by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 12, 2014 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
A couple of days ago, I posted about how reading the blurb before the passage can in some cases allow you to quickly eliminate multiple answer choices to a question — even before you’ve read the passage(s). (If you haven’t read that post, you should consider doing so before you going any further).
To refresh you, this blurb establishes that the Cold War is the topic of this Passage 1/Passage 2 pair:
The term “Cold War” refers to a period of confrontation from about 1945 to 1990 between the two global superpowers of that era, the United States and the Soviet Union (a collection of republics led by Russia). These passages are adapted from a book published in 1998.
Because the topic must almost certainly appear in the correct answer choice to the question below, you can start by eliminating (C) – (E), even in the absence of any additional information.
Both passages are concerned chiefly with
(A) the causes of the Cold War
(B) the aftermath of the Cold War
(C) European political ideologies
(D) Soviet leaders and policies
(E) the devastation of World War II
Since (A) and (B) mention the Cold War, they can stay.
Now, however, I want to talk about how to go about choosing between those two answers by reading only the beginning of Passage 1.
The blurb states that the book was from 1998, which was 18 years after the end of the Cold War. So the book could talk about the aftermath of the Cold War (post 1990) as well as its origins (1940s), although it’s worth keeping in mind that the SAT usually doesn’t like to get into history that’s too recent — there’s just too much potential for controversy.
So now we need to develop a slightly more nuanced (more specific) understanding of the topic.
At this point, you might think, “I can’t possibly answer that question now. I need to read both passages. By the time I finish reading them, I should have a pretty good idea what they’re about. Then I can go back and answer it.”
You could of course save the question until the end, reading though both passages first, but that would leave you an awful lot of room for confusion. If you have a tendency to get caught up in the details, you could mistake “mentions” for “is about.”
This reasoning also overlooks one important fact. Critical Reading questions are listed in chronological order of the passages. If a question appears first, you can probably answer it by reading the beginning of the first passage. Yes, the first passage only, even though the question appears to ask about both passage.
Here’s why: the question is telling you that both passages have the same focus. By definition, then, the focus of the first passage must be the focus of the second passage. Therefore, all you need to determine is the focus of the first passage.
Here again, you might think, “Ok, now I have to read the whole first passage. By the time I’m done, I should have a pretty good idea of what it’s talking about.” In which case you might again be right, but you’re also likely to make things a lot harder than necessary.
Remember: the point of an introduction is to tell you what the passage is going to be about, i.e. the topic. In most cases, including this one, you can determine the topic of the first passage just by reading the first few sentences.
The traditionalist school of historians dominated the American scholarly discussion of the Cold War during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Traditionalist scholars generally supported the basic thrust of American policy toward Russia, which was known as containment. These scholars blamed the Cold War on Soviet expansionism in Europe, which they saw as motivated by either communist ideology, traditional Russian great-power foreign policy goals, or, most often, a combination of the two.
There are two major things to notice here: first, it talks about the 1940s and ’50s. This is when the Cold War began, not when it ended. Second, the statement that scholars blamed the Cold War on Soviet Expansion directly implies that he is talking about its causes. That in turn points to (A), which is in fact correct.
If you want to check it out, you can scan — not read — both passages for dates. It just so happens that the only dates that appear in the passage involve the 1940s and ’50s, effectively eliminating (B). The Cold War ended in 1990, and any discussion of its aftermath would include dates from 1990 and after.
This is, incidentally, where the knowledge component comes into play: much as contemporary educational theory might malign the importance of “mere facts,” they are really quite useful in a case like this. If you have no actual idea of when the Cold War began or ended, it probably won’t occur to you to use dates in this way. Sure they’re staring you in the face, but they won’t really mean anything to you. It’s the equivalent of staring at a math formula while simultaneously trying to figure out when and how to apply it. It’s profoundly irrelevant that the information is given to you if you don’t have the tools to use it. The same is true here: a person who knows the basic chronology of the Cold War can glance over the passages and instantaneously comprehend that they’re focusing on its origins.
It’s also not a bad idea to know when some of the most important events of the 20th century occurred — events whose repercussions continue to exert an enormous influence on events today.
It’s called, you know, like, being educated.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 11, 2014 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
If you’ve looked at any SAT prep books or taken a class, you’ve probably been advised to always read the blurb before the passage. As I was discussing with Debbie Stier yesterday, however, those couple of lines can seem like a throwaway. People keep on reading them because they know they should, but they don’t really know how to use the information they provide. Truth be told, I never thought all that hard about those little blurbs until recently, when I was explaining to someone to how incredibly important it is for students to be be able to identify passage topics. Forget main point, tone, and all those, uh, “higher order thinking skills” like inferences. If a student cannot figure out what the topic of a passage is… well, they’re not necessarily screwed, but let’s just say that things won’t be easy.
