Why Indian Students Score Lower on SAT Reading and Writing - And How to Fix It

We often observe a trend in students who appear for the SAT. They score well in SAT Math by securing 750+ marks, but get stuck at 550-600 in Reading and Writing. Even after hours of practice and a strong foundation of English at school, the scores on the SAT remain low.

In this Tutela Prep blog, we will address this issue of low SAT scores, especially in the case of Indian students and the way the issue can be solved.

Why does SAT Reading and Writing feel so different for Indian Students?

Many Indian school assessments reward recall, syllabus familiarity, and long-form answers. The SAT instead rewards evidence-based reasoning, precision, and elimination. SAT Reading and Writing only reward logic, inferences, tone and the author’s intent. It expects students to not only find the required information, but to analyse how and why the passage is structured.

Indian students are adept at grammar rules, but often struggle to apply them when under pressure. 

#CTA#SAT Vocab List

Mistakes students make during SAT preparation 

While preparing for the SAT Reading and Writing sections, students often make some costly mistakes:

1. Solving full mock tests every day: Students directly jump into solving practice questions as they feel it is just simple English that they’ve been practising all their lives, and do not spend enough time and consideration into reviewing their mistakes deeply.
2. Overlooking grammar foundations: At times, students might feel complacent about their grammar skills and overlook basic grammatical errors like punctuation, modifiers and sentence rules.
3. Reading too slowly: There is a major section of students who often struggle to complete the SAT Reading and Writing due to their slow pace of reading. Those who already have a fairly low command over the language often spend significant amounts of time trying to understand every single word while reading, which hampers their speed and performance.
4. Choosing answers based on gut feelings: Many students make the grave mistake of selecting answers that sound or look right to them instead of using their analysis and supportive evidence for their answers. The SAT often tests this by placing attractive distractor options intentionally.
    

How to improve SAT Reading and Writing

There are some simple but effective ways to improve all the common mistakes and boost your scores in this section:

1. Learn or revise grammar topic-wise: It is highly recommended that before you dive into the preparation of SAT Reading and Writing, you brush up on your grammar skills first. This will not only help you solidify your grammatical foundation but also help you identify and cover any pre-existing loopholes. Focus on topics like Subject-verb agreement, Modifiers, punctuation, Transitions, and Concision.
2. Stop reading the passages like school textbooks: It is important to practice and learn to read the SAT passages to identify arguments, tone, purpose and inferences from text. SAT Reading and Writing passages are meant for testing students’ interpretation and not their memory or word meaning.
3. Build the habit of elimination: Like any other exam with multiple-choice questions, this is one of the most effective hacks to learn. Since SAT deliberately gives confusing options, it is useful to develop the skill of removing unnecessary options that contain exaggerated words, unsupportive statements, and partially correct options.
4. Analyse mistakes properly: Instead of getting demotivated or ignoring mistakes, it is highly advisable to analyse your mistakes while solving mock papers and PYQs. Recognise the pattern of your mistakes to improve your scores exponentially.
    

The Digital SAT

The Digital SAT’s Reading and Writing section has some changes, but the core motive remains the same. The new Digital SAT Reading and Writing has shorter passages to reduce the fatigue of the students. However, the questions still emphasise testing your reasoning skills and precision, and the pressure to complete within the stipulated time still matters. It simply means you need a sharper focus instead of a long attention span.

With Tutela Prep’s SAT course and smart guidance, all the above hiccups are taken care of meticulously within the coursework. Thus, it ensures the student prepares with structure and less confusion without feeling overwhelmed by so many dos and don’ts. 

SAT Reading and Writing improvement doesn’t just happen with studying harder or longer. It just improves through effective and analytical reading, understanding mistakes carefully, and understanding the requirements of the exam. Once students can achieve these skills, scoring high becomes a far more achievable outcome.