by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 25, 2014 | Blog, SAT Essay
Here’s something I find puzzling: the SAT essay consistently comes under fire for allowing kids to make up information without being penalized for it. Presumably, then, the people doing the criticizing believe that knowing facts, and citing them appropriately in one’s writing, is a good thing. But at the same time, those people turn around and criticize schools for promoting “drill and kill” and “rote learning.”
If students were truly exposed to endless “drill and kill,” they would presumably at least know facts. There’s almost no way *not* to remember things after hearing them repeated a certain number of times. But from what I’ve observed, most of my students have difficulty discussing their Essay examples in anything resembling an in-depth manner because they don’t know enough concrete facts — about academic subjects, at least — to be able to discuss history, literature, or current events in detail. As a result, their writing inevitably becomes vague, repetitive, and confused.
Does anyone else see the irony here?
You can’t insist that schools stop teaching facts and then be surprised when students don’t know facts!
To be clear, I understand perfectly well that students learn facts best in the context. But the idea that kids are simply sitting and chanting “one times one is one, two times two is four…” is profoundly detached from the reality of American schools in 2014. (Yes, there are plenty of schools that drill kids endlessly in test-taking strategies, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) More likely they’re clustered in groups so they can “learn from each other,” with one or two diligent kids sitting and doing the work while the others talk about what they did last weekend.
If an administrator happens to poke her head in, they’ll all look like wonderfully active and engaged learners, but the chances that they’ll retain any of what they discussed tomorrow or the next day are pretty slim. Then the ones who can afford it hire tutors to do the drilling they didn’t get in class.
The reality is that even if teachers do present fascinating, engaging, stimulating lessons, kids still need to be held responsible for mastering basic pieces of factual knowledge — the two are not mutually exclusive, and it’s a gross oversimplification to claim that they are. But learning usually involves repetition, sometimes lots of repetition. That’s just how it works. In other domains (sports, music, etc.), that’s still accepted as common sense, but when it comes to academics, all that flies out the window.
Incidentally, I now encourage my students who are big sports fans to just write about sports: a kid who can’t write a coherent argument about the The Great Gatsby to save his life suddenly turns into a clear, flowing, and eloquent writer, complete with names, dates, facts, and statistics, when discussing Magic Johnson’s career. And it works: those essays are (by SAT essay standards) interesting to read, relatively painless for the kids to write, and they consistently receive scores of 10+.
Funny that I don’t see anyone complaining about “rote learning” there — if a kid wants to spend hours memorizing batting or shooting statistics, no one seems to have the least problem with it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 18, 2014 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
When I start working with a new student, there are a few questions I normally ask: What foreign language do you take and what have you covered? What are you currently reading in English class, and what have you read in the past year or two? Do you read books/newspapers on a regular basis?
You see, my mistake has been to assume that even if students don’t read on their own, they’ve actually been doing the reading that they’re assigned in English class.
Increasingly, however, I realize that my question should really be this: how often do you actually do the assigned reading for English class, and how often do you just go on Sparknotes.com and read the summaries?
Or perhaps more cynically: do you ever do the assigned reading for English class, or do you just go on Sparknotes and read the summaries?
The first time a student told me she’d gotten an A- in English class without ever reading any of the books (at a fairly rigorous $40K+/year Manhattan private school, incidentally), I was mildly taken aback. The second time it happened, a bit less so. Now, I’ve (sadly) come to expect it, even from straight-A students.
A friend of mine who teaches AP French now spends most of her prep time trying to find readings that can’t be looked up in translation online. I think that pretty much says it all.
Aside from the obvious question of what on earth could actually be going on in English class that would allow students to get perfect grades without doing any of the reading (lots of extra credit???), this is starting to pose some real problems for standardized testing.
Now to be fair, I actually think that Sparknotes is a pretty good resource. I find the summaries and analyses to be quite accurate and thorough, and they offer very solid guidance for someone who needs to understand basic themes, characters, etc.
It is not, however, a substitute for reading actual books.
In terms of school, that might not be apparent. If students can glance through Sparknotes, ace the quiz the next day, and bullshit a few comments to ensure that all-important participation grade, there’s no apparent drawback to that method. The fact that they’re not actually learning anything would seem to be irrelevant.
The problem only shows up when they hit the SAT or the ACT. Suddenly, they’re being asked to read texts much more challenging than, well Sparknotes, and there’s no way to whip out an ipad look up the answer. Having minimal experience with unfamiliar vocabulary, for example, they don’t know how to use context clues to figure out what they don’t know. The experience of struggling with a text is entirely foreign to them, and the feeling of winning its meaning even more so. (Why bother if it isn’t easy, right? And who would, like, write in that weird way anyhow?)