As I was saying this, I started thinking about the fact that students have difficulty identifying topics because they get so caught up in worrying about unfamiliar vocabulary and trying to puzzle out confusing syntax that they can’t figure out the basics. Then it occurred to me that there’s one place where the topic is likely to be stated clearly and with minimal room for misinterpretation: the italicized blurb.
Think of it this way:
The point of the italicized blurb is to tell you what the passage is about. In other words, it tells you the topic.
Many correct answers to Critical Reading questions mention the topic, either by name or rephrased in more general form.
In contrast, incorrect answers to Critical Reading questions are often wrong because they are off-topic.
In order to recognize when an answer is off-topic, you must know what the topic is. If you do not know what the topic is, you will not be able to recognize when answers are off-topic. That does not mean you sorta kinda have a general idea what the passage is talking about. It means you must be able to state the topic clearly, precisely, and accurately in no more than a couple of words. (I don’t take that last one as a given; I have had students who could state topics clearly and precisely, but also totally inaccurately.)
Since the italicized blurb often identifies the topic clearly and precisely in no more than a couple of words, it is therefore logical to read the blurb carefully.
To be sure, the blurb will not always provide this information, but it will do so often enough that it is worth spending a few seconds reading. This is especially true for Passage 1/Passage 2. The point of the blurb is to tell you what both passages are about — information that can allow you to answer seemingly complicated questions in no more than a few seconds.
Let’s look at an example:
Blurb:
The term “Cold War” refers to a period of confrontation from about 1945 to 1990 between the two global superpowers of that era, the United States and the Soviet Union (a collection of republics led by Russia). These passages are adapted from a book published in 1998.
What does the blurb tell us? That the passages will be about the Cold War, defined as the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1945-1990. That is the topic.
The topic is not “the United States” or “the Soviet Union” or “Russia” or “global superpowers” or “the period between 1945-1990.” Those things are only mentioned in order to explain the topic. Any answer choice that implies that one of those things is the main focus of the passage will be incorrect.
Now consider this question:
Both passages are concerned chiefly with
(A) the causes of the Cold War
(B) the aftermath of the Cold War
(C) European political ideologies
(D) Soviet leaders and policies
(E) the devastation of World War II
This question is really asking us what the topic of both passages is. According to the blurb, the topic is the Cold War. Only (A) and (B) specifically mention the Cold War.
“European political ideologies,” “Soviet leaders and policies,” and “the devastation of World War II” make no mention of the Cold War, so (C), (D), and (E) can be eliminated for being off-topic.
So just by reading the blurb, you can eliminate three answers without even reading the passage.
But how to decide between the remaining two? Stay tuned…
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 9, 2014 | Blog, The New SAT, Vocabulary
Here’s one to add to the “critical thinking” lack-of-definition phenomenon.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I’ve been following the news of the SAT overhaul pretty closely; suffice it to say that I’ve read quite a few articles about it lately. In doing so, however, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon: virtually every article I’ve encountered has included the line that the new SAT will eliminate “arcane” words. The authors of these articles almost invariably use the word “arcane.” I’ve seen one or two authors put it in quotes, implying an ironic or skeptical understanding of the term, but the use it with the literary equivalent of a straight face.
The SAT, of course, is distinctly partial to the word arcane, along with synonyms abstruse, archaic, esoteric and recondite. (Admittedly, recondite is a tad, uh, recondite, but I’d say the other two are pretty common.)
So the logical question: is the word “arcane” arcane?
The fact that journalists have no problem using the word arcane in mainstream publications would seem to imply that it is not actually arcane.
It is of course, hard to talk about a concept without referring to it directly, but think of it this way:
If you look at, say, The New York Times, you do not see sentences like this: Beginning in 2016, the SAT will no longer test really big and weird words that normal people don’t use.
Journalists do not write like that because that is not how educated adults write, and it is not what educated adults expect to read in publications intended for them. Educated adults expect to see words like arcane — common words that indicate a reasonable level of verbal acuity and sophistication.
An interesting question, though, is whether journalists have bothered to investigate which words are commonly tested on the SAT.That, however, would require them to have an interest in facts, and when it comes to discussions of the SAT in the mainstream media, facts are for all intents and purposes irrelevant. (If anyone bothered to look at a recent SAT, they would undoubtedly notice that passages are already drawn from history and the sciences. Or perhaps they’d just ignore that fact and focus on the sole fiction passage.)
Presumably, the journalists do not actually know that the word arcane is tested on the SAT, and that people consider it, well, arcane. If asked whether sixteen year-olds should know it, they would almost certainly answer in the affirmative.
The alternative would require quite a feat of doublethink — arguing that a word is irrelevant by using the word itself, apparently without noticing (or remarking on) the irony.
