College Resource Center

You’ve gone over the “SAT prep and what to expect” guide and know what you’ll find in the SAT exam. You’ve studied and prepared yourself for the exam, you’ve read the “How to take tests” article, and now, here’s how College Board suggests you work through the Reading section of the SAT.

Overall

• Answer easier questions first as all questions are worth the same number of points regardless of the type of difficulty.
• If you don’t know what a word means in a sentence completion or reading passage, consider related words, familiar sayings and phrases, roots, prefixes and suffixes. Have you ever heard or seen a word that may be related to it?
• In your test booklet, mark each question you don’t answer so that you can easily go back to it later if you have time.

Sentence Completion

• Work on sentence completion questions first. They take less time to answer than the passage-based reading questions. The difficulty of sentence completion questions increases as you answer them in order.

Reading Questions

• Reading questions do not increase in difficulty from easy to hard. Instead, they follow the logic of the passage.
• Reading carefully is the key to finding the correct answer. The information you need to answer each reading question is always in the passage(s). Don’t be misled by an answer that looks correct but is not supported by the actual text of the passage(s).
• Reading questions often include line numbers to help direct you to the relevant part(s) of the passage. If one word or more is quoted exactly from the passage, the line number(s) where the quotation can be found will appear in the test question. You may have to read some of the passage before or after the quoted word however, in order to find support for the best answer to the question.
• Do not jump from passage to passage. Stay with the passage until you’ve answered as many questions as you can before you proceed to the next passage.

Read more on How to take tests
Additional SAT test taking information can be found at here