All Posts

This blog post has a modest goal: make the “Structure of the Text” problems so gosh-darn easy that you’d have to be drunk out of your mind to get one wrong. And also, let’s try to get them done in about a minute or less, so we have plenty of time to doodle on our scrap paper before submitting our work. Good. The goal is clear. First things first: what am I talking about when I refer to “Structure of the Text” problems. If you’ve done some SAT practice, you may already know th

The hardest part of the SAT, for me, has always been reading comprehension. Not only am I a slow reader, but my ability to grasp what is really going on is often dependent on the subject matter and how interesting or familiar I find it. I am very upfront with the fact that this area is not a natural strength for me, but it is something the SAT tests - a lot. And as an SAT tutor, sometimes students expect me to be able to help them in this area. Anyways, after considerable tri

Bullet Point Problems are the problems at the end of the SAT Reading section, and there are often about 3 of them per section, although this will vary from test to test. Since they are all in the exact same format, it is worthwhile to consider how to optimize our speed and accuracy on these problems. After analyzing a bunch of them, here's the big takeaway: You usually don't need to read the actual bullet points. Read the question, and read the answers. At least half the time

Most students think guessing on the SAT is a coin flip. It doesn't have to be.

"Careless Error" might as well read "error I don't CARE to investigate."

Quickly boost your SAT Score with a no-nonsense strategy on Time Management!

What I’m about to explain in this blog post will allow you to answer certain grammar questions in 5 seconds. I want to present 1 idea in this post and give you 2 applications for it. Minority Rule: This is the idea that if 3 of the answer choices all fit a certain pattern and one does not, the one that doesn’t is almost always correct. This is not my original finding- it is in countless SAT courses and books, and is an important thing to understand and apply. Now, 2 very comm

Dangling Modifier Questions are the grammar section's toughest problems for most students. College Board refers to grammar questions as “Standard English Conventions”, and they make up 5-7 of the 27 questions in each module (usually starting at question 15 or 16 and going until 20-22). These are the questions that ask: “Which choice completes the text so that is conforms to the conventions of Standard English” I cover a lot of the content needed to understand these questions

Here are the rules the SAT uses for punctuation. I accompany each rule with a simple example for clarity. All of the examples contain strawberries, which are my 5th favorite fruit. Colon: Independent clause before, related thought after. (She had only one goal: to eat as many strawberries as possible.) Period: Independent clause before, independent clause after. (I like strawberries. I also like pie). Semicolon: Semicolon series (a sentence with a comma list, but each item in