I recently reread 1984 for a book club I occasionally attend, and it’s hard not to see echoes of Newspeak in the idea that students’ vocabularies should be reduced to a narrow set of STEM career-friendly words. (Note: evidence presented in an “empirical” manner isn’t necessarily reliable; data can be distorted in all sorts of ways.) I don’t usually subscribe to conspiracy theory mentality, but it’s hard to not to see a parallel here. The fewer words you know, the smaller the number of texts you can access, and the smaller the range of ideas you can be exposed to in a meaningful way. (Studies have shown that readers must know at least 90% of the words in a text in order to understand it; anything less, and they can’t accurately infer the meanings of unfamiliar words or phrases).
Words are not merely collections of letters — they stand for concepts, some of which are quite challenging. My students already have a staggeringly difficult time with words like nuance — they are so accustomed to having things in presented in black-and-white terms that the very concept of discussing gray areas is foreign to them. Studying the kind of vocabulary tested on the SAT is not just about learning big words; it’s about gaining exposure to new ideas.
But back to the question at hand: what, exactly, makes a word arcane?
The fact that an average sixteen year-old does not use it on a daily basis?
The fact that a low-level STEM career isn’t likely to require it?
The fact that it includes more than three syllables?
Would anyone care to offer a suggestion?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 17, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education, Reading (SAT & ACT), Tutoring
Occasionally I’ll stumble across a passage that seems perfectly straightforward to me, but that I see students get confused about over and over again. One such passage begins in the following way:
Through a friend’s father, Elizabeth found a job at a publishing company.
Her parents were puzzled by this. The daughters of their friends were
announcing their engagements in the Times, and those who joined the Peace
Corps or had gone to graduate school were filed under the heading of
“Useful Service” as if they had entered convents or dedicated themselves to
the poor.
The passage continues for another couple of sentences, but that’s pretty much the gist of it.
That my students should have such difficulty with this of all passages was a mystery I had filed away in a mental drawer somewhere, to be trotted out an examined from time to time but never yielding sufficient clues for me to draw any real conclusions from.
Then I had a couple of illuminating moments.
First, I had a student miss a Writing question because she did not know what the Peace Corps was. This was a girl who liked to read and had already scored a 750 in CR — not the type of kid I’d expect to have that sort of gap.
Next, a friend of mine who teaches high school told me that her AP students did not understand what a mistress was — as in, they had never been exposed to the concept and couldn’t really grasp it.
She also told me the following anecdotes about her son, who had just finished his freshman year of high school: One, he had accidentally bubbled in, on a practice ACT, that he intended to pursue a two-year college degree because she’d recently explained to him that it took her two years to get her master’s, and he didn’t realize that people go to school for four years of undergraduate education before they go to graduate school. And two, while going over a newspaper article with him, she discovered that he did not know what pesticides were. This despite his having attended an über-progressive middle school with a community garden!
Incidentally, her son is a very smart boy (albeit not much of a reader), but no one had ever bothered to explain to him these very basic pieces of information that most adults take for granted. Everyone, his mother included, assumed he knew them and therefore never saw any reason to discuss them. His mother was absolutely gobsmacked when she discovered what he didn’t know. (If you’re a teenager reading this, don’t be so quick to laugh. I guarantee that there are some very important pieces of information about life in the real world that you don’t know either.)
The moral of the story? Every time I think I’ve stopped taking things for granted, I discover that I need to strip away yet more of my preconceptions about what pieces of knowledge I can and cannot assume students possess.
After all that, I started taking a look at the SAT from another angle: that of cultural reference points that most adults don’t give a second thought to but that plenty of kids taking the SAT haven’t picked up. I was inspired, of course, by E.D. Hirsch, but the reference points aren’t so much Great Events in Western Civilization as they are things you learn from reading a newspaper on a regular basis. Even a really bad newspaper.
Then today I happened to be going over the passage cited at the beginning of the post, and suddenly I had a lightbulb moment. It’s chock-full of references that wouldn’t give most adult readers pause, but that the average teenager wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of.
1. “Announcing engagements in the Times”
Assumed knowledge: The Times refers to a newspaper, e.g. The New York Times. When people get engaged, they sometimes post announcements in the local newspaper. Usually the people who do this are relatively well-off or socially prominent, especially in a newspaper like The New York Times. This piece of information suggests that Elizabeth’s family is probably at least upper-middle class, if not outright wealthy, which in turn suggests why her parents are surprised that she doesn’t want to take money from them.
2. The Peace Corps(!)
Assumed knowledge: The Peace Corps is a governmental organization that places American volunteers (usually college graduates) in various high-need areas in the developing world. Members may teach English, help preserve wildlife, or run recycling programs. In general, they have a reputation for being left-leaning tree huggers.
