by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 14, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The more time I spend tutoring, the more I become aware of the need for flexibility in my approach. The truth is that no one technique will work for everyone, and rigidly insisting on a strategy that simply doesn’t make sense to a student is likely a recipe for a disaster. I once got fired from a tutoring company because I refused to stick to its “script,” and although I was initially upset about losing the work, I realized that the job never would have worked out anyway. People think too differently, (mis)interpret things in too many ways, and have too many quirks for a one-size-fits-all approach to be effective — and if I’ve learned one thing from all this tutoring, it’s that you can basically *never* assume that someone will automatically understand a passage or sentence or turn of phrase in the way the SAT requires them to understand it.
I think that a lot of Critical Reading prep is ineffective because it’s based on the assumption that people will of course be able to understand the literal meaning of the passage with relatively little effort. While I’ve certainly worked with plenty of students who do fall into this category (and for whom test prep essentially consists of being reminded endlessly to slow down, work methodically through the questions, and go back to the passage to check out the answers), I think that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most people who are capable of understanding exactly — not just approximately — what the passages are saying and of nailing the main point on their own will typically score in the 650+ range with little to no prep, but needless to say, the average CR score is nowhere near 650 (it’s actually about 150 points lower).
Anyway, I digress. The point I’m attempting to make is that if you 1) are a slow reader who just can’t seem to finish CR sections in time, and 2) don’t always fully understand what the passages are saying, then reading the passage, trying the main point, and only then looking at the questions might not be the best strategy for you sometimes. It might work on the shorter passages, but on the longer ones — and especially on Passage 1/Passage 2 — it’s just going to be way too time consuming. You’ll get confused an bogged down and start to panic, then slow down even more.
Now, I am *not* going to suggest you read the questions first — if you do that, you’re almost certainly going to miss important contextual pieces of information when you go back to the passage, and because you’ll only have a partial view of things, you’ll overlook answers that would otherwise be much more straightforward.
What I am going to suggest, however, is a compromise, namely that you answer the questions while you read the passage . So you read, say, the first paragraph and answer perhaps the first question, maybe the second. The you read another short chunk, answer the next question or two, and so on. If it helps you to look ahead at the line numbers in the next couple of questions before you read, just to give yourself a sense of how far you need to go in order to be able to answer, by all means do so, but try not to avoid reading the question itself — you won’t approach the passage with a clear mind, and you risk being so focused on the question that you can’t actually absorb what the author is saying.
If you need to focus on the detail questions first and skip over the “big picture” ones until you’ve finished the passage, that’s fine. In fact, you’ll probably have to work this way. But doing the detail questions first will allow you to get to more questions than you might be able to otherwise — you also won’t be sacrificing questions you could answer in order to spend time pondering questions you’re really not sure about. And the more you see that you can actually finish sections in time, the calmer you’ll be approaching the test.
Note, however, that this is simply a strategy for getting yourself to answer more questions more quickly — it doesn’t mean that you can just coast. The answers to many questions are still unlikely to be in the actual lines given, and you may still have to go back and read above and below in order to determine the answer. Transitions, “interesting” punctuation, and strong language are still of utmost importance. So is trying to get a general sense of what the answer might be before you look at the choices (or, at the very least, immediately eliminating all answers that don’t make sense in context). But if you keep these things in mind and break the passage/questions into small, manageable bits, you might find that things get a lot easier.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 11, 2011 | Blog, Time Management
Disclaimer: if you always finish right at time or are forced to leave a couple of questions blank because you just couldn’t get to them, this article does not apply to you. For the rest of you, but especially the ones who finish sections with five or ten minutes left over and aren’t scoring consistent 800s on them, slow down!
And when I say “slow down,” I don’t just mean “stop racing.” I mean give yourself the time you need to fully process each question, determine exactly what it requires, work through every step of the problem, and make sure you’re choosing the answer you actually intended to choose. If you think you need an extra five seconds, take ten instead. If you’re finishing 24-question sections in 20 minutes rather than 25, that gives you about 12.5 extra seconds per question to play around with. Assuming that you won’t really need all those extra seconds for some of the easier questions, you can probably spend up to 20 or 30 more seconds on the couple of hardest ones.
Working this way can be scary: it forces you to stop going on instinct (and hoping that you get lucky) and actually prove the answer before you pick it. It means you can’t justify a wrong answer by saying that you had to guess because you were afraid you’d run out of time (even though you were finishing with ten minutes to spare). It means you have to be really, really careful.
But here’s the thing: it works. If you’re scoring 650 Reading and are trying to break 700, chances are you need to be a little more meticulous. Slowing down, making sure that you really consider whether there’s one word in an answer choice that doesn’t quite work, going back to the passage to check things out… that might just be enough to get you there.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 6, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
Given the amount of weight admissions officers give to standardized test scores, I realize that everyone not applying only to test-optional schools is therefore entitled to a reasonable amount of stress over them. Yes, they count for a lot, and having to deal with them can be exhausting and overwhelming when piled on top of everything else the average high school junior or senior is trying to accomplish. What concerns me, though, is the tendency to confuse worrying (and talking) compulsively about the SAT with getting a good score on it.
