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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Start early and appear for a diagnostic test.
- 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?
- 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
- Anonymous – Beowulf
- Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
- Agee, James – A Death in the Family
- Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
- Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
- Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
- Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
- Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
- Camus, Albert – The Stranger
- Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
- Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote
- Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
- Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
- Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
- Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
- Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
- Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
- Dante – Inferno
- Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
- Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
- Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
- Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
- Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
- Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
- Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
- Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
- Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
- Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
- Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
- Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
- Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
- Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
- Homer – The Iliad
- Homer – The Odyssey
- Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
- Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
- James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
- James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
- Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
- Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
- Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
- Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
- London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
- Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
- Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
- Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
- Morrison, Toni – Beloved
- O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
- O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
- Orwell, George – 1984
- Orwell, George – Animal Farm
- Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
- Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
- Poe, Edgar Allen – Selected Tales
- Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
- Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
- Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
- Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
- Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
- Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
- Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
- Shakespeare, William – Julius Caesar
- Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
- Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
- Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
- Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
- Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sophocles – Antigone
- Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
- Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
- Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
- Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
- Thoreau, Henry – David Walden
- Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
- Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
- Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Voltaire – Candide
- Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse Five
- Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
- Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
- Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
- Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
- Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
- Wright, Richard – Native Son
About the Author:

Vivek Bhandari is the Chief Executive and Co-founder of Scholarly.co. He is an engineer from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM Kolkata. Vivek has worked extensively in financial services, real estate and mortgages space in USA, Europe, and India.
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