3. Graduate school
Assumed knowledge: “Graduate school” refers to any post-college academic program leading to a masters or doctoral degree. Most masters program last two years, and most doctoral programs 5-7. The doctorate is the highest academic degree one can receive. In order to apply to graduate school, you must first obtain a bachelors degree (four-year undergraduate degree).
4. Convent
Assumed knowledge: a convent is a place where nuns live apart from the world in order to devote themselves to prayer. For a good part of European history, unmarried women were expected to enter one. By equating joining a convent with “Useful Service,” the author is being ironic — that is, suggesting that Elizabeth’s parents would have considered it more useful for Elizabeth to renounce all worldly goods and lock herself away than to take a job at a publishing house.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Technically, it is not actually necessary to understand all of these references to answer either of the questions that accompanies the passage. But that is somewhat beside the point. The point is that if the reader does not have a pretty darn good idea of what these things refer to, the passage itself has the potential to read like sheer gobbledygook. At that point, it’s not even relevant whether the questions can be answered without that information because the reader is so thoroughly lost that he or she can barely even focus on the questions.
Knowledge deficit indeed.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 6, 2014 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” If you’re not familiar with the expression, it means that when searching for an explanation, you should always consider obvious possibilities before thinking about more unlikely options. Whenever I tutor the Writing section of the SAT, I find myself uttering these words with inordinate frequency.
I’ve worked with a number of students trying to pull their Writing scores from the mid-600s to the 750+ range. Most have done well on practice tests but then unexpectedly seen their scores drop on the actual test. Unsurprisingly, they were puzzled by their performance on the real thing; they just couldn’t figure out what they had done differently. And at first glance, they did seem to know what they were doing. When I worked very carefully through a section with them, however, some cracks inevitably emerged. Not a lot, mind you, but just enough to consistently pull them down. They would be sailing along, identifying errors like there was no tomorrow, when all of the sudden they would hit a question whose error (if any) they simply could not identify.
When that happened, they would stop and read the sentence again. And when they couldn’t hear anything wrong, they would read the sentence again, slowly, trying to hear whether something was wrong (mistake #1). Then, if they really didn’t want to choose “No error” but weren’t sure whether something was truly wrong, they would start searching for an explanation, usually a somewhat convoluted one, for why a perfectly acceptable construction was ambiguous or awkward or otherwise wrong (mistake #2). Almost always they did so when the actual answers — answers based on concepts they understood perfectly well — were staring them right in the face.
One of things that it’s easy to forget — or, in the case of many natural high-scorers who haven’t needed to study the framework of the test, to never realize — is that “hard” questions are not necessarily hard because they test hard concepts. Most often, they are hard either because they test (relatively) simple concepts in hard ways or because they combine concepts in unexpected ways.
Hard questions can — and often do — have “easy” answers. That does not mean that the answer is the option that sounds weird (that’s the distractor answer). It does, however, mean that the answer is likely to be an extremely simple word like “is” or “are” or “it.” It also means that the answer probably involves an extremely common error, like subject verb agreement or pronoun agreement, not some obscure rule you’ve never heard of.
The challenge is figuring out which concept is being tested, not understanding the concept itself. So when people who can usually hear the error come across a question whose answer they don’t instantly hear, their instinctive reaction is to look for something outlandish to be wrong with it, not to think systematically about what the most common errors are and check to see whether the question contains them. In others words, they hear hoofbeats and imagine that a herd of zebras is about to come racing around the corner.
For example, consider the following question, which a very high-scoring student of mine recently missed:
(A) Thanks to the strength (B) of the bonds between (C) its
constituent carbon atoms, a diamond has exceptional
physical properties (D) that makes it useful in a wide
variety of industrial applications. (E) No error
If you spotted the error immediately, great, but bear with me for illustrative purposes. The sentence itself is rather challenging: it discusses a topic (chemistry) that many students are unlikely to have unpleasant associations with, and it also contains the word “constituent,” which many weaker readers will have difficulty decoding, and whose meaning many slightly stronger readers will not know or be able to figure out. So right there we have two big stumbling blocks likely to distract from the grammar of the sentence. Many test-takers are also likely to think that “Thanks to” sounds too casual and would be considered wrong on a serious test like the SAT. Many other test-takers are likely to just not hear any error.
In that case, the most effective approach is to consider the structure of the test. The most common error is subject-verb agreement, and when in doubt, it’s the error you should always check first. There is exactly one underlined verb in the sentence: “makes.” It singular (remember: singular verbs ends in “-s”), which means that it’s subject must be singular as well.
But what is the subject? “Physical properties,” which is plural, so there’s a disagreement. The answer is therefore (D). The sentence should read “…physical properties that make it useful.”
