Mastering the SAT: Part 1 (SAT Reading)
Discover expert SAT Reading strategies from our team of seasoned tutors. Learn how personalized, high-level SAT tutoring builds critical reading skills, boosts comprehension, and maximizes test-day confidence for top-tier college admissions success.
I. Introduction to SAT Reading
Overview
The SAT has undergone a significant overhaul within the past year, as the paper-based version has been wholly replaced with a digital, multistage adaptive version. The scoring scale, however, has remained unchanged. The composite score comprises two equally weighted sections: Reading & Writing and Math. Each section score may range from 200 to 800 and is calculated based on a student’s performance across two adaptive modules. Accordingly, the composite score may range from 400 to 1600.
Within each Reading & Writing module, about half of the questions (54%) are reading-focused, meaning that these questions test skills that involve interpreting and critically engaging with written texts, rather than – as with the writing-focused questions that make up the remainder of the section – making decisions about how most effectively to convey information using standard written English.
Thus, reading-focused questions ultimately contribute to over one quarter of a student’s composite SAT score.
Key Challenges
Although each reading passage is short, with only one question associated with it, students face a handful of challenges that arise from this format: there are many different question types to keep track of, the answer choices can be tricky to navigate, and the variety of passages, questions, and answer choices can be exhausting to work through, especially given the added pressure of a ticking clock.
This article – the first in a three-part series – elaborates on these challenges and offers effective techniques and strategies students can employ to master SAT reading-focused questions.
II. Understanding the SAT Reading Section
Structure & Format
When you sit for your official SAT, the Reading & Writing section will come first. The section involves two modules, each 32 minutes long and containing 27 questions. There is no break between the modules, meaning this section is long—64 minutes altogether.
In total, there are eleven Reading & Writing question types, seven of which are reading-focused. And within each module, the questions always follow the same order.
Types of Questions
The College Board divides the reading-focused questions into two broad categories:
Craft & Structure
Information & Ideas.
Each module begins with the three Craft & Structure question types, and always in this order:
Words in Context
Text Structure & Purpose
Cross-Text Connections
These are followed by four Information & Ideas question types:
Central Ideas & Details
Command of Textual Evidence
Command of Quantitative Evidence
Inferences
Each question type on the SAT can be recognized by its distinctive wording, and it’s well worth the time and effort it takes to become familiar with them. Doing so enables you to apply the right strategy for each question – something we’ll explore below – and better understand your score report.
After you take the SAT or PSAT, you’ll receive a list of eight subscores: four in Reading and Writing and another four in Math. Although these don’t correspond directly to specific question types, they do indicate the categories where your performance was strongest or weakest. Paying attention to these subscores can guide your preparation by helping you identify which question types deserve extra focus as you prepare to retake the exam, or as you use your PSAT results to guide your SAT study plan.
Types of Passages
Each SAT Reading and Writing passage is excerpted from some longer text and will be between 25 and 150 words. Passages encompass four subject areas: literature, history and social studies, humanities, and natural science. Some of these will be accompanied by an informational graphic (i.e., a table, bar graph, or line graph).
The genres of these passages range widely, from fiction, plays, and poems, to nonfiction essays. But no outside knowledge is expected, and all the information needed to answer questions based on passages is in the passages themselves. Moreover, test takers should not be overly concerned with the passage types. It’s far more important to recognize the question type associated with each passage, and to learn—and regularly practice—question-specific strategies.
III. Techniques for Effective Reading
Because all Reading & Writing passages are relatively brief, their length is not typically one of its most challenging aspects. In fact, the primary challenges facing test takers come from the advanced reading level of many passages, as well as the need to navigate the often dense and tricky wording of the answer choices.
We recommend a four-step process for each of the reading-focused questions.
First, read the directions. This means initially skipping over the short passage and going straight to the instructions that follow. Because the directions are the best way to identify the specific question type, It’s important to read them carefully. Furthermore, reading the directions first will allow you to note any particular details that will be relevant to answering the question. For instance, a Central Ideas & Details question might ask, “What is true of the narrator’s relationship to her mother,” something to which you should pay special attention as you read the passage. However, it is important to note that you should not look at the answer choices yet. This is because many of the incorrect answer choices have been carefully written to lure uncautious readers into choosing them. If we read them before the passage, we risk being prejudiced by those answer choices before we even know what the passage says. To avoid falling into a carefully laid trap, you must resist the temptation to read the answer choices until you’ve read the passage and made your own prediction.
Second, with the specific details of the question in mind, read the passage carefully, noting its general features – such as its main idea, structure, and tone – and paying special attention to the specific fact (e.g., the narrator’s relationship to her mother) you’ve been asked to identify.