What concerns me, however, are the truly head-spinning conversations I’ve had with parents who in one sentence openly admit that their child goes on Sparknotes for every English assignment, and in the next express their utter bewilderment over why that child (a straight-A student) just cannot seem to raise his score, no matter how many practice tests he takes.
Sometimes, I’m really at a loss for words.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 6, 2014 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
If you’re someone who consistently gets down to two answers but doesn’t know how to choose between them, this post is for you. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of you out there; the test is designed to force you into making subtle distinctions between answer choices, so what you’re struggling with is precisely what the test is designed to do. If nothing else, take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.
When I watch students in this category work through a question on their own however, I almost invariably witness the following sequence of events:
-Student reads question.
-Student quickly rereads the necessary section of the passage.
-Student looks at answer choices.
-Student quickly and decisively crosses off three answers that are clearly wrong.
-Student stares at the remaining two answer choices.
-Student stares at the remaining two answer choices some more.
-Student’s eyes begin to take on a “deer in the headlights” cast.
-Student turns to me and croaks, “Help…?”
The reaction is entirely understandable. To be sure, there are plenty of answer choices that do seem very similar — so similar, in fact, that the difference(s) between them might not be obvious immediately, or even after you’ve read each answer through a few times. The danger, however, is to mistake perception for reality — that is, to assume that because you don’t happen to see any differences between the answers, such differences do not exist.
In reality, the more effective procedure is to turn the problem back on yourself and ask what distinction you personally have not yet noticed. SAT questions jump through a lot of hoops to make it onto the test — every couple of years, a question or two that’s a bit more ambiguous than usual might make it on, but that usually doesn’t happen. When dealing with a standardized test, it’s best to work from general rules and only consider the exceptions if the rules clearly don’t apply. So your assumption should be that the College Board probably didn’t mess up, and that there’s a good — if subtle — reason that the right answer is right and the wrong answer is wrong. In short, it’s not the test, it’s you.
If you can approach pairs of similar-seeming answers by looking for specific types of differences, however, your job becomes much simpler. Instead of having to worry about every word of each option, you only have to worry about a single aspect. And one common difference is that of scope — that is, how general or specific an answer choice is. Remember that correct answers tend to be relatively limited in scope, even if they’re phrased vaguely. They frequently restate the topic of the passage, either by name or in a more general way, e.g. Shakespeare becomes “a playwright”. That is only logical because SAT passages themselves tend to be relatively limited in scope: they are about specific topics, events, ideas, and individuals, not about all of human history or the meaning of life.
One very simple “trick” when you are deciding between two answer choices is to momentarily ignore the answers and simply restate the topic of the passage. (Granted, this strategy only works if you can correctly identify it, but let’s assume you can handle that part.) If one answer choice restates that topic — either explicitly or more generally — and the other goes “out of bounds,” the former will be correct.
For example, consider this pair of answers from a Passage 1/Passage 2 question. It’s fairly easy to determine from the passages that the correct answer must indicate a positive relationship, but that still leaves two possibilities.
How would the “many scholars” (line 70, passage 2) most likely react to the search or the “grand theory” (line 1, Passage 1)?
(A) With sympathy, because these scholars too are attempting to understand the overarching meaning of Paleolithic art
(D) With delight, because these scholars are convinced that Paleolithic art provides the key to comprehending natural history
They seem pretty similar, right?
Now consider the first sentence of the blurb above the passages:
The passages below discuss a type of Paleolithic art, cave paintings created between approximately 33,000 and 9000 B.C.E.
In this case, the test tells you what the topic of the passages is; don’t have to figure anything out. And since (A) refers only to “Paleolithic art” (specific), while (D) mentions “natural history” (way too broad), the former is correct. (As a side note, the extreme word “convinced” in (D) is also a hint that it’s probably wrong.) Out of two passages and 84 lines, that’s the only information you actually need.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 21, 2013 | Blog, Vocabulary
A very, very long time ago — so long ago that many of the people who stumble across this post were probably in, gasp, middle school — I wrote a post about the infamous marshmallow experiment. For those of you unfamiliar with the experiment, it involved giving a group of preschool students a marshmallow and then telling them they could either eat it right then or, if they wanted to wait, could have a second marshmallow. A follow-up study revealed that the children who had elected to wait had higher SAT scores than those who ate the marshmallow immediately, thus suggesting a correlation between the ability to delay gratification and long-term academic achievement.