The moral of the story is that if you don’t spot an error immediately, whatever you do, don’t fall into the loop of endlessly rereading the sentence and trying to figure out whether something sounds funny. Instead, check systematically for the top five or so errors: subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement (check “it” and “they”), verb tense (pay attention to dates and “time” words), adjectives vs. adverbs (easy to overlook), and, if you’re at the end of a section, faulty comparisons.
If all of those things check out, the sentence is probably fine.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 18, 2014 | Blog, The Mental Game
I confess, I get nervous when my students tell me that they feel confident. Well, some of my students, at least. You’d think I’d be happy to hear that, right? I mean, I’m a tutor — shouldn’t I want my students to feel confident? Yes, of course… When it’s merited, that is. But confidence is unfortunately not always merited, especially when it comes to standardized testing. What some students know and what they think they know are often not the same thing at all. And in those cases, a small helping of fear can be a lot more effective than all the confidence in the world.
At this point, I think that it’s helpful to distinguish between types of confidence:
On one hand, there’s the kind of confidence that results from genuine mastery of material, or from sustained, regular preparation. My students who have made 100+ point leaps, especially in reading, do not score 520 one day and 670 the next. No, their increases come in fits and starts. They go up a bit, they plateau, sometimes they go down a little, and eventually their scores start to go up again. They put in the work, and they do lots and lots of practice. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 22, 2014 | Blog, The New SAT
I will eventually.
Test aside, it’s just that for now, reading David Coleman’s vapid, repetitive, bloated prose makes me physically ill.
It is quite literally some of the worst writing I’ve seen in my life. “College and career readiness proficiency?” WTF? You can have proficiency in a subject, or in a field, or on an instrument, but you cannot have proficiency in readiness. Proficiency is readiness.
This is nonsense.
Dry and boring is one thing, but this makes my skin crawl. I’ve actually been mulling it over, trying to pinpoint just what it is — textually speaking — that’s eliciting this reaction. As far as I can ascertain, it’s something about the juxtaposition oftouchy-feely metaphors (heart of algebra! “digging into” problems!) and otherwise soulless, mechanical style that strikes me as downright bizarre. It’s the worst type of edu-speak, one that pays lip service to the romantic ideal of education as a stimulating, imaginative process while simultaneously turning it into something dull and dry and utterly utilitarian.
Or perhaps I should call it zombie writing — it has letters and words and sentences combined in recognizable ways, and it conveys an idea (THE NEW SAT TESTS REAL WORLD SKILLS), but it lacks an inner spark of consciousness, so to speak. Every single sentence: subject – verb – object, subject – verb – object… College and career readiness, readiness for college and career, skills that students will apply in college and in the workplace… On and on and on. It’s like reading something written by a mechanical doll — you know, the kind that speaks when you pull a string in its back.
I may do a close reading of it at some point, just to see how internally contradictory it actually is, but that would of course actually require that I read it closely.
Clarity and transparency (or at least the illusion of such) are certainly admirable goals, but someone seems to have confused those qualities with redundancy.
Call me histrionic, but I don’t think I’ve ever had quite so visceral a reaction to any piece of writing in my life.
The only good that’s come out of this whole thing is that it’s made me remember what I love so much about reading and words and language — the “humanity” part of the humanities. Paradox, irony, subtlety, wordplay, metonymy… Oh, what unspeakable relief!
It feels like a revolt.
Now if you’ll excuse, I need to get back to The Shock of the Ancients: Literature and History in Early Modern France.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 4, 2014 | Blog, The New SAT, Vocabulary
From Federalist Paper I (chosen at random)
To the People of the State of New York:
AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.
Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.
What was that about eliminating “arcane” vocabulary from the SAT again?
And let’s not even get started on the syntax.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 19, 2014 | Blog, General Tips
Just needed to do some venting. After I find myself saying the same things repeatedly, I start to think that perhaps I should just make a recording and just hit the “play” button whenever someone neglects to do one of these things…for the fiftieth time.
1) When you get down to two answers on Critical Reading, GO BACK TO THE FRIGGIN’ PASSAGE AND CHECK TO SEE WHICH ONE IT DIRECTLY SUPPORTS. Pick the most concrete, specific aspect of one answer choice, and check to see whether the passage explicitly addresses it. If it doesn’t, it’s not the answer. If one of the answers contains extreme language, start by assuming it’s wrong and focus extra-hard on connecting the other answer to the passage. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 18, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education
I have to say I never thought I’d write a post singing the virtues of multiple choice tests (well, sort of). Despite the fact that much of my professional life is dictated by such exams, I’ve never had any overwhelming liking for them. Rather, I’ve generally seen them as a necessary evil, a crudely pragmatic way of assessing fundamental skills on a very large scale. Sure, the logic and elimination aspects are interesting, but they’ve always in comparison to the difficulty of, say, teaching a student to write out a close reading of a passage in their own words. People might argue that learning to do so in irrelevant (obviously I disagree, but I’m not going into that here), but basically no one is disputing that it’s hard. At any rate, I’ve always assumed that given the alternative between an essay-based test and a multiple-choice one, the former would invariably be superior. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 16, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education
People seem to be throwing around the term “rote learning” a whole lot these days in regard to the SAT, without any apparent understanding of what it actually means. So in a modest — and perhaps vain — attempt at cutting through some of this linguistic obfuscation, I offer the following explanation.
