How to Raise SAT Scores

From the archive: first published September 19, 2011, when SAT reading and writing scores had just posted another decline. The underlying advice still holds.

In 2011, the news on the SAT was bad and unsurprising: reading and writing scores had declined again. Verbal scores for 17-year-olds — one of the broadest measures we have of how well schools teach — had been sliding since the 1970s and never fully recovered. Commentators argued over demographics, schools, and screen time.

For students, the debate didn't matter much. What mattered was practical: what actually raises a score?

Read more, and read hard. The reading section rewards years of reading, not weeks of cramming. Students who read challenging material regularly — newspapers, long-form essays, real books — recognize sentence structures and vocabulary the test keeps recycling.

Learn vocabulary in context. Memorizing word lists helps less than learning how words behave in sentences. When you meet a new word, write down the whole sentence, not just the word.

Take full-length practice tests under real conditions. Timing is half the battle on the SAT. Students who have sat through a full, timed, no-interruption practice test stop panicking in the real one. Review every wrong answer and, just as importantly, every lucky guess.

Treat the essay as a structure exercise. The old SAT essay rewarded a clear position, a few concrete examples, and clean organization — not originality. Plan for two minutes, write for the rest, and leave a minute to fix your thesis sentence.

Fix the basics first. Scores plateau when students skip foundations: grammar rules tested repeatedly, the handful of math concepts that make up most of the quantitative section, and reading-speed drills.

None of this is glamorous. But for a test that measures years of preparation compressed into one Saturday morning, boring fundamentals beat clever tricks every time.