If I may play armchair psychologist for a moment, I think that all that talking serves a distinct purpose, namely that it creates the illusion of control. If you can expound upon every last thing that could possibly be on the test (and, of course, the distribution of “hard” and “easy” tests throughout the year), then you can beat it. And thus the more you expound on it, the better you’re likely to do.
Only it doesn’t quite work that way. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 4, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Among critics of the SAT, “shortcut” is often viewed as a bad word. Doing well on the SAT, they claim dismissively, is only a matter of learning the right shortcuts (like reading the questions before the passage), which of course have nothing to do with any sort of understanding beyond the SAT.
While I disagree with part two of that statement (the skills tested on the SAT extend far beyond the test itself), I actually agree completely with part one — I’ll even take it a step further. Not only is doing well on the SAT a matter of learning the right tricks, but the right tricks — the real ones, the ones that allow you get the answer to what appear to be incredibly complex questions at warp speed — *are* the test.
But unlike the SAT’s critics, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Here’s why: there’s almost no way to answer those types of questions efficiently and with certainty unless you have an absolutely, totally, crystal clear understanding of what they are in fact asking you to do and of what skills or concepts are required to solve them. The ability to apply a shortcut is thus a reflection of the ability to instantaneously pinpoint the requisite knowledge and to apply it in ways that might not seem immediately obvious to the majority of test takers, who will plod obligingly through each answer, weighing its pros and cons and pondering whether it’s some kind of trick.
In other words, your ability to answer questions is actually a reflection of your knowledge (shocking, I know). And if test-prep teaches you something about the ways in which arguments are put together, so be it.
Let me give an example from Critical Reading. Consider the following question:
The author does which of the following in lines 25-27?
Lines 25-27 read as follows: “They were saying that pulling on the rope need not make the bell ring. The bell itself — the mind — could stop it.”
(A) Employs a previously used comparison to explain a newly introduced idea
(B) Cites an aforementioned study to disprove a recently published claim
(C) Signals a digression from the main line of the argument
(D) Invokes figurative language to note the drawbacks of an approach
(E) Uses personification to explain the intricacies of a theory
Seems like you have absolutely nothing to go on, right? No context, no information, zip, zilch, nada.
Think again.
This is actually a rhetorical strategy question, which means that you don’t actually need any context to answer it — you don’t even really have to understand precisely what it’s saying. You just need to get a sense of where it might fit into a larger argument, and what role it might play in either developing or refuting that argument.
The key phrase here is, “They were saying.” Pretty much the only time someone would use the phrase “they were saying” would be if they wanted to clarify or to explain another idea — that is by definition the function of that phrase, the only reason it would be used in the first place.
So it is necessary to look for an answer that contains one of those words. The only option that suggest that function is (A) because it includes the word “explain.”
Now, is it necessary to go back and double check that the comparison in question has already been used? Yes, of course, but that one word, “explain,” is almost enough to nail it. You might think that one phrase is just too little to go on to get the right answer, that you couldn’t really be sure unless you read everything else in those lines plus all the answer choices carefully, but in fact that would be unnecessary. The question is testing whether you recognize the function of the information presented, and that phrase is the only thing that gives away its function. If you can recognize that, you can answer the question in a couple of seconds. A shortcut? Yes. But easy… well, if you can do that without too much trouble, that’s a pretty good sign that you can ace the test.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 3, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
One of the things that inevitably drives me crazy is when a student proudly announces to me that he or she is determined to take the SAT in a particular month because that’s when either 1) the test is always easier, or 2) that’s when all the stupid people take it, and so of course they’ll beat the curve that way.
Newsflash: the SAT is a *standardized* test. If the test is on the harder side, the curve will adjust accordingly and be a bit more generous. If the test is easier, the curve will be harsher. And without significant work on their weakest areas, most people will repeatedly score within the same 20 or 30 point-range — regardless of how easy or difficult they perceive a particular test to be.
Besides, you are not just competing against the math whiz in your physics class (she’s taking it in November, so clearly that’s going to blow the curve!) or the moron in Spanish (well he’s taking it in June, so that must be when all the dumb people take it). You are competing against the hundreds of thousands of people taking it in Iowa and Mississippi and Alaska, not to mention Singapore and Sao Paolo, many of whom will have had very minimal prep and who will thus keep the average pulling toward about 500 across the board. Forget about “smart” juniors taking and early and “dumb” seniors taking it late. So many people take the test each time it’s offered that the average is always going to be about the same.
If you’re more concerned with trying to pull tricks that’ll give you a tiny little leg up on your classmates than with actually learning the material, you’re wasting your time. Tricks don’t get you to a top score, only knowledge and a willingness to be utterly, ruthlessly meticulous about your work. If you’re spending your time trying to figure out the easiest month to take the SAT, that’s a sign that your skills might not actually be solid enough to get you the kind of score you want.
Every single kid I’ve worked with who wanted to focus on these kinds of easy outs at the expense of getting to the root of their problems 1) did in fact have some form of underlying weakness that they didn’t want to address, and 2) consistently failed to make the kind of improvement they wanted. The kids who get the very top scores — the ones for whom a 770 CR constitutes a bad day — don’t spend their time worrying about those things. Their skills are so strong that it doesn’t really matter whether most people think that the test is “hard” or “easy.” If you want to be seriously competitive with them, you need to focus on getting yourself to that point as well. The other stuff…well, it’s peripheral at best.