This is an example of a question that tests rote knowledge:
The dates of the American Civil War were:
(A) 1849-1853
(B) 1855-1860
(C) 1861-1865
(D) 1866-1871
(E) 1872-1876
This question does not require any thought whatsoever, nor does it require the answerer to have any actual knowledge of the American Civil War beyond when it occurred. It is simply necessary to have memorized a set of dates, end of story. This is what “rote learning” actually means — memorizing bits and pieces of information, devoid of context, and without consideration of how those particular bits and pieces of information fit into a larger context. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 12, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education, The New SAT
There are many, many things I could say about the overhaul of the SAT (coming to a testing center near you in 2016!), but I don’t want this to turn into an endless rant, and so I’ll do my best not to ramble on too long.
The elimination of the sentence completions and the 1/4 point penalty, as well the changes to the essay didn’t surprise me in the least; the combination of Reading and Writing into one section caught me a bit off guard, however. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. If more time is going to be allotted to the essay — the only possibility if you’re giving a more in-depth assignment — it’s going to get cut somewhere else. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 11, 2014 | Blog, College Admissions
Among the favorite arguments regularly trotted out by critics of standardized testing is the fact that scores correlate so closely with income. Sure, there might be an occasional outlier, but for the most part, the correlation holds steady. Students who come from well-off families will obtain high scores, while students who come from poor families will score far lower. So if standardized test scores are nothing more than a reflection of socioeconomic status, why bother even having the tests in the first place?
Well, I can think of a couple reasons. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to restrict myself to highly competitive/elite colleges — the schools that the SAT was developed for in the first place.
Let’s start with the fact that in 2013, the average score for a student from a family with an income of over $200,000 a year was 1714: 565 Reading, 586 Math, and 563 Writing. Even with very good grades, a student who earns those scores is nowhere near a shoo-in for admission at even a second-tier university. (If they don’t need financial aid, they’ll probably have a better chance.) At the most competitive schools, they fall below the 25th percentile. Absent a very significant hook, they’re not even in the pool.
By the way, I’ve been trying to locate income statistics about the very highest scorers, but thus far, I’ve been unable to find them. If anyone has a link, I’d be really interested to see the breakdown. If the score curve continued to follow the income curve into the 700s, that might change my perspective, but I haven’t yet seen any evidence that the students scoring in the 750-800 range come from the very highest-earning subset of families.
Second, top colleges draw the majority of their applicant pools from the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum. Fair or not, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. These schools are perfectly aware that wealthy students can pay thousands of dollars for tutoring, and they consider it a given that most of their applicants have had some sort of prep. (Although they might publicly bemoan the hysteria they’ve created, the reality is that they have too much — namely their U.S. News and World Report ranking — riding on the average scores of their admitted students to discount their importance.) Their primary concern is whether that prep actually got the student someplace.
This is where the “holistic” part comes in. These schools are not admitting statistics; they are admitting individual students, and it’s their job to worry about the outliers. As a general rule, a high score from a highly advantaged applicant is a prerequisite for serious consideration; provided it’s somewhere around the average for admitted students, it becomes more or less irrelevant.
On the other hand, a low to middling score from a well-off applicant is a serious red flag; it suggests that even given every advantage, the student still isn’t capable of performing at a top level academically. Under normal circumstances, colleges have no reason to accept someone who is genuinely likely to struggle. That’s unfair to everyone, the student included. And given that some prep schools go so far as to invent their own grading systems to obscure where their students actually stand, and prevent comparison between their students and those from other schools, test scores may provide the only clear-cut assessment of an applicant’s actual abilities.
On the flip side, a seriously disadvantaged applicant with exceptionally high scores, or an applicant from a high school that rarely sends its graduates to top colleges — or any college — can make admissions officers sit up and take notice. That’s why the SAT was developed in the first place, and occasionally it does what it was designed to do.
I’m not trying to trivialize the serious problems with the system, most notably the tendency to judge merely middle class applicants by the same standards as the wealthy (test prep aside, merit can be awfully expensive to attain). But given the alternative between a somewhat objective standard and a completely subjective one, I’d vote in favor of the former. Colleges have a right to ensure that entering students have obtained a baseline level of knowledge; the fact that the existing educational system fails to prepare students adequately across the board shouldn’t detract from that fact.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 10, 2014 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
When I first started tutoring reading for the SAT and the ACT, I took a lot of things for granted. I assumed, for example, that my students would be able to identify things like the main point and tone of a passage; that they would be able to absorb the meaning of what they read while looking out for important textual elements like colons and italicized words; and that they, at bare minimum, would be able to read the words that appeared on the page and sound out unfamiliar ones.
