SAT Sentence Completion Questions: When to Guess?

In this prepcast, Ill discuss sentence completion SAT questions. Ultimately, if you started early and developed a great vocabulary, youll be in great shape answering questions on this section of the test. If youre a little late developing your vocabularly and the SAT test is in two weeks, dont panic! Ill discuss how you can still prepare and the overall strategy on when to guess. If youre new to ePrep, I encourage you to visit our earlier series on SAT vocabulary

I want to talk to for a couple of minutes about the sentence completion questions in the critical reading section. Sentence completion is when they give you a sentence and they leave one or two blanks and youre then asked to fill in the blank or blanks with the answer choices.

My advice is this, if you can read the sentence and fill in the blank on your own on what word you think would go in there and then look through the answer choices and either find that word or one that would means the same thing thats ideal you pick and you move on.

Lets say your vocabulary is not great. You think you know what word would go in and you look through the list and you dont see that word anywhere. But you do see two answer choices that you do know the definition of and you know that those two dont work; they dont fit into the sentence. So cross out those two eliminate them you then have three left and even if you dont know what the three words mean statically speaking its to your advantage to guess at this point. If you can eliminate two or more answers go for it and guess. But ultimately you might be right before the SATs you might not be able to improve your vocabulary in the next week.

For the younger students who may be watching this video, if you get started freshman, sophomore even at the beginning of junior year working on your vocabulary you can make a huge huge difference in your critical reading score. I have a pretty good vocabulary. I go through the sentence completion questions a lot with students and their easy for me not because Ive seen them before but because I know what all the words mean.

So ultimately if you know what the words mean you have a great vocabulary its going to be easy for you. If you dont your running out of time dont panic. Again, try to pick a word that would fit in your own mind. See if you can find it or one that means the same thing. And if you cant and you only know two words out of the five and you know they dont work cross them out and guess; thats the way you maximize your score

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