Can tutoring really raise Critical Reading scores

Im writing this in response to the SAT Reading vs. Math post over at Kitchen Table Math. In case you dont want to read the entire post, the gist of it was essentially that college tend to be more impressed by high Critical Reading scores than they are by high Math scores because SAT Reading scores essentially cant be raised through tutored (although Catherine was nice enough to cite me as the exception to that rule!). So, as someone who spends a good deal of time on this purportedly impossible task, my response to the assertion that CR is somehow un-tutorable would be no and yes. Or rather, it depends. Before I launch into my reasons, however, Id like to say that tutoring CR is one of the hardest parts of my job. For starters, its completely exhausting I spent about three-and-a-half hours one day this past weekend just doing CR (one of those hours was devoted *just* to working on how to determine a main point), and I had to go home and sleep afterward. Teaching CR ruins me for the day; it wears me out mentally so much that I often just have to wander around the city aimlessly for a few hours to recover. Dont get me wrong: I enjoy teaching it, and when I finally have a breakthrough with someone, its hugely rewarding. But it is hard. I think that this is because teaching CR at least the way I do it is not just about the SAT; its actually about teaching people to read closely (Dont tell me approximately what the author says. Look at the passage no, look at the passage and tell me exactly what the author is saying. Exactly as in word for word.) and to draw relationships between specific words and their functions or the more abstract categories they represent (Yes, the passage talks specifically about women artists, but the fact that theyre referred to as a group of individuals in the answer choice doesnt mean you should eliminate it. Think about whom that phrase is referring to). A few of my students see these relationships naturally. Most do not. Some lack the decoding skills to even begin to draw these relationships, but the majority fall some somewhere in between. But back to the original question: when it tutoring effective for raising a CR score, and when is it not? My first response would be, define raise. Are we talking 50 points? 100 points? 200 points? Most people will get something out of high-quality tutoring, but its probably unrealistic to expect someone with a 550 to try for an 800 at least in the short term. And the higher scores go, the harder it is to raise them the margin of error is so tiny, sometimes even a question or two out of 67, that it almost comes down to chance. (For the record, I have gotten people from the mid-600s to 800, but they had virtually no comprehension problems and were willing to work very, very carefully and do everything I said). The second thing I would say is that the crucial factor isnt the persons baseline score but rather their actual skill at understanding relationships between words (for sentence completions) and comprehending the meaning of relatively sophisticated texts. Kids who have no trouble understanding what the passages are literally saying but who work too quickly and fall for wrong answers because they dont read carefully or think through the questions probably have at least the potential to score in the high 600s or 700s. Ive had students in this category who started around 500 (junior PSAT) and ended up close to 700 (senior SAT). On the other hand, someone with a poor vocabulary and trouble perceiving relationships between words, plus weak comprehension skills is probably not going to make it past 600 with strategy-based tutoring alone. If the person is willing to spend very significant amounts of time reading and working on vocabulary independently, thats a different story, but that is not realistically the case for most high school juniors. Ive helped students in that situation move from the low to the high 500s, but they all got stuck below the 600 line. In that case, the SAT does precisely what it was designed to do: it reveals persistent weaknesses in comprehension, and theres really no way to beat it past a certain point. So in general, I think that high-quality CR tutoring can be effective insofar as it allows people to take the fullest advantage of the reading skills they do have. But the 600 and 700 walls are there for a reason students who dont read much on their own and who dont really understand how texts work (how authors play with language to convey a point, how very common words can be used in unexpected ways to mean different things, and how specific phrasings relate to broader concepts), and no amount of test-prep alone will typically get them past it.