by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 31, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Because of the nature of my job, I tend to get a lot of students with very significant imbalances between their math and verbal scores. Most people scoring a 760 in Math without much prep just don’t bother with math tutors, although the same people sometimes find themselves stuck in the 600s or even the 500s in Reading and Writing. What I look at the (full) tests of students like these, however, what often strikes me the most is the difference between the sheer amount of stuff they’ve written in the Math sections vs. the CR sections.
Even just glancing at the math, I can see that they’ve really worked those problems out. In fact, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to do otherwise. There are equations scribbled all over the place. Maybe not for every question, but often enough for it to be clear that they haven’t been approaching the SAT like some kind of glorified guessing game but rather solving the problems. They might use their knowledge of a particular rule to eliminate answers quickly, but at no point have they simply decided to abandon working things out in favor of making a guess they hope will be right.
The same, alas, cannot be said for the Reading. Sure, they’ve probably underlined and circled some things in the passages, maybe written the main point and perhaps the tone, but the spaces next to the questions are totally and completely blank. Even if they’ve made an attempt to reason their way through the problem, they haven’t bothered to write down all the steps. More likely, though, it hasn’t really occurred to them that they *can* approach CR in more or less the same way they would approach Math What seems like an obvious way to work through a math problem seems far less obvious when applied to reading — especially since they’ve never been asked to think about reading in quite that way before.
What really gets me, though, is that even after I demonstrate — in some cases, multiple times — how to work through a CR question step by step like a math problem, writing down each part of the process and moving systematically through the choices when the answer isn’t initially obvious, they still refuse to even attempt to replicate the process on their own. (Actually, after I demonstrate the first time, they usually give me a look that says approximately, “Oh s–t! That looks like a lot of work. No way, there has to be an easier way to do it.” Um, no, there isn’t.) It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that this was how I got an 800, and that if they’re really serious about wanting one as well, they need to make themselves go through the entire process. They still want the magical shortcut that’ll get them a perfect score without having to work quite so hard. Guess what, folks: it doesn’t exist. The closest thing to a fail-safe technique I have for getting an 800 on CR is this, take or leave it.
So having said that, I want to work through what is quite possibly the hardest CR question I know of — one that absolutely demands to be worked out like an equation and that pretty much every student I’ve ever had, no matter how high they ultimately scored, screwed up on. (True confession: I actually had to look at the answer the first time I saw it. It was only when I went back that I was able to work out the reasoning behind it). It’s from the College Board Test 4, section 6, question 20, p. 592.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I would actually write all of my reasoning down. Note that I constantly, quasi-obsessively reiterate both what the question is asking and the point of the paragraph. It may seem excessive, but it’s necessary. It’s the only way to leave no room for error.
Paragraph 2
Things that live by night live outside the realm of “normal” time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good, people who have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms. Also night is when we dream, and so reality is warped. After all, we do not see very well at night, we do not need to. But that makes us nearly defenseless after dark. Although we are accustomed to mastering our world by day , in the night we become vulnerable as prey. Thinking of bats as masters of the night threatens the safety we daily take for granted. Though we are at the top of our food chain, if we had to live alone in the rain forest, say, and protect ourselves against roaming predators, we would live partly in terror, as our ancestors did. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw – a ghoul.
Which of the following assertions detracts LEAST from the author’s argument in the second paragraph (lines 25-42)?
(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer’s personal life
Solution:
1. Since the question is phrased in a somewhat convoluted manner, we need to make sure that we are absolutely clear about what is actually being asked before we do anything else. The question is asking us which option detracts LEAST.
That means that the four incorrect answers will detract from (go against) the argument and the correct answer will not detract from the argument.
It does not, however, mean that the correct option will SUPPORT the argument. Just because an idea does not explicitly go against an argument does not mean that it supports it; there might just be no relationship.
So we are simply looking for something that does not contradict the argument.