That correlation is something I observe pretty regularly. A student who jumps to choose the first answer she thinks sounds plausible without really considering what it’s saying is is obviously going to have difficult doing well. (By the way, I’m not just trying to be politically correct by using the female pronoun here — interestingly, I’ve actually seen this problem occur more frequently among girls than boys.) But the one place on the entire SAT that I consistently see this problem most clearly is in sentence completions.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t fully conscious of that weakness presented itself until I started writing dozens (and dozens and dozens) of sentence completions for my Sentence Completion Workbook (yes, that’s a shameless plug). The more time I spent analyzing how answer choices were constructed, though, the more I realized how those questions are set up to exploit students’ tendency to jump to conclusions before fully thinking things through.
Let’s try an experiment. Look at the following question:
There has been little ——- written about de la Mare; indeed, that which has been written is at the two extremes,
either appallingly ——- or bitterly antagonistic.
(A) hostile . . ambiguous
(B) recent . . illogical
(C) fervent . . complimentary
(D) objective . . sycophantic
(E) temperate . . censorious
This isn’t the easiest question, but it’s pretty doable if someone has a solid vocabulary and, much more importantly, can stay calm long enough to figure out what the sentence is actually saying.
The second blank is a little more straightforward than the first, so it makes sense to start with it. It’s the opposite of “bitterly antagonistic,” which has to be something good. Even if you don’t know what “antagonistic” means, you can make an educated guess because good things aren’t normally described as “bitterly.”
Now, when a lot of solid, 500-600 students look at the right-hand blank, something like this happens:
(A) no, ambiguous means “unclear”
(B) no, “illogical” just doesn’t make sense
(C) “complimentary” is good, so it fits! It’s the answer. Ok, done.
When students do bother to look at (D) and (E), they can often get rid of (E) because they know that “censor” is bad. Then they look at (D), and I hear something like, “Well, I don’t know what “sycophantic” means, but “syco” sounds like something bad (like a psycho), so it must be (C).
Which of course it isn’t; otherwise, I never would have chosen this question to discuss.
(C) vs. (D) is actually a classic case of easy synonym vs. hard synonym. It is, shall we say, an ETS favorite, primarily because it plays on the oh-so-common tendency to grab at the first thing that looks like it could work.
In reality, “sycophantic” means “excessively complimentary” — as in, so over the top that it’s borderline creepy. In reality, the second side of either (C) or (D) could work; the answer hinges on the first blank, which is opposed to “two extremes.” The word must therefore mean something like “not extreme,” and between “fervent” and “objective,” only the latter fits (“fervent” means “passionate”).
There is, however, an interesting phenomenon that can be observed when one looks only at the right-hand answers.
(A) . . ambiguous
(B) . . illogical
(C) . . complimentary
(D) . . sycophantic
(E) . . censorious
The words in (A), (B), and (E) have nothing to do with one another. They’re somewhat random, even if they are all negative. (C) and (D), however, have similar meanings — (D) is simply much stronger than (C). In addition, it’s much more obscure, and that’s the part that counts. Given the choice between word that clearly fits and a word that could mean anything, most people will choose the word that clearly fits.
Furthermore, it’s not a coincidence that “complimentary” is presented before “sycophantic.” Plenty of test-takers stop as soon as they hit that word; it doesn’t occur to them that there could be another possibility later on.
But here’s the rule: Different answers to two-blank sentence completions typically contain “easy” and “hard” synonyms that could work equally well for one of the blanks. When this occurs, the more difficult synonym is usually correct. This is particularly true as you get closer to the end of the section (unless, of course, a second meaning is involved) — the answer to number two might be something very straightforward, but the answer to number seven…? Probably not.
So the bottom line:
One, don’t choose an answer until you’ve looked through ALL of your options.
Two, don’t choose an answer just because you know what it means, especially if the word for the other blank doesn’t quite fit.
And three, if you’re close to the end of a section and happen to spot an easy/hard synonym pair in different answer choices, it’s usually a safe bet to start out by assuming that the answer that contains the harder word is right. You can always reevaluate if necessary.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 8, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Education is in the news a lot these days. With the increasing reliance on standardized testing at all grade levels and the implementation of Common Core standards, there’s suddenly a lot of concern about where American schools are headed; and as someone with a significant interest in educational issues, I pay a lot of attention to what people are saying. Reading through education articles and the accompanying comments, many of which bemoan the lack of I’m struck by the extent to which ideas about education have become polarized: on one side, joyless, dry, rote learning, devoid of imagination or interest, with no other end than the thoughtless regurgitation of facts; on the other side, a sort of kumbaya, free-to-be-you-and-me utopia, where learning is always an imaginative and exciting process with no wrong answers or unpleasantness. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 7, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
A few months back, I got into a conversation about the concept — and consequences — of child-centered education with a colleague who teaches high school. Suffice it to say that neither of us is a particularly big fan of that approach, and the discussion was, for the most part, more cathartic than edifying. But then, halfway through the discussion, my friend commented that “child-centered” could not only be understood to refer to a type of education that is focused on children’s needs, but that it could also be interpreted to mean “education that is focused on being a child.”
