by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 13, 2015 | Blog
For those of you who absolutely can’t wait a few more weeks to get started studying for the new exam, I am planning to make (unproofed pre-publication copies of The Ultimate Guide to SAT® Grammar, 3rd Ed. available for purchase through CreateSpace sometime this week for a reduced price of $19.95. If you’d prefer to wait a few weeks for the final, proofed version, I’m hoping to make it available on Amazon in early July.
The book provides a comprehensive overview of all of the grammar and rhetoric topics tested on the redesigned test, as well as numerous exercises designed to hep students apply individual concepts to test-style questions.
At just over 250 pages, it is somewhat longer than the previous editions (partly because of the inclusion of more test-style questions) but still concise enough to be manageable.
As in the previous editions, the book includes two complete indices of College Board questions (full-length SATs recently posted on Khan Academy): one organizing concepts by category, and one organizing them by test. These tests will also be included in the forthcoming Official College Board Guide.
I will post notification as soon as the book is available for purchase.
Note: Because the new SAT Writing section is so similar to the ACT English test, there is some overlap between this book and The Complete Guide to ACT English. That said, all of the material is tailored to the specifics of the new SAT.
I am doing my best to finish revising The Critical Reader by the end of this month. I am hoping to make pre-publication copies available sometime in early-mid July, with the goal of having the book on Amazon by the end of that month.
The Ultimate Guide to SAT® Grammar Workbook, 3rd ed., will most likely be available in the late summer or early fall, although I am considering making individual tests available as they are completed.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 12, 2015 | ACT Reading, Blog
I recently noticed that a couple of my students were kept missing ACT reading comp questions that should have been very straightforward. Their reading was strong enough that they shouldn’t have been getting those questions wrong, and at first I wasn’t sure why they were having trouble. Upon closer inspection, however, I realized that the questions giving them trouble consistently had answers located in the introduction.
What I suspect was happening was this: they saw a question without a line reference, and if they didn’t remember the answer, their immediate reaction was to panic and (subconsciously) assume that the answer was going to be buried somewhere in the middle of the passage — somewhere very difficult to find. Basically, they were so used to assuming that things would be hard that it never occurred to them that they might actually be easy!
Had they simply scanned for the key word/phrase starting in the introduction and skimmed chronologically, they would have found the answer almost immediately. Inevitably, when I had them re-work through the questions that way, they had no problem answering them correctly.
So if you find yourself confronted with a straightforward, factual reading comprehension without a line reference and have absolutely no recollection of where the answer is located, don’t just jump to somewhere in the middle of the passage and start looking around.
Instead, figure out what word or phrase you’re looking for, and start scanning quickly for it from the very first sentence, pulling your finger down the page as you scan to focus your eye and prevent you from overlooking key information. You might come across the answer a lot faster than you’re expecting.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 11, 2015 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog
I think we can probably all agree here that whatever the strengths of the ACT English section may be, formatting is most definitely not one of them. When there are five or six spaces — or even half a page — between lines, it’s almost impossible not to sometimes lose track of where paragraphs begin and end. Since I started tutoring the ACT in 2008, I’ve spent who knows how much time explaining just where the sentence is supposed to be inserted, or which paragraph a little numbered box is actually referring to. Sooner or later, almost every ACT student of mine has missed a question simply because they couldn’t figure what they were supposed to fix where.
Beyond the most obvious instances of formatting-related mistakes, though, I’ve noticed some subtler errors. One problem that seems to come up again and again involves…page turns. When I work through the same tests with enough people, I inevitably start to notice that almost everyone gets certain questions wrong, usually for the same reasons.
A couple of tests that I regularly use have questions that bridge two pages — that is, the sentence that a question asks about begins at the bottom of one page and ends at the top of the next page. Sometimes, it’s a very long sentence, which means it’s easy to lose track of.
And very often, my students answer those questions incorrectly because they’ve only read the information on the page containing the underlined portion or numbered box.They either didn’t want to make the effort to back up a page and read from the beginning of the sentence (relatively rare) or, more frequently, were so focused on the underlined portion of the sentence that they didn’t realize it actually began on the previous page.
Ironically, focusing on the question so hard caused them to overlook the larger context and miss the very information that they needed to answer the question. Had the entire sentence been located on a single page, they would likely have read from the start of it; but because it was split up, they simply didn’t notice that they weren’t reading from the beginning.
The moral of the story? Always, always back up and read from the beginning of the sentence, actively identifying where that place is. The capitalized letter at the beginning of a word is a giveaway, and no, I’m not being sarcastic. Sometimes you have to be that literal.
Recently, I’ve started seeing the same problem with paragraphs and rhetoric questions, specifically adding/delete sentences questions. In order to determine whether information should be added or deleted — that is, whether it’s relevant to a paragraph — it is first necessary to know what that paragraph is about. What part of the paragraph tells you most directly what it’s going to be about? Often, the first (topic) sentence or couple of sentences.
When the first sentence is on the previous page, however, it’s suddenly a lot less intuitive to read that spot. And when lines are separated by multiple spaces, making only a few lines of text appear much longer, it is possible to not even realize that a paragraph begins on the previous page. Again, the best way to guard against this problem is to back up and consciously search for the indented line that always signal the beginning of a paragraph, keeping in mind that it may be on the previous page.
Working this way might seem like an inordinate amount of effort — one more little detail to think about, on top of everything else — but it can actually save you time and energy in the long run. Instead of trying to puzzle out an answer that you don’t have sufficient information to determine, flipping back a page and getting the full picture can actually make finding the answer much more straightforward.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 5, 2015 | Blog, The Mental Game
For those of you taking the SAT tomorrow (and scouring the Internet for a few last-minute tips), here’s a small one that could actually have a significant effect on your score.
To introduce it, a personal anecdote (notice how many time the word I appears in the following sentences). About five years ago, I was going over a student’s QAS score sheet from her first real SAT. She was a good student and strong test taker, and in fact she’d scored a 2200. It was pretty much in line with her practice tests, but when I looked at the scoring breakdown by section, something leapt out at me: virtually every question she had gotten wrong came from the first three sections. And when I read over her essay, I saw that it was, well… Let us say it was not her best work.
At that point, I put two and two together. “G,” I said pointedly. “Were you awake when you started this test?” (more…)