2. The next step is to determine what the argument actually is. While the question gives us a lot of lines to read, they can be pretty much summed up AND WRITTEN DOWN as follows:
-Humans sleep @ night and think it’s normal, get scared by stuff that’s awake @ night b/c = abnormal.
-Bats don’t sleep @ night, THUS: B/c bats assoc. w/dark = scary.
Notice that I’ve crammed down the paragraph into just the essential, disregarding the details entirely.
3. Before we look at the answers, we need to consider very clearly what we are looking for. The question asks us to find the answer that does NOT explicitly contradict the idea that bats & stuff @ night = scary. It might not support that idea, but it won’t go against it either. So now we consider the answers.
(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
If many people work at night and sleep during the day, they go against typical patterns. But that happens all the time and people don’t get scared. So that DOES detract from the idea that night is only for scary stuff, and we can eliminate the answer.
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
Again, owls go against normal human patterns but NOT scary. So that also detracts from the idea that night = scary stuff. It can be eliminated.
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
But scary stuff is supposed to happen @ night, not during the day. So that detracts from the idea that scary stuff just comes out @ night. It can be eliminated.
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
This is dealing with the other main point in the paragraph: bats = scary. But if bats are really so scary for everyone, then they shouldn’t be associated w/positive qualities. So this DOES detract from the idea that bats = scary. It can be eliminated as well.
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer’s personal life
Since we’ve reasoned through the other options and have determined that they cannot be correct, this must be right. But before we pick it, we’re going to double check it against the original question to make sure that it works. This is part of the whole “not leaving yourself any room for error” thing, and if you want to certain, you can’t leave this step out.
We know that the right answer will not detract from the idea that bats/night = scary, and this option has nothing whatsoever to do with that idea. And if it has nothing to do with that idea, it can detract from it. It does, however, support the idea that bats/night = scary; it just does NOT detract from it. So it’s right.
Most of my students groan when I explain the logic to them; it seems so ridiculously convoluted. And such an outrageous amount of work. But there is no other way to figure it out. Even if some people can get the answer very fast, they’re still going through the entire process — they’re just doing it at warp speed.
Now to be fair, this question is very extreme. Most don’t have anywhere near this level of complexity. The problem is that there are always a couple of outliers that have something close to it, and those are the questions that separate the 800s from the mid-700s. I’ll admit that working like this does not initially feel natural. It can be time consuming (although in reality no more time consuming than staring blankly at the answers), but it’s also the sort of thing that gets faster the more you practice it. You have to be able to do it before you can do do it fast. Even if you screw it up the first few (or twenty) times you try to do it, practicing the approach is what counts. You’re dealing with the SAT in terms of what it’s actually testing — your ability to reason your way logically through complex material — and that’ll get you a lot further than looking at it just about any other way.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 18, 2011 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
As I’ve said before, I’m generally suspicious when people claim to have timing issues on Critical Reading. While I certainly appreciate that some people read much faster than others and do work on timing when necessary, the time itself is almost never the real root of the problem. Upon doing a bit of probing, I typically discover one of two things:
1) The student has genuine comprehension issues, weak vocabulary skills, and rereads portions of a passage three or four times just trying to understand what’s literally being said. Ditto for the answer choices.
2) The student has solid comprehension skills but an incomplete understanding of what they’re looking for when they read the passages. Like the students in the first category, they tend to waste a lot of time staring at answer choices and trying to distinguish between them without really understanding how to relate them back to the passage. Equipped with some tools for understanding just what to look out for, however, they tend to get rid of their timing issues very quickly.
If you fall into category #2, this post is for you.
Part of the problem for people in this category often comes from not fully understanding what line references mean: if a question refers to “the historians in line 18,” that only means that the word “historians” appears in line 18 — not that the answer to the question is in line 18. The answer could be anywhere.
Usually, this type of misunderstanding plays out in the following way:
You encounter a question that says something like, “In lines 25-37, the author’s description of photo albums serves primarily to,” and so of course you go and read lines 25-37 because those are the lines that the question gave you.