That got my attention: as obvious as it seemed, I had never really considered that meaning before.
The word education means “to lead from” (Latin e = from + ducere = to lead). It contains a suggestion of movement — from ignorance to knowledge, and eventually from childhood to adulthood.
Teach is a transitive verb, which by definition requires two people — a leader must lead someone else — and it also implies a hierarchical relationship (in the best sense of the term) because a leader cannot be a leader without a follower. The very concept of child-driven education therefore strikes me as an oxymoron, not simply because it eliminates the student-teacher relationship that lies at the heart of the very concept of education, but also because children, being children, do not know what they do not know and thus cannot be expected to teach it to themselves.
That discussion came back to me as I read Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education, a remarkable treatise/deconstruction/rant about the most pernicious beliefs on which the contemporary educational establishment is based.
Christodoulou trained and teaches in the UK, but a lot of what she says is equally applicable to American schools. (Although the ideological basis for the antipathy toward direct instruction differs somewhat in the two countries, in practice it manifests itself in much the same ways, with equally atrocious results.) Christodoulou makes the point that when students do nothing but project-based group work, they are effectively restricted to topics already familiar to them because they have not actually been taught anything new. Moreover, when they attempt to research new topics without having the necessary background knowledge or the vocabulary to filter what information is relevant, accurate, etc., they end up either confused and frustrated or flat-out misinformed.
Christodoulou cites one student who, assigned to write a report on the life of Dickens, confused the author’s life with that of Pip, the protagonist of Great Expectations — I realize that sounds impossible for anyone who hasn’t worked with with weak readers, but trust me, I’ve seen kids fall prey to similar types of confusion. After the first five or six times, I stopped getting surprised.
The end result is that schools, while attempting to teach students the skills they’ll need to succeed in the adult world, end up inadvertently short-circuting the entire educational process and keeping them children. And when it comes to Critical Reading, that is a very big problem indeed. Critical Reading [on the old SAT], you see, is the epitome of an adult-centered test: it covers topics from global warming to creative writing programs to Pauline Kael. There is little, if anything, that is directly relevant to most eleventh graders’ lives. Which means that if a student’s exposure to the adult world has been limited — if their teachers have gone out of their way to make everything relevant to teenagers’ lives — they’re in for a rough ride when it comes to the SAT. Even when they understand what the words are literally saying, they can’t make sense out of them because the concepts are so foreign. They often end up ignoring the text entirely and reducing what they’ve read to a familiar idea (everyone is really the same inside, so can’t we all just get along? Actors should try to be more creative to express their characters more effectively!) instead of trying to understand what it’s actually saying.
There’s a passage in the Official Guide in which the playwright and actress Anna Deaveare Smith talks about the limits of the traditional, psychologically-oriented approach to acting, a method that asks actors to transform themselves into characters by relating the characters to themselves. As Smith points out, the result for acting students was that the characters behaved exactly like the actors — there was nothing to distinguish actor from character, and all of the characters sounded the same. That passage flawlessly describes the limits of an education that never requires students to get past themselves and deal with other people’s ideas on their own terms. The irony, of course, is that most students taking the SAT cannot make heads or tails of that passage, even though (or perhaps precisely because) they’ve spent their entire school careers in a system based on the very principles that Smith criticizes.
Recently, the mother of one of my students told me that when her son first started studying for the SAT, the test just seemed like another irritating hurdle to jump through, and one that would take time away from schoolwork at that. As he studied, though, she started to realize that preparing for the SAT was forcing him to read at a much higher level than anything he would have ever been asked to contend with in school. “If not for the SAT,” she told me, “they’d never get past elementary school.”
How many times have you heard the complaint that SAT passages are boring and pointless and irrelevant to everything else in the world? It’s a pretty familiar refrain, and I’ve even heard it from parents. As it true for most things about the SAT, however, it’s a matter of perspective: the reality is that people do in fact care about those topics — it’s just that those people are generally well past high-school age. True, some of the topics are relatively obscure by mainstream, pop-culture standards, but others are taken from best-sellers (fiction and non-fiction) read by thousands upon thousands of people. A kid who isn’t really aware of what goes on in the adult world is pretty unlikely