Remember that the essay is worth 30% of your raw score, and the multiple choice is worth 70%. College Board has information online that may help you: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/prep_one/writing_approaches.html , and information about solving each type of multiple choice question, as well as practice questions: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/prep_one/sent_errors/pracStart.html .

In addition to practice tests and questions, try to review grammar concepts, either in a review book or online there’s a lot of good information. In identifying sentence errors and improving sentences, pay particular attention to subject-verb agreement—they like to test that a lot, because it’s something that’s going by the wayside in spoken English grammar. On improving sentences, the correct answer is NEVER in the passive voice, and will almost never have a preposition at the end. Read the sentences in your head with your chosen answer, make sure it SOUNDS right. The less complicated the answer, the better—the wrong answers usually weirdly complicate the sentences. That sort of thing, but you don’t just need pointers, you need to actually improve your understanding of grammar! If you can, read a few fiction books with more complex grammatical structure throughout—The Scarlet Letter, Crime and Punishment, something like that—to improve your grammar skills and get you used to how more complicated grammar sounds.

And even if you don’t do as well as you’d like on the writing section, that doesn’t put you out of the running for UCs. Even at UC Berkeley, for example, the middle range of students admitted scored 590 – 710 on the writing portion—a score in the low 600s would put you in that range, and if your scores on the other sections were sufficiently high, a lower writing score would not completely kill your chances, especially if you’ve got a good GPA and some good extracurricular activities on your résumé. Use College Board’s college search to find information for other Colleges, too: http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=988&profileId=6 , to see what you’re up against and what scores you need to aim for.

Good luck!

If you are trying to get into the UCs, you might be fine getting a score in the lower 600s. Maybe not Berkeley, but you should still have a good shot at a lot of the other ones if other factors in your application, like your grades and high-level classes, are good. If your stumbling block is the essay, I don’t know what to tell you–I got 9s on teh essay both times I took the test. I know you are supposed to write a plan (with examples and maybe a word or two about what points you want to bring up about the example) for the essay before you start writing. I know part of my problem was realizing I had an example that was too hard to fit into the essay without sounding strange because I didn’t plan what my points would be about the example.

Did you try pinpointing your weaknesses? If you purchase Princeton Review’s 11 SAT’s, you can go to www.review.com to fill in your answers for their tests. They generate a summary of the types of questions you get wrong (i.e. questions testing redundancy).