it. C is looking pretty good. Finally, Choice D: “Richard acknowledges that his mischievous nature has spurred him to commit misdeeds.” Now, he never says that he is mischievous by nature. He just says that he set the mischiefs flowing and blamed other people. And he says, “I do the wrong and first begin to brawl.” So, he began the fight. It’s his fault. He claims the fault. But he doesn’t say that it’s his mischievous nature that spurs him. So again, this cause-and-effect piece makes it wrong. I can choose C, and I’m done.
So cause and effect, go after that language. That’s what you want to be double-checking. If you don’t have explicit evidence of it, it’s probably wrong. And this is only one of my flags. If you want more, check out our online self-paced course. We’ve got all of my flags videos there. You can also check out our super seminars if you’ve missed the live version. We have recorded versions that you can purchase and watch, and I go through a lot of the flags in there too.
Overall, I hope you guys like this blog. If you want more of this in general, again, I have a lot of other resources that you can use to soak in a lot of my teaching. We have private tutoring, we have group classes, and we have an intensive that’s a six-session class to not only give you the tips and tricks but also give you the practice and the drilling. I mean, that’s the other piece, you guys. If you’re really trying to improve your score, it takes hard work. It takes lots of practice questions, going over what you missed, figuring out what you did wrong, and doing it right the next time. It’s not just tips and tricks. It’s also that practice. So, if you want more of that practice that’s soaking in all of this, and you need the discipline, we have group classes, and we have private tutoring. Thanks for joining us!
In addition, be sure to check out our tutoring options, upcoming seminars, and free resources at supertutortv.com!
