Improve your English scores in standardized tests and competitive exams

Students appearing for competitive exams (SAT, CAT, GMAT, GRE) often struggle with poor marks in the reading comprehension section. In general, all languages take time and effort to master and English is no exception. Here are some tips for students. Depending on the time available for preparation, you may pursue some or all of the techniques mentioned below:

1. Read a lot of books: No surprises here. Reading more is the best way to improve your reading comprehension. Students that are voracious readers, read more and faster than those that are not. They are able to understand a complex matter better in a single reading than someone else may in multiple attempts. Its important to cultivate reading as a hobby while young. Most students start with fantasy fiction like, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson etc. before moving into more advanced books like Twilight or The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Provided below is a list of books recommended by College Board for college bound students. While this list includes a lot of classics, reading current non-fiction books is equally helpful. However, if your exam is in a few months, you may need to make extra efforts.

So please read on.

2. Read an English newspaper daily, including the editorial section: Build the newspaper into your daily routine. Reading news is easy, there are a lot of facts, reporting and comments that are easy to remember. Reading the editorial section is more difficult. You are reading the editors views and analysis of a complex issue. Try to read deliberately and slowly. After reading, spend a few minutes thinking about the idea that the writer was expressing. Are you able to write down what the editorial was saying? Go back to the passage and read it again.

Now compare the editorial with what you wrote. Were you able to write down some of the concepts, most of them or all of them? You will notice a marked improvement within a few weeks of practicing this way.

Through extensive experience (both my own and other students), I strongly recommend this strategy.

3. Learn five to ten new words daily: A strong vocabulary is a major asset. You can understand more complex passages and authors and know just the appropriate word to describe a particular situation. Even if your tests are in three months, learning 5 new words daily means 450 new words added to your vocabulary. No matter where you are starting from, this improvement in vocabulary will be a huge improvement.

Reading books, reading newspaper editorials and expanding your vocabulary all help strengthen your English language foundations, especially in reading and comprehension. An average student that diligently follows the above three steps sees major improvement in three to six months.

4. Practice for your test using high quality preparation materials and online resources: Since the objective is to appear for a competitive test, you have to find high quality preparation materials and resources focused on that test.
   
   1. Start early and appear for a diagnostic test.
   2. Spend time analyzing your mistakes. This is probably the most crucial part of test preparation. Set out a day of the week (say, Sunday) when you will appear for a mock test. After the test sit down and check the answers while the test is still fresh in your head. Focus on the ones that you got wrong. What were you thinking when you chose option A instead of option D? Were you undecided between both the options and went with one over the other? Do you realize why your answer was wrong?
   3. Understand your strengths and weaknesses. After two mock tests, you should have a strong idea of the topics where you are doing well, topics where you need some improvement and topics where you need a lot of improvement. Scholarly provides a powerful online platform for SAT and ACT for high school students. The diagnostics enable the student to understand their performance, strengths and weaknesses. This allows the students to allocate their time appropriately to get the best possible results.

Time is the most important resource while preparing for an exam. Knowing where you stand and where to invest the available time wisely is crucial to getting the best possible score. You do not have time to attend all coaching classes for all topics. Identify the topics where you need help and attend those classes. Test, Practice, Rest & Repeat. It is a simple strategy.

Recommended Reading List for College-Bound Students

Author Title

1. Anonymous – Beowulf
2. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
3. Agee, James – A Death in the Family
4. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
5. Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
6. Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
7. Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
8. Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
9. Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
10. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
11. Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
12. Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote
13. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
14. Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
15. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
16. Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
17. Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
18. Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
19. Dante – Inferno
20. Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
21. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
22. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
23. Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
24. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
25. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
26. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
27. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
28. Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
29. Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
30. Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
31. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
32. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
33. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
34. Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
36. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
37. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
38. Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
39. Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
40. Homer – The Iliad
41. Homer – The Odyssey
42. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
43. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
44. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
45. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
46. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
47. James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
48. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
49. Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
50. Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
51. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
52. Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
53. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
54. Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
55. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude
56. Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
57. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
58. Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
59. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
60. O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
61. O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
62. Orwell, George – 1984
63. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
64. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
65. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
66. Poe, Edgar Allen – Selected Tales
67. Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
68. Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
69. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
70. Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
71. Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
72. Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
73. Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
74. Shakespeare, William – Julius Caesar
75. Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
76. Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
77. Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
78. Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
79. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
80. Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
81. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
82. Sophocles – Antigone
83. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
84. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
85. Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
86. Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
87. Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
88. Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
89. Thoreau, Henry – David Walden
90. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
91. Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
92. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
93. Voltaire – Candide
94. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse Five
95. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
96. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
97. Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
98. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
99. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
100. Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
101. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
102. Wright, Richard – Native Son