Though there is no replacement for hard work, but there are certain strategies, which can be applied to improve your SAT score. The strategies are powerful means to transform what you already know into higher SAT scores.

These help you learn critical thinking skills so you can analyze a problem and determine the right answer and enable you to solve a question in a shortest possible time. Also these help you make intelligent guesses and guide you on when not to guess. Here are a few of the strategies that have been discussed.

Increasing your SAT Vocabulary

Approximately 50% of the questions in the verbal section test your vocabulary, directly or indirectly. Therefore if you try to find any shortcuts in learning vocabulary, you might end up with a poor score against your name in the verbal section. Apart from the good old wordlist, there are certain complementary things that can help in increasing the vocabulary:-
High Frequency Words: Rather than learning anything and everything in vocabulary (which is not advisable when the time is less), one must know the difficult and common words, which keep appearing on SAT.

Pictographs - Using pictures to learn words is very efficient and effective method of learning vocabulary as it also involves the right side of the brain i.e. the creative aspect of the brain.

For instance; To learn the meaning of the word BALEFUL; which means harmful or threatening picture this:
A large bale of cotton is about to fall on the head of a boy. This is certainly a threatening or harmful situation for the boy. So bale helps you know the meaning of baleful.

Improving your Critical Reading performance

Always look for the main idea of each paragraph. If you cannot find the main idea, then irrespective of the time spent on the passage, the test can confuse the student. Work on the concept of the "topic sentence". SAT paragraphs often contain such a sentence that summarizes the central point of the paragraph. When you find one, underline it.

Acing the math multiple choice questions

The choices in math multiple-choice questions are arranged from smallest to largest number. If there is a question to be solved through the choices, then try the (C) choice (the middle number). If you require a smaller number, then try (A) or (B) choice and if you require a larger number then try putting in (D) or (E) choice.

Speeding through Quantitative Comparisons