How to Score a 750+ on SAT English Without Reading the Passages
- Laura (Heslin) Whitmore
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Laura Whitmore
If SAT reading passages make you feel like you’re running in circles—reading the same lines over and over again and still thinking What did I just read?—you’re not alone. The digital SAT’s reading section is faster, denser, and trickier than before. But the good news is that you don’t need to read every word to get the answer right. In fact, after 18 years of tutoring and a 1590 on my recent SAT, I’ve developed a strategy that makes a huge portion of the reading section unbelievably efficient.
Want to skip the reading? Head over to my YouTube video instead!
⚡️ The Last-Sentence Strategy: ⚡️
The SAT Reading Shortcut You’ve Been Missing
On the digital SAT, the passages are short, compressed, and often structured so that the core argument appears at the very end. That final line frequently gives you the author’s conclusion, their claim, or the most important idea the question is targeting.
Students often fall into the trap of reading and rereading the entire passage for clarity, but on this new SAT, you usually don’t have to.
The test writers pack so much meaning into that final sentence that it becomes the most valuable real estate in the whole passage. This means you can safely skip the confusion, skip the fluff, and go straight to the heart of the argument.
❓ When This Strategy Works Best ❓
The last-sentence strategy is incredibly effective for most passages in the early-to-middle portion of the reading set—typically questions 5 through 10.
These passages often focus on straightforward claims, simple arguments, or directly supported ideas. The questions tend to ask things like:
“Which statement is best supported…?”
“According to the text…”
“What does the text most strongly suggest…?”
These are the kinds of questions where the last sentence gives you exactly what you need.
It can also work for some later questions, especially graph questions or support/undermine questions—anything where the claim tends to be stated clearly at the end. But for extremely technical science passages or advanced inference questions, you may need a bit more reading. Still, by saving time from the earlier passages with this strategy, you’ll have more mental bandwidth to tackle the tougher ones later.
⏱️ How This Strategy Saves You Time ⏱️
The SAT reading section is designed to overwhelm you. The test makers throw in unnecessary details, unfamiliar terms, and complicated phrasing—not to deepen your understanding, but to waste your time.
Focusing on the last sentence cuts straight through the noise.
You’re no longer stuck decoding every line. You don’t waste precious minutes rereading. Instead, you extract the central idea instantly and match it to the answer choices using synonym-matching, one of the most underrated SAT reading skills.
This makes the test feel simpler, cleaner, and far more manageable.
🐾 The Strategy in Action 🐾
Example 1: “Best Supported by the Text”
Last sentence: “Historians of capitalism tend to focus on longitudinal economic data drawn from archival records, which do not exist for much of pre-colonial Africa.”
Even without reading the rest of the passage, you can pull out the key idea: the usual data isn’t available for Africa, so scholars must use different evidence.
When you scan the answer choices, the correct one becomes obvious—the one saying the scholars rely on different types of evidence. Everything else is off-topic.
Example 2: “Text Most Strongly Suggests”
Last sentence: “The play’s refusal of narrative coherence thus hinges on the sense of spatial fragmentation that the venue’s immense and intricate layout generates.”
The important phrases here are “hinges on” and “spatial fragmentation.” The play depends on the venue.
So the right answer is the one that says the production depends on that specific performance environment and would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Example 3: “Support the Hypothesis”
Last sentence: “Wider-headed fish will be less likely than narrower-headed fish to detect obstructions.”
You now know the hypothesis is a direct comparison: wide-headed fish perform worse.
The correct answer? The one where wide-headed fish bump into more obstacles than narrow-headed fish. Any answer that only mentions one type of fish is incomplete and therefore incorrect.
Example 4: “Main Idea”
Last sentence: “Users employed cognitive mechanisms to mitigate those feelings, ultimately reversing their initial sense of disappointment.”
If disappointment was reversed, users became more satisfied. If they mitigated negative feelings, their contentment increased.
So, the correct answer reflects the idea that even after negative initial reactions, users ended up feeling content with the technology.
💯 Practice Makes Perfect 💯
Like any strategy, mastery comes with repetition. The key is learning to trust the last sentence even when it feels uncomfortable. Yes, you may not fully understand the passage. Yes, the handlebars might feel like they’re falling off. But the SAT rewards synonym-matching far more than full comprehension.
If you want to go deeper into this method—and learn all the other reading strategies I personally used to hit my 1590—my Self-Paced Digital SAT English Course is the best place to start. It includes hours of exclusive video lessons, drills, and guided practice designed to make the reading section feel straightforward.
Until then, keep practicing smarter—not harder—and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your confidence grows.
Happy prepping!
