A couple of Sundays ago, I woke up and spent a couple of hours puttering around my apartment doing chores and the like. At some point, it occurred to me that I needed to check something on my website, and so I grabbed my computer and navigated to the site and… nothing.
Gone.
The entire site had vanished. (more…)
For those of you who are looking for some bite-sized test daily practice, some good news: I’ve decided to revive my Question of the Day. Every morning, I’ll post a new verbal question along with an explanation.
For logistical reasons, I’m going to have to tilt toward the grammar side for now, but I will be posting reading as well as grammar questions. Most of the questions will SAT®/ACT®-style, but I will probably throw in some more advanced items (AP® English, GRE® or GMAT®) from time to time, just to keep people on their toes;) (more…)
In an interesting coincidence, the day after I published my previous post, which detailed the ways in the which the college essay can be gamed by wealthy applicants, Eric Hoover, who covers admissions for The Chronicle of Higher Education, published a story in The New York Times describing the minefield that it is the elite college admissions process in 2017. (more…)
It took a while to happen, but college essays have begun to be placed under the kind of scrutiny traditionally reserved for the SAT. In just the past couple of weeks, articles have appeared in both the Washington Post and Inside Higher Ed discussing the college essay industry and highlighting the vast sums of money some families spend on assistance with this aspect of the application.
These articles raise some very important questions: exactly how much help is too much? And how should colleges evaluate an assignment that some applicants have spent thousands of dollars to complete? (more…)
Broadly speaking, time-based ACT Reading problems tend to fall into two categories.
The first category involves students who cannot even come close to finishing ACT Reading in time. At 35 minutes, they might still be only halfway through the third passage, and often their scores are stuck somewhere in the low 20s. Even if they’re solid readers, they need to radically change their approach in order to see significant improvement.
The second category typically involves students who are scoring in the mid-high 20s. Their overall comprehension is strong, and they could likely answer nearly all of the questions right given just 10 more minutes, but they can’t quite seem to get there in the allotted time.
If you fall into the second category, this post is for you. (more…)
As part of my attempt to make thecriticalreader.com the official repository of all things related to SAT, ACT, and GMAT grammar, I’ve posted lists of preposition-based idioms for those tests. (For now, they’re the same as the ones in my SAT, ACT, and GMAT grammar books, but I will update them if I come across additional tests with other examples.)
For SAT/ACT idioms, click here.