Over the last few years, however, I’ve progressively shed all those assumptions. When I start to work with someone, I now take absolutely nothing for granted. Until a student clearly demonstrates that they’ve mastered a particular skill, I make no assumptions about whether they have it. And that includes reading the words as they appear on the page. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 1, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education
I’ve come up with a formula
The amount of time a curriculum devotes to teaching critical thinking is inversely proportional to the actual critical thinking skills that the students acquire.
Think of it this way:
Critical thinking skills can only develop as the result of accumulated subject-specific knowledge, not as the result of learning “critical thinking” strategies in the abstract.
The more time students spend learning formal processes (e.g. identifying the main point) designed to teach them “critical thinking” skills in the abstract, the less time they spend obtaining subject-specific knowledge (e.g. biology, history).
Thus, the more time students spend learning learning formal processes designed to teach them critical thinking skills, the less likely they are to acquire the very knowledge that would allow them to think critically.
Or to put it in mathematical terms, where CT is defined as actual critical thinking ability and ct is defined as abstract, formal processes designed to promote “critical thinking:”
CT ? 1/ct
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 28, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education
As long as I’m in full-out combat mode… One more snipe.
Plenty of people love to hate the SAT because of the purported lack of “critical thinking” it requires.
But what about the other side?
I’ve had more than one parent tell me that their child does wonderfully on tests in school because they can just memorize things and spit them back, then forget those things as soon as they’re done.
They say this as if it is a good thing. (For the record, this is not the sort of content-based education I support.) (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 26, 2014 | Blog
So Debbie Stier’s book, The Perfect Score Project, is officially out.
While I don’t agree with every single one of Debbie’s recommendations (we’ve gone back and forth over some of them for months), I am utterly, phenomenally, incredibly proud of her for actually seeing this thing through to the finish. I can’t believe she made it, and I am so, so happy for her.
I’m not just saying this because there’s an entire chapter about me. Seriously. Although I do have to admit she did a pretty good job of capturing my personality, the good and the, uh, prickly.
And for the record, I’ve been expecting the backlash re: “helicopter parenting” à la The Atlantic. I’m planning to post my contribution to the discussion here since the forum moderators were kind enough to remove what I considered a surpassingly civil piece of commentary (perhaps I wasn’t supposed to mention my real name?), on the off chance that someone actually wants to read the real back story behind the sensationalistic headline. In all fairness, though, you slap on a headline like “I Took the SAT Seven Times to Help My Son Get Into College” (NOT Debbie’s decision, and only tenuously related to the real story!), and the crazies are going to come swarming out of the woodwork.
But here I’d like to discuss Elizabeth Kolbert’s article in The New Yorker. As I told Debbie, I found the article surpassingly trite and irritating. Not just because Kolbert actually ends with the SAT cliché to end all clichés (c’mon now, say it with me: The only thing the SAT tests is how well you take the SAT!) but also because she seems more concerned with wallowing in her own anxieties and pre-conceived notions about the test than in actually reading the book that Debbie wrote.
On one hand, I’m sure Kolbert gave readers the article they wanted: no one wants to hear that the SAT is worth something. Thinking about it, I realize that Debbie’s done something incredibly subversive — she’s written a book in which she 1) dares to take the SAT seriously, 2) openly admits that she likes it (oh horror of horrors!), and 3) suggests that doing well on it might actually require not only knowledge but actual work.
Taken together, that trifecta represents such a fundamental attack on received wisdom about the test that it’s a wonder anyone was willing to publish the book at all!
What’s interesting to me about Kolbert’s article, however, is how it embodies some of the central tropes and contradictions that inevitably run through discussions about the SAT. (Yes, I know that last sentence is written in academic-ese, but there is literally no other way to say it.)
Kolbert states:
As an adult, I found the test more difficult than I had as a teen and, at the same time, more disappointing. Many of the questions were tricky; some were genuinely hard. But, even at its most challenging, the exercise struck me as superficial. Critical thinking was never called for, let alone curiosity or imagination.
There are a couple of things to notice here. First, Kolbert invokes the standard straw man argument, criticizing the SAT for failing to do something it was never intended to do. American university applicants — unlike those in virtually every other country in the world — have ample opportunity to demonstrate their curiosity and imagination, and are in fact encouraged to do so. The SAT is intended to give a general snapshot of applicants’ ability to apply basic reading, math, and writing skills in unfamiliar settings. (Sometimes that’s called for in the real world too.) The point is not to test creativity; the point is to test the ability to apply basic knowledge and have a reasonably objective criterion by which to compare applicants from wildly different backgrounds.
