SAT English
General Introduction:
The SAT’s critical reading section will test students’ ability to read and understand college-level material. Colleges want to know whether a student will be able to comprehend written material quickly and make accurate inferences. Our course will cement the skills necessary to succeed on the SAT’s verbal sections—valuable preparation both for the test and the students’ future.
Program and Instruction Content:
Our curriculum is divided into four parts: vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, and writing. Students will learn the most common words that appear consistently on the SAT as well as how to memorize them. Despite this preparation, students can still expect to encounter during the test words that they have never seen before. Therefore, students will also learn how to figure out what such a word means by dissecting it into its Latin parts (roots, suffix, prefix) and by using the context of the question.
The reading comprehension section of our curriculum will focus on “strategic reading”—learning how to anticipate and “read for” the questions in order to save time and increase accuracy. Students will also receive lessons on logic rules, which tend to recur in the reading comprehension segment (logic questions also appear as word problems in the SAT Math section). This aspect of our curriculum will also emphasize individual instruction; instructors will work closely with each student on their own level of reading comprehension.
Students will also learn all of the grammar rules that must be mastered to succeed on the SAT’s verbal section. Students will be drilled and tested to ensure that they can recognize and avoid the common grammar mistakes that the SAT will attempt to trick them into making. Of course, our class will also instruct proper methods for practicing the SAT in order to optimize study time. We will also go over frequently asked questions and strategies about guessing and time management during the test.
The essay writing section of our curriculum will cover the formula for writing a successful SAT essay and will give individualized feedback on their compositions. This class will go beyond mastering the SAT essay by giving students the tools to create a superior college application essay.
Tests and Homework:
Students will be expected to take full-length verbal section practice tests at home. Tests will also be administered and proctored during class to track students’ progress and to simulate the timed test environment. Homework assigned after every class will be graded, and students will receive prompt and individual feedback.
Prerequisites:
It is recommended but not required that students have completed 9th grade level English. Students must bring to class one or two recent essays or research papers that they wrote for any English assignment in school.