by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 30, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I’m convinced that one of the top reasons people lose points unnecessarily on Fixing Sentences is that they neglect to actually plug their chosen answer back into the sentence and consider it in context.
While in some cases an answer may be clearly better worded or more grammatically correct than all the others, in many other cases multiple answers may appear perfectly correct on their own. In such cases — especially ones in which you are dealing with a large amount of underlined information — you should take the extra time and double-check that your answer actually works in terms of syntax, clarity, and punctuation.
It is crucial that you pay attention to the punctuation aspect, particularly to the existing (non-underlined) commas within a sentence. This is because the comma splice (two full sentences joined only by a comma) is among the two or three most common types of wrong answer choices, and it shows up constantly. Constantly. If you’re facing a full sentence on one side a comma, you can’t have a full sentence on the other side. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds or how much sense it makes in context — it’s always going to be wrong.
For example:
During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, whereby they forbade artisans to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
(A) whereby they forbade artisans to leave
(B) as a result artisans were forbidden
(C) artisans were thus forbidden
(D) it being forbidden for artisans to leave
(E) and so artisans were forbidden
(A) and (D) are pretty clearly wrong, but (B), (C), and (E) all seem relatively plausible, right? Here’s the problem, though: the non-underlined portion of the sentence contains full sentence + comma, meaning that another full sentence cannot follow the comma without creating a comma splice.
If we plug these options into the sentence in turn, we get: (B) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, as a result artisans were forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
That’s two sentences separated by a comma, so that’s out.
(C) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, artisans were thus forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
That’s also two sentences separated by a comma, so it’s out too. It is very important to note that the second clause really is a full, grammatical stand-alone statement, even though it may not make logical sense outside of any context.
(E) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, and so artisans were forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
This answer correctly uses a FANBOYS conjunction to join the two sentences, thus eliminating the comma-splice problem.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 27, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
As I’ve written about before, one very helpful time and energy saving strategy on Fixing Sentences is to always start by looking at the shortest answer. Since one of the things that the SAT Writing section tests is your ability to eliminate wordy and awkward constructions, it follows logically that shorter answers are typically more likely than longer ones to be correct. Identifying the shortest answer, however, is not always as straightforward as it might seem.
Here why: One of the subtler tricks that the College Board likes to play involves altering the spacing of answer choices on the first line so that the various options appear closer to one another in length than they actually are. As a result, the shortest answer often appears to be virtually the same length as a substantially longer answer.
For example:
Traveling through Yosemite, the scenery of waterfalls
and granite peaks, which we photographed, was
beautiful.
(A) the scenery of waterfalls and granite peaks, which
we photographed, was beautiful
(B) the waterfalls and granite peaks were the beautiful
scenery we photographed
(C) we photographed the beautiful scenery of
waterfalls and granite peaks
(D) we photographed the scenery of waterfalls and
granite peaks, being beautiful
(E) what we photographed was the beautiful scenery
of waterfalls and granite peaks
All the answers look about the same, right? But actually they’re not. Look again at choice (C). Another word or two could easily fit on the top line, but it’s been truncated quite substantially so that the length of the second line will appear equal to the second line of the other answers. Even though (C), the correct answer, is only a word or two shorter than some of the other answer, it takes up a lot less space — and ETS doesn’t want that difference to be too obvious.
So when you’re looking for the shortest option, don’t just compare the ends of the answers — look at the first line, and you may be surprised at just how much of a variation there actually.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The infamous marshmallow test popped up again today in the New York Times. For those of you unfamiliar with the experiment, a group of four year-olds were given the choice between receiving one marshmallow that they could eat immediately and waiting 30 seconds for a second marshmallow. More than a decade later, their standardized-test performance was tracked, with some rather remarkable results:
The difference between a 4-year-old who can wait 30 seconds for a marshmallow, and one who can wait 15 minutes was 210 points on the SAT,” (neuroscientist Jonah) Lehrer reported. He stressed that the key to success – in test-taking, in college and beyond – is discipline, and the key to discipline is, rather ironically, learning to distract oneself. As evidence, he mentioned the children who had been successful in resisting temptation: those who turned their backs on treats or closed their eyes.
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that you’re doomed on the SAT if you were in fact the sort of four year-old who just couldn’t bear to wait an extra 30 seconds for a marshmallow. Even if you’ve never had a problem with delayed gratification, it still wouldn’t hurt to take Lehrer’s words to heart, particularly when it comes to Critical Reading.
You see, vocabulary weaknesses aside, the single biggest stumbling block for relatively high scorers (650-700) who want to make it into the stratosphere (750-800) is the unwillingness to delay gratification — that is, to avoid looking at the answer choices until after they’ve worked out the entire problem for themselves, and to avoid jumping to a particular answer just so that they can get the question over with and move on. They simply assume — repeatedly and incorrectly — that they’ll always be able to identify the correct answer when they read through the options. They therefore see no reason to cross things out or mark them or sum them up and right them down… Frankly, that’s unpleasant. It takes, well, work. Besides they’re getting pretty much everything right already. And they want that marshmallow now. That’s why their scores have a nasty tendency to plateau, leading to frustration and an even stronger desire to just get it over with. Cue the vicious cycle.