Third, armed with this information, you should make a prediction about the answer you’d expect. For some questions, such as Central Ideas & Details, your prediction should be specific. For others, such as Inferences, your prediction will necessarily be more general.
Finally, with this prediction in mind, apply a careful process of elimination to the answer choices, which we will describe below.
When you read the short passages, do not skim. Instead, read carefully to make sure you understand what you’re reading. We recommend a technique called “active reading,” which involves conducting a dialogue with the text’s author or narrator. Effective active reading entails stopping after each sentence and mentally repeating to yourself the key idea of the sentence, as well as any relevant details. As you proceed through the passage, you should also ask yourself how each sentence builds on the preceding sentences to convey a main idea. Along the way, you might pose imaginary questions to the author: What do you mean by this? Why are you telling me this? What is your evidence for your claims? What implications does this have? Finally, allow your reading
Given the difficulty level of some passages, it is likely you will sometimes encounter sentences that don’t initially make sense to you. Here, we recommend doing your best to deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar term from its context. Does it seem to have a positive or negative tone? Alternately, you can mentally delete the word and ask yourself what sort of word would make sense there, given the context. Whether or not you manage to successfully paraphrase the puzzling sentence, you should proceed, cautiously but confidently inferring the overall sense of the passage from the parts you do understand.
IV. Practice and Review
While cultivating the habit of close, careful reading in your everyday life will certainly sharpen the reading skills needed to perform well on the SAT, you should also practice specifically and intentionally with official SAT questions. These are available via the College Board’s Bluebook app, in the Official Digital SAT Study Guide, and in the SAT Question Bank. It is also a good idea to use official SAT practice tests to gauge your progress along the way… Because there are only six official SAT practice tests altogether, we recommend using them sparingly. For instance, you might use non-test official questions to familiarize yourself with the format and content of the exam, and then work through the first one or two official practice tests untimed as a way of identifying your strengths and weaknesses. Once you’ve worked to address those, you might use the remaining four official practice tests to gauge your progress and practice your timing and pacing under test-like conditions.
The most important component of effective SAT preparation, we believe, is regular and critical review of practice problems. This means not only maintaining a consistent study schedule but also keeping track of your results, analyzing their mistakes, and then changing your approach accordingly.
Additional Resources & Tools
In our years of working with students, we’ve consistently noted that students who have the best success in improving their SAT scores tend to share a few traits in common: they’re self-motivated, organized, and disciplined. With or without the help of a tutor, they create a game plan, putting in hours of consistent work over several weeks or months. If you’d like help diagnosing areas where you can improve most, specialized focus on math or grammar concepts you struggle with, or the accountability that a tutor can provide, we’re confident you will find a good match in North Avenue Education’s test prep tutors.
It’s also crucial to practice with high-quality material. There is no dearth of third-party SAT materials, some of which does not accurately reflect the content of the test. Accordingly, it’s important to be careful in seeking out practice materials. We recommend the following resources to help you prepare for the SAT.
The gold standard is material published by College Board, the organization that publishes and administers the SAT. A good starting point is the Official Digital SAT Study Guide, Note that the Official Digital SAT Study Guide contains 7 non-adaptive practice tests that overlap extensively with questions appearing in the Bluebook app.
Note: We recommend limiting your use of the study guide to its first 315 pages, which offer an overview of the test as along with practice questions corresponding to each of the 8 content domains. If you do study the 7 tests that follow this material, you are likely to spoil the official adaptive tests that you should prioritize taking.
Indeed, most useful for practicing the SAT in a test-like experience are the official SAT practice tests available via College Board’s Bluebook app. These are limited, so we recommend using them judiciously so you don’t run out of official practice tests too quickly.
For resources specific to the Reading & Writing section, we recommend several books by Erica Meltzer, all of which are now updated to reflect the format and content of the Digital SAT.
Finally, we recommend The North Avenue Guide to the SAT, available for purchase as an e-book. This is an innovative, science-backed approach to testing and college preparedness, written and compiled by our team of expert tutors. The guide is included at no extra cost for students who enroll in 1:1 SAT prep or an SAT Small Group class.
Conclusion
Ultimately, improvement on the Reading and Writing section comes with practice. In this sense, gaining mastery of the SAT can be compared to learning a musical instrument, artistic medium, or sport. As you gain increasing familiarity with the material and format through careful practice, you’ll find the passages and questions on the SAT easier to navigate. If you’d like expert and personalized guidance in mastering the SAT Reading & Writing section, please contact us to schedule a free consultation.
