by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 28, 2017 | Blog, College Admissions
I’m beginning to think that high school students should be required to take a Statistics course just to be able to navigate the numeric thicket surrounding the college admissions process. As I’ve written about recently, the percentages that colleges throw around throughout the admissions process can’t necessarily be taken at face value.
Much like the overall acceptance rates that colleges release each spring, statistics involving Early Action and Early Decision deferrals require some interpreting as well. Depending on the college, a deferral can tell a lot about an applicant’s chances in the spring — or it can tell almost nothing at all. In some cases, a deferral can also act as a warning sign about the likely fate of someone’s applications at other schools of comparable selectivity; in others, it might do just the opposite. In either of those cases, an early deferral could spur you to make some last-minute alterations to your list. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 3, 2017 | GRE, Vocabulary
One of the things that often gets overlooked in discussions about standardized testing is that scoring well is often a matter of having strategies, plural, rather than a single strategy.
Different items may call for different approaches, even when they are the same type of question, and nowhere is this fact illustrated more clearly than on GRE sentence equivalences.
In some cases, you may be able to identify the answer almost instantaneously using a “shortcut” approach, whereas in other cases you may need to work through the sentence very carefully, circling key words, playing positive/negative, and dodging trick answers left and right.
The key is to know which strategy to use when. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 21, 2017 | Blog
The SAT redesign eliminated a lot of the traditional differences between the SAT and the ACT, and choosing between the two exams has become more challenging as a result.
But while the differences have become subtler, there are still a handful of key factors that point in the direction of one test or the other. If you’re not sure which exam to take, this quiz is for you.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 13, 2017 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog, GMAT
“Clause” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in discussion about grammar. It’s one of those words that students often hear but whose meaning they tend not to be 100% sure of.
It’s certainly possible to study for the SAT®/ACT®/GMAT® without knowing the exact definition of a clause, but understanding what clauses are and how they work can make things a whole lot easier. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 11, 2017 | Blog
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…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 6, 2017 | Blog, Questions
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…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 3, 2017 | Blog, College Admissions
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…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 30, 2017 | Blog, College Admissions
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…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 24, 2017 | ACT Reading, Blog
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…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 21, 2017 | Blog, GMAT, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
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.
For GMAT idioms, click here. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 16, 2017 | Blog, College Admissions
Over the past several decades, acceptance rates at the most selective United States colleges and universities have dropped dramatically. In the mid-1990s, for example, Yale University had an acceptance rate of around 18% for freshman applicants, whereas its freshman acceptance rate in 2017 was only one-third as high. Assuming that acceptances rates for the high school class of 2018 are similar to those for the class of 2017, all freshman applicants to Yale during the 2017-2018 admissions cycle will compete in a pool from which approximately 6% of freshman applicants are accepted.
Which of the following would most weaken the conclusion of this passage?
(A) Applicants who apply to Yale through Single Choice Early Action are accepted at far lower rates than they were in the mid-1990s.
(B) There is a significant difference in the acceptance rates of Single Choice Early Action and Regular Decision Yale applicants.
(C) The most competitive applicants to Yale often gain admission to multiple Ivy League schools.
(D) A smaller percentage of students apply to Yale through Single Choice Early Action than apply Regular Decision.
(E) The demographic makeup of Yale’s freshman class has changed significantly over the past several decades. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 13, 2017 | Blog
Since everyone now seems to be figuring out that the big tech companies aren’t quite the saviors they’ve made themselves out to be, I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon with yet another cautionary tale.
While browsing The New York Times earlier today, I came across an article discussing the fact that Amazon is now permitting third-party sellers to bid for the top seller listing. When users click on an item, the default “buy now” option may not be Amazon itself, but rather a third-party seller that purchased the right to be listed in the top spot. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 10, 2017 | Uncategorized
A few months back, a rather startling article appeared in the Education section of The Washington Post. Written by Colorado mother Cheri Kiesecker, who decided to investigate the College Board’s use of student data after seeing the number of personal questions asked on her child’s school-administered PSAT 8/9 test, the piece explains how the College Board has effectively transformed itself into a massive data-collection organization and is profiting from the sale of student information.
The entire article is well worth reading — and I would strongly recommend that anyone who is about to take the PSAT or who has a child about to take the PSAT do so — but one of the most important takeaways is as follows: (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 3, 2017 | ACT Reading, SAT Reading
When it comes to Reading questions on the SAT and ACT, nothing induces fear — or at least groans — like inference questions. Some of this reaction is undoubtedly due to the fact that they often seem so fuzzy. Part of the problem, I suspect, stems from the fact that when people talk about inferences, they’re not always talking about the same thing.
One type of inference is more based on formal logic — that is, it involves the types of conclusions that can be drawn from various premises, and whether those conclusions can be considered valid. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 30, 2017 | Blog, College Admissions, Financial Aid
If you’re an international student interested in applying to American universities, you probably already know that studying in the U.S. isn’t cheap – and sticker prices just keep rising. With tuition and fees at some schools now topping $70,000 a year, the cost of higher education in the U.S., even at public institutions, easily costs tens of thousands more than it does in most other countries.
The good news is that schools do offer some kind of financial assistance for international students – in some cases, very significant amounts of aid. The bad news, however, is that navigating the American system requires a fair amount of savvy.
For example, consider the following list of the 10 universities offering international students the most financial aid, courtesy US News and World Report: (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 27, 2017 | Blog, The New SAT
Nick Anderson at The Washington Post reports that the scoring of the redesigned SAT is causing some confusion:
The perfect score of yore — 1600 — is back and just as impressive as ever. But many students could be forgiven these days for puzzling over whether their own SAT scores are good, great or merely okay.
The first national report on the revised SAT shows the confusion that results when a familiar device for sorting college-bound students is recalibrated and scores on the admission test suddenly look a bit better than they actually are. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 23, 2017 | Blog
The ACT has recently made a somewhat under-reported change to its accommodation policies.
In the past, students with extra time who took the non-Writing version were given 5 hours to complete all four multiple-choice sections, whereas students who took the Writing version were given 6 hours for the four multiple-choice sections plus the Essay.
Although students could not move back and forth between sections, they could divide up the time in any way they wanted — so if they wanted to spend an extra 10 minutes on Reading, for example, they could potentially “borrow” that time from the less important Essay. For a slow reader with good comprehension, those 10 minutes could easily make a difference of two or three points.
Students not taking the Writing version could still divide their 5 hours as they wanted; however, they did not have the option of borrowing against the Essay, putting them at a potentially significant disadvantage. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 21, 2017 | Blog, College Admissions
Note: I originally published this piece in 2011, but with the addition of the August SAT, it seems particularly relevant. Whereas the October SAT was the make-it-or-break-it test for a lot of seniors in the past, the possibility of just one more retake in October might now seem very appealing. Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re trying to decided whether to make one last go.
If your scores are borderline, how do you decide whether it’s worth it to go all out for a school or simply let it drop? In other words, at what point is it truly worth writing that supplement and shelling out $75 for an application? (more…)
