General Verbal SAT Strategies
The verbal half of the SAT is made up of three sections.
Two of those sections are 30 minutes long and include analogies,
sentence completions, and reading comprehension questions. The other
section is 15 minutes long and contains one reading comprehension passage
and its corresponding questions. The analogies and sentence completions
are roughly organized from easiest to most difficult, but reading
comprehension questions are not ordered by difficulty.
The only thing that’s important on the SAT is getting
as many answers correct as you possibly can. Getting the hard questions
right earns no more points than correctly answering the easy questions.
And answering the easy questions is much easier than answering difficult
ones. Given this, it seems wise to devise a strategy that ensures
that you get to see, and answer, all of the easier questions.
Answer Easy Questions First
Let’s say you’re in the 30-minute verbal section that
has 10 sentence completions followed by 13 analogies, and a reading
comprehension passage. Answer the sentence completions first. When
you hit a question that’s too difficult, skip it and move on to
the next question. Do not skip out of the sentence
completion section entirely. On this first run through, at least
look at every question to see whether you think you can answer it.
If you do skip a question, mark it in some way so that you can go
back to it. Once you’ve gone through the sentence completions, skipping
where necessary, move on to the analogies and do the same thing.
After the analogies, turn to the reading comprehension, read the
passage, and answer every question you can. Finally, go back to
the questions you’ve skipped and see if you can figure out the answers
or eliminate some answer choices and put yourself in a good position
to guess.
Know Your Strengths
If you take a couple of practice tests before the test
date, you’ll start to get a feel for your SAT verbal strengths.
If you’re best at analogies, go back to the analogy group and give
the hard ones another shot. If you are least good at sentence completion
questions, return to those last. By refusing to follow the order
in which the test presents itself and instead making certain you
answer all the questions you can, you tailor the SAT to your strengths.
And the closer the test fits your strengths, the better you’ll do.