More worrisome, however, is Kolbert’s implicit attitude that a test that fails to test imagination and creativity must be bad. Imagination and creativity are of course good things, but in order to get to the point where you can make those things work for you (in college, in life), you have to master a lot of other, more “superficial” skills first. Observing how a text is structured, for example, may seem superficial, but it is a crucial prerequisite to understanding how its argument is organized, and thus to formulating a cogent response. This “basic” skill, however, is one that almost none of my students have mastered. Most of them have never been asked to do it at all. Nevertheless, Kolbert — along with most of the American educational establishment — takes it as a given that an exercise that does not explicitly encourage creativity (as she defines it — I would argue that in certain ways, the SAT demands quite a bit of creativity) must lack value.
In this regard, Kolbert makes the classic mistake of an adult looking at the SAT; she assumes that students have already mastered “rote” skills to the point where they can apply them effortlessly in “creative” and “imaginative” ways, the way an educated adult could. Having read the writing of many, many high school students, however, I can confidently state that this is not the case.
What is most interesting, though, is Kolbert’s use of the term “critical thinking.” Notably, she fails to define the term — apparently she considers it so self-explanatory as to be unworthy of a definition. This is, of course, hardly a surprise; most of the people who criticize schools, the SAT, etc. for failing to promote “critical thinking” rarely bother to give actual examples of what they mean by the term. (Presumably people who argue in favor of critical thinking would acknowledge that it involves supporting one’s arguments, but perhaps that isn’t necessary when one is arguing in for so noble a cause.) In this case, however, Kolbert’s rhetorical omission allows her to criticize the test for doing precisely what she argues that it fails to do. This tortured logic becomes apparent when she states:
Soon I came to a reading section, with a long passage about writing and running by Haruki Murakami. Was this passage “analyzing an activity” or “challenging an assumption”? Both seemed valid. Was a phrase in a second reading passage “speculative” or “ironic” or “defensive”? Damned if I knew.
Now, incorrect answers to Critical Reading questions are written to sound eminently plausible — that’s one of the hallmarks of the SAT. The test consists of reading closely to determine which of those plausible-sounding answers is in fact directly supported by the text. Very, very rarely — and I do mean occasionally, as in one vaguely ambiguous question or so every five or six tests — The College Board flubs this up, but for the most part, the right answer is actually the right answer, even if it’s not an answer you expected, or like, or would phrase in a similar way. Having spent around five years dissecting quite literally hundreds of Critical Reading question and then producing a 380 page tome dedicated to picking apart the skills required to succeed on that section, I think I’ve earned the right to state that like them or not, answers to Critical Reading questions, especially ones to tone questions, are pretty damn accurate.
“Speculative” and “ironic” are also pretty far apart tone-wise. It’s obviously possible for a statement to be both, but the chance of those two things converging in the particular section that a Critical Reading question happens to ask about is well beyond unlikely. But rather than acknowledge, for example, a propensity for reading too far into or outside what the author intended, she relies on the classic strategy of turning the blame on the test. Because everyone knows that SAT answers are tricky and ambiguous, she has no need to justify herself further. She’s simply presenting what for her audience is likely a foregone conclusion.
Furthermore, let’s consider Kolbert’s assertion that “both [answers] seemed valid,” emphasis on seemed. Is not distinguishing between things that merely seem to be true and things that are actually true not a crucial component of so-called critical thinking? Or does the fact that it’s the SAT asking Kolbert to make fine distinctions negate the importance of that skill?
I am not just being sarcastic here — how would Kolbert define critical thinking and how, exactly, do the aspects of the test that she criticizes not actually require it? Or in other words, when she criticizes the SAT for not requiring “critical thinking,” what does she actually mean? Is it the multiple choice format she dislikes (with its ensuing elimination of any possible way of bullshitting one’s way through a question or the acquisition of partial credit)? But then when she does get to write in response to an open-ended prompt, she resents having to take a stance, normally a hallmark of good analytical writing, and one that she has no difficulty demonstrating in her article (presumably she knows better than to make a bunch of vague, unconnected statements, regardless of Debbie’s advice). Is it the tiresome necessity of reading of texts literally instead of (no pun intended) speculating about some deeper metaphorical significance?
What does she mean?
I would seriously like to know.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 25, 2014 | Blog
So I finally got around to reading The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch’s screed against the American educational establishment. I didn’t actually realize that the book was controversial until I mentioned it to a couple of people. I can’t, however, say that I’m surprised it elicited the reaction it did when it was first published; it contradicts pretty much all the received wisdom about what constitutes effective education in the United States, and it does so very, very bluntly. I can’t figure out how it didn’t get on my radar sooner.