But when you read lines 25-37 and then look at the answers, nothing seems to work. At that point, you start to wonder whether you were missing something.
There are a couple of answers that just totally don’t make sense, so you cross those off, but out of the two or three answers you have left, it seems any of them could work. So you go back and read lines 25-37 again, trying to match them to one of the answers. But it still seems terribly ambiguous.
At that point, you go back and start to read the lines again, only now you realize that you’re wasting an awful lot of time on the question and start to skim through without really knowing what you’re looking for.
Then you start to think, “well maybe if I interpret it this way, it could be (B).” The author must be trying to suggest it without really saying so directly. Yeah, that must be it. So you pick B and move on but still really aren’t sure. Your mind keeps going back to it as you work through the rest of the questions in for that passage, so your concentration is compromised, and you end up missing other things that you could have gotten right.
When this happens, there’s a really good chance that the answer was actually spelled out for you somewhere around line 23. Why? Because the question was asking you what purpose the lines served (i.e. what point did they support?), not what the lines themselves said, and usually the information necessary to determine that purpose is found before the lines themselves. In these cases, the lines are only important insofar as they relate to that point — for the purposes of answering the question, they’re virtually irrelevant.
Plenty of times, of course, it doesn’t work that way, and the answer can in fact be found in the given lines. The problems is that just as often they can’t, and you really have no way of knowing in advance which category a particular question will fall into before you actually look at the passage.
So if you’re a slow-ish reader and don’t want to waste time by always backing up and reading a sentence or two before, try this: read the lines you’re given, and see whether you can definitely answer the question from what you’ve read. Not, “well if I interpret it this way, (C) might kind of work,” but “the answer must be A because this passage says xyz.” If you can’t answer the question from those lines you’ve been given, there’s a good chance the answer isn’t there. And if it isn’t there, it has has to be located someplace else. Your job is to locate that someplace else: if it isn’t right before, it’s probably right after. It doesn’t matter if it takes a little more time to go back and read that extra bit; there’s essentially no other way to determine the answer, and you’ll be far worse served if you just keep looking at the lines given in the question. Just keep in mind that if your comprehension skills really are good, the problem is most likely not that you’ve overlooked something or didn’t interpret the lines in the way the SAT wanted you to. It’s just that the answer was probably never there in the first place.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 12, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Among the tidbits of wisdom that I attempt to impart to my students is the fact that it doesn’t really matter if they understand a particular rule/concept/strategy after I’ve explained it to them once. The real test is whether they can apply at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning, when they’re still not 100% awake, and, oh yeah, are in the middle of taking an exam that will play a very significant role in determining where they spend the next four years of their lives.
In general, I do my best not to pile on the pressure for my students (they’re certainly under enough already, and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for anyone having a nervous breakdown!), but every now and then, when someone needs a reality check about what’s involved in really and truly mastering a concept, I give them that little speech. Usually it’s met with a small giggle and a look of minor incredulousness. Until they actually go through the process of taking the SAT and end up sitting in front of question 9 in section 10, desperately trying to wade through four-and-a-half hours of test-taking fatigue and figure out just what is wrong with the stupid sentence already, most people don’t fully appreciate what it means to understand comma splices.
So let me spell it out. If you haven’t taken the SAT yet, you might not quite believe, but trust me, it’s something to keep in mind as you prepare. True mastery of a particular concept, whether it be comma splices, dangling modifiers, or right triangles, means that you can always recognize when it’s being tested. Always. No matter how tired you are, no matter what you were doing beforehand, no matter how much room the people in the next room are making, no matter what angle it’s being tested from — the knowledge is just there.
If you can usually recognize comma splices on the SAT but use them rampantly in your own writing, that means you don’t fully understand them — which means that you still have the potential to get fooled on the exam.
