Engineering major - cannot get verbal SAT up

[Anonymous]

The best way to raise the verbal score is to read longform - whether long articles or books - for pleasure. The New Yorker is a good start, but I'd find some enjoyable quality books. I think fiction will be better for the purpose of the SAT. There's more complexity and usually a higher level of vocabulary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:my kid raised from 690 to 760
it came down to just learning lists of vocab words
your son probably also needs to learn grammar rules if his score is that low
if he does the above two he can get to the 700s

What year was this? SAT has much less vocab now than in the past.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The best way to raise the verbal score is to read longform - whether long articles or books - for pleasure. The New Yorker is a good start, but I'd find some enjoyable quality books. I think fiction will be better for the purpose of the SAT. There's more complexity and usually a higher level of vocabulary.

Better to do Khan academy, which has SAT level articles and in depth discussion of SAT textual analysis.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My son has taken the SAT twice. Highest score for math was a 780, but despite having taken a prep class, verbal remains relatively low at 620. How badly do you think schools will look at this, assuming he wants to major in engineering?

What about practice tests? What types of questions is he getting wrong? Is he running out of time?

620 is 90%ile for a junior, good enough for engineering if you aren't extremely picky about where.

[Anonymous]

Focus on grammar and vocab.

[Anonymous]

This was my daughter. She’s happily at Colorado School of Mines. It’s a good engineering school and doesn’t have a lot of humanities gen ed requirements. She leaned into her strengths and looked at schools that matched her abilities and interests.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This was my daughter. She’s happily at Colorado School of Mines. It’s a good engineering school and doesn’t have a lot of humanities gen ed requirements. She leaned into her strengths and looked at schools that matched her abilities and interests.

Typ verbal correlates with math unless you are an immigrant not exposed to education in English. If so, it’s a concern given how easy SAT math is ….

[Anonymous]

It should naturally go up after junior year english, look at taking again in March/April. Also look at YouTube videos of kids who got perfect scores. There are a few tricks/strategies that are helpful for verbal and there are a few types of questions that are on every SAT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:my kid raised from 690 to 760
it came down to just learning lists of vocab words
your son probably also needs to learn grammar rules if his score is that low
if he does the above two he can get to the 700s

What year was this? SAT has much less vocab now than in the past.

1550 this month
100 percent was about vocab=when you dont understand the true meaning of a word your inferences are wrong-it has nothing to do with IQ
im suspecting this kid also doesnt know grammar rules-easily get 40-50 points on just that

[Anonymous]

im suspecting this kid also doesnt know grammar rules-easily get 40-50 points on just that

No, he did well on the grammar part, so unfortunately it will not be that easy to raise his score.

[Anonymous]

Part of the problem may be that while he does read, he prefers science fiction type books (e.g. John Scalzi, Ender's Game series) that aren't particularly challenging. But getting him to switch genres has not been easy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Part of the problem may be that while he does read, he prefers science fiction type books (e.g. John Scalzi, Ender's Game series) that aren't particularly challenging. But getting him to switch genres has not been easy.

That's more and plenty advanced for SAT

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was my daughter. She’s happily at Colorado School of Mines. It’s a good engineering school and doesn’t have a lot of humanities gen ed requirements. She leaned into her strengths and looked at schools that matched her abilities and interests.

Typ verbal correlates with math unless you are an immigrant not exposed to education in English. If so, it’s a concern given how easy SAT math is ….

Math is so easy that that Eemnglish shore should be as high as the math? Thank you for your deep wisdom, guru.

[Anonymous]

Ignore the troll.

[Anonymous]

The old paperback book "30 Days to a Better Vocabulary" works to boost verbal scores.