Top 5 SAT Reading Tips

From experience, improving on the SAT/ACT Reading section can be complicated and stressful. This is because there are many factors that go into increasing your score: reading comprehension ability, reading speed, and strategy are just a few. For this reason we decided to dive deeper into some tips that can help significantly boost your score.

Don’t spend too much time reading:

The SAT only gives you 13 minutes per passage. Ideally, you should not spend more than 5 minutes reading the passage because it will compromise your ability to answer the complex questions thoroughly. One strategy that we use (that’s been quite successful) is to split Reading Test Prep into 3 levels. During the first level we give our students 13 minutes, during the second level 12 minutes, and during the third level 11 minutes. This inherently will force them to improve their critical thinking ability and reading speed. If lowering the time stresses you out or significantly lowers your score don’t worry…. realize that you are already ahead of the game by even attempting to do that.

The goal overall should be to complete each passage (there are 5 total) within 11 minutes. This way, you have 10 minutes left over at the end to check your answers and go over the more complex ones.