Hot Tip: Order the SAT Question and Answer Service (QAS)

For students who take the SAT in January, May or October, the College Board offers what it calls its Question-and-Answer Service or QAS.

With the Question-and-Answer Service, you’ll get:

* A copy of the SAT questions for the specific testing administration
* A record of your answers, the correct answers, and additional scoring instructions
* Information about the type of test questions and levels of difficulty of the questions

The QAS is a very valuable tool for improving your SAT score because you receive a copy of the actual test you took along with your answers to all of the questions. Using QAS, you can see specifically which questions you missed so you know exactly what you need to work on to improve.

SAT QAS can be ordered at the time you register for the test and/or any time within five months after the test date. Be aware that QAS reports take a while (6-8 weeks) to send so you may not receive yours before the next SAT test date. Best to order as early as possible.

The fee for the service is currently $18.

To order the QAS for a test you’ve already taken, sign in to the College Board website and go to the ‘My Scores’ page where you should see a link to order the ‘QAS’. You can also call the College Board and order over the phone.

Alternatively, you can download and fill out the Answer Reporting Services Order Form (PDF) and mail it in with a check or money order. However, at the time of this writing, the College Board hasn’t yet updated its form from last year so probably best simply to call or order online.

SAT Critical Reading: Answering Line Number Questions

Always read a few lines above and below the line numbered portion of text to understand its context. The SAT counts on students simply reading only the specific text cited by the line number. For this reason, most line number questions include false answer choices that appear correct when a line is read on its own, but not when read in context of the larger passage. Reading above and below is the key to getting the correct answer because the information you need from the passage is usually located nearby (but not within) the text cited by line number.

Tip:
Between 2/3 and 3/4 of all SAT Passage Reading questions in any given long passage question set include at least one line number reference.

SAT Critical Reading: How to Handle Hard Sentence Completions

Vocabulary based questions appear on the SAT in the form of Sentence Completions. Sentence Completion questions omit either one or two words from a sentence, and ask you to choose from a list of possible word choices to complete the sentence. Because Sentence Completions appear in order of difficulty from easiest at the beginning to hardest at the end, the hardest of these questions lie at the end of each Sentence Completion question group.

Don’t get stuck on hard Sentence Completions and waste time that should be spent on Passage Reading. Hard sentence completion questions are some of the most challenging questions on the entire SAT. The sentences are difficult to interpret and the vocabulary answer choices are even tougher. What’s more, hard Sentence Completion questions usually include trick answers (known as ‘attractors’) that sound like the correct answer, but in reality mean something completely different than the word the question is looking for.

Beware! Hard Sentence Completion questions can mess up your entire Critical Reading score. The temptation here is to waste valuable time pondering vocabulary words you don’t know, only to then desperately guess at the attractors. When you do this, not only are you likely to answer these hard questions incorrectly (and lose points!), but also, and even more importantly, you lose the precious time you need to answer the later Passage Reading questions that make up the bulk of your Critical Reading score.

Skip hard Sentence Completion questions and come back to them at the end if you have time. If you do not know the word the Sentence Completion question is looking for, or cannot confidently eliminate at least THREE answer choices, skip the question. Remember, it is far more important to finish the Critical Reading section than to waste too much time trying to answer some of the hardest questions on the whole test – especially if you can’t even eliminate most of the incorrect words.

Adapted from my SAT training guide: SAT Unlocked.