Likewise, if formulating a clear thesis statement and composing an argument that adheres consistently to it something that’s just beginning to sink in for you, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to pull it off on the real test. This is not just a question of “getting familiar” with how the SAT works. Until you get to the point where it’s an extension of a real-life skill, one that you consistently apply in your actual schoolwork, there will always be an element of chance. (If you don’t believe me, ask a kid who got a 12 on the essay without doing a single practice run: I can virtually guarantee that coming up with a clear thesis and keeping their argument directly focused on it is something they can do in their sleep.)
I think, by the way, that this is part of why so many people perceive the SAT to be so “tricky.” If you’ve just brushed up on a couple of things for the test but haven’t fully assimilated them, of course you’re going to miss things; it’s inevitable, especially since the test is written to exploit those misunderstandings.
What does this mean in terms of studying? Well… I’ll put it this way. For most people, the inclination is to study until they’ve gotten more or less where they want to be. And then stop. But that doesn’t really work: just because you did incredibly well on one practice test doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily do as well on the next test (unless, of course, you really do know what you’re doing). So take another one. And another one. Do it until there’s absolutely no way you can possibly score below a certain level, even on your worst possible day. And when you go back and review the questions you’ve missed, make sure that you’re not just looking at the questions themselves but rather at the underlying concepts they’re testing. If you have trouble with subject-verb agreement, take a book and try to identify the subject and verb in every single sentence; if your ability to identify dangling modifiers is hit or miss, try writing some of your own. If you can produce it correctly, you’ll be a lot less likely to overlook someone else’s error.
You might not be able to master everything, but you can pick a handful of concepts that seem well within your control and focus on them. Even three or four more questions per section could boost your score well over 100 points.
The bottom line is that you never know just what’s going to happen when you go in and take the test. If you perceive your score as the result of chance, whether particular the test is “easy” or “hard”… well, chances are you’re not going to do nearly as well as you could have. Or, at the very least, you’re going to feel as if the whole experience is somehow beyond your control. But if you’ve trained yourself past the point of mastery, the whole experience might actually border on. . .maybe not quite pleasant, but at least not so bad.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 7, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Update: Somehow or other, I neglected to notice that PSAT scores were coming out just as I posted this (usually my students flip out about them, but this year everyone seems remarkably laid back about the whole thing, so I apparently I’m the last to know;) Anyway, I wanted to add a couple of things in light of that fact. First, if you’re less than thrilled with your score, don’t panic — a lot of people are in exactly the same situation. A weaker-than-expected PSAT score is in no way a harbinger of doom — it’s simply an indication of the approximate score you would get if you were to take the SAT tomorrow, without any additional studying.
That said, however, PSAT can be a major wake-up call for a lot of people who thought they were going to skate through standardized testing. (I always cringe internally whenever a junior that I know really needs to work on things tells me that the PSAT was “easy;” it’s usually an indicator that they fell into every trap in the book, and seeing scores 100+ points lower than what they expected can be a major blow.) It can be exciting to hit junior year and actually start the whole college process you’ve been hearing everyone go on about forever, but getting a less than stellar PSAT score can suddenly make the whole process get old really fast.
Here’s the thing: your improvement from here on largely depends on your attitude: if you get disgusted with the whole process now and decide that it’s futile to even try to raise your score, you probably won’t. If, on the other hand, you can accept it as what it is — a diagnostic — and use the information it gives you to motivate you and focus your study process, you have the potential to make truly massive gains.
I’m not going to lie: it can be a lot of work, but provided you have the basics in place, it is totally doable. I’ve had students who improved literally hundreds of points from the PSAT to the SAT — and yes, that includes major (150+ point) increases in Critical Reading. Yes, I did help them, but they also put in huge amounts of work independently.
Despite claims to the contrary, what’s tested on the (P)SAT is not some sort of undefinable “aptitude” but rather a set of concrete skills. They may not be tested in quite the same way that you’re accustomed to being tested in school, but that doesn’t make them any less real. And as a result, there are specific steps that you can take to improve them. For that reason, it can be helpful to view your scores not as some sort of ultimate, immutable indicator of your ability, but rather as a general indicator of where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and of what sorts of things you need to focus on improving.
Looking at your score as feedback makes the process more neutral. Yes, of course SAT scores do ultimately count for a lot in the admissions process; I’m not about to deny that. But they’re also a relatively accurate, unbiased measure of where you stand in some key areas — how to recognize the point that an author is trying to make; how to distinguish between what they think and what they think about what other people think (!); and how to read objectively without allowing your own opinion to cloud your understanding of what’s literally being said. It could be that you simply need to practice taking the test or work more carefully, but chances are that there’s a skill or two you need to brush up on — even if it doesn’t seem to obviously correlate with the questions you missed.
Look at it this way: you missed the questions you missed for a reason. Even if you really did know how to do them, there wasn’t some mysterious force that forced your hand to pick up that #2 pencil and bubble in B rather than C. Something in your process went awry, and that resulted in your getting the question wrong. The way to improve your score is to try to identify the problem at its core and deal with it from there.
If, for example, you misread a Math question and solved for x instead of 2x, that’s a sign that you need to read more carefully; it doesn’t matter how good you are at math in school. The Math portion of the SAT is a math-basedreasoning test, not a math test per se, and it asks you to integrate English and math skills simultaneously in the same way that Critical Reading asks you to use logic skills similar to those used in Math. Blaming the test for asking a question in a way that you weren’t expecting won’t help. What will help is putting your finger on the page as you read the question, taking a moment to reiterate for yourself exactly what it’s asking, and, if necessary, scribbling yourself a note so that you don’t forget. Those are important skills too. But that said, pretty much every math tutor I’ve ever talked to has told me that plenty of kids in AP Calc are missing some of the fundamentals, either because they forgot them or because they never really mastered them in the first place. If you’re so convinced that you’re above going back and reviewing the math on the test, you probably won’t get your score up anywhere near as much as you hoped.
Likewise, if you’re a straight-A student in AP English but can’t get past 650 on Critical Reading, it won’t do you any good to get indignant. You need to look honestly and objectively at why you’re making so many mistakes. If your score reflects the fact that you consistently get down to two answers but tend to pick the wrong one, you need to look at why you always pick the wrong one. It could be because you’re not going back to the passage and really checking things out (or are reading too quickly or not extensively enough when you do), but it could also be because you have a tendency to insert your own knowledge and not look closely at what’s actually being said. It could also be that you have trouble recognizing how specific words contribute to the creation of a particular tone, or in decoding particularly unfamiliar types of syntax or phrasing — things that have absolutely nothing to do with your test-taking ability. In that case, you need to spend some serious time reading SAT-level material. One of my students who got himself up 100 points in CR did so in part by devouring Oliver Sacks’ books, passages from which frequently show up on the SAT (it helped that he absolutely loved the books, though); the level of his comprehension skyrocketed.
I recognize that it can be hard to identify just what you’re missing, especially if you’re trying to do it all on your own, and it can be even harder to be brutally honest with yourself about just what you need to work on. But the key is not to take it personally. If you can leave your ego at the door and focus on solidifying some of the fundamentals that got lost along the way, you might even learn something in the process.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 5, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
Sometimes I feel like the SAT is a kind of Rorschach test. It’s so laden down with cultural baggage and anxieties (about race, class, social mobility, you name it) that people’s opinions — and they tend to be very, very strong opinions — seem to reveal more about their own concerns than they do about the actual test itself. I also sometimes feel as if people who complain about the SAT’s purported “trickiness” are missing the point of the it: both the questions and the incorrect answer choices are deliberately written to exploit the kinds of mistakes that people are most likely to make when working through the various kinds of questions. The real issue is whether that whole setup is a valid means of testing, well… whatever it is that the SAT is supposed to be testing (which is of course something that no one can agree on anyway).
I do feel obligated to point out that for the small percentage of test-takers whose skills are such that they can disregard the multiple-choice aspect and simply answer the questions, the whole concept of trickiness is essentially a moot point. (more…)