So if this happens to apply to you, remember: the answer choices are there to distract you. They’re written to sound entirely plausible, even if they’re completely preposterous. The best way to distract yourself from falling for those distractions (!) is to work systematically through every step of the problem and determine as much as you can about the correct answer so that you can’t be fooled when you look at the answer choices. Take the extra five or ten or even thirty seconds. You’ll probably get more questions right. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get yourself a marshmallow either. I’m sure you could use the sugar rush;)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 21, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
In discussions about skimming, one question that often arises is how to know when various sections of passages should be read slowly vs. skimmed through.
What makes this question so important is that it cuts to the heart of what a lot of standardized-test reading targets — namely, the ability to sort essential information (main ideas) from information of secondary importance (supporting details), and to use the “clues” that an author provides within a text to identify just what that important information is.
What that means, practically speaking, is that while you do need to read slowly enough to get the gist of a passage, you don’t have to read everything slowly — at least not the first time through. Very often, what looks like a time problem is really a problem of recognizing when it’s ok to skim through things and, consequently, of getting overly caught up in irrelevant details. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 19, 2011 | Blog, Issues in Education
The New York Times reported several days ago that SAT Verbal scores are down.
Granted the drop isn’t immense — three points in Reading (to 497), two in Writing (to 489) — but it’s still generating a fair amount of hand-wringing. Given that the Writing section is the most straightforward section to prep for, I find it perversely impressive that 1) Writing scores have been consistently lower than scores in the other two sections; and that 2) average Writing scores have actually dropped every year since the section was introduced in 2005 (although the number of 700-800 scores spiked by about 5,000 this year).
Among the proposed reasons for the drop are shifting demographics, including an increasing number of students who speak more than one language at home (27 percent up from 19 percent a decade ago) and an increasingly narrow focus on preparation for state-mandated standardized tests.
Based on what I’ve observed, I think that there’s also something else going on here. As a disclaimer, let me say that most of the students I work with are decidedly not disadvantaged (some of them attend schools that are more selective than most of the Ivy League — for kindergarten), but nevertheless, I have noticed some disturbing trends in their schoolwork, trends that I suspect are probably echoed at schools both private and public.
First, the total, utter absence of vocabulary tests. Some of my students tell me that the last vocabulary test they had was in fifth grade. Some of them tell me that they’ve just plain never had a vocabulary test. It’s no wonder that they have spend their time cramming hundreds or even thousands of words before the SAT — they’re trying to stuff into a period of months the kind of knowledge that is better acquired over a period of years. And because they’re memorizing words from lists or flash cards rather than encountering them in the more organic context of actual reading, they often miss the kinds of nuances and/or second meanings that the SAT is fond of testing (e.g. “to embroider” can mean “to invent,” not just “to sew.”)
Which brings me to my second point: more and more, I’m encountering students who, with the exception of a Shakespeare play or two, rarely have to read works written before the twentieth century.
Occasionally I’ll be called on to help someone with a paper on Dickens or Twain, but very, very rarely anything before that. Far more frequently, my students are required to read novels written over the past few decades. While there’s nothing wrong with contemporary fiction per se, I’m going to pull out my uber (literary) conservative Harold Bloom-esque claws and say that a lot of it just shouldn’t have a place in the high school classroom. By focusing on works that students can relate to, schools deprive them of the chance to grapple with unfamiliar vocabulary, characters, and situations, as well as the opportunity to decode challenging literal meanings. If these skills aren’t built up steadily over a long period of time, they can be almost impossible to develop in a flash when the SAT rolls around. It’s no surprise that most students are utterly flummoxed by the “Miss Keeldar” and “Trabb’s boy” passages in the Blue Book — the language and diction are so foreign to them that they simply have no idea how to make sense of what’s being said.
As for the Writing section… well, let’s just say that I’m overjoyed, not to mention shocked, when a student can actually identify a preposition, never mind a prepositional phrase. I’ve had maybe five students who could absolutely nail comma splices off the bat (indicating they knew what a sentence was), and many have continued to struggle with the distinction between the simple past (“went”) and the past perfect (“had gone”) for months. Even when they’ve covered the same grammar in French or Spanish, they’ve learned it so poorly that they can’t establish any relationship between it and the English grammar on the SAT.
While I don’t doubt that there are a handful of very rigorous high schools that are still doing an exceptional job of inculcating the skills necessary to ace the SAT, the vast majority — at least from what I can tell — are simply not.
So what to do?
Dump the test (as Fair Test would have it)? Or, perhaps, take a good, hard look at what’s actually being taught in American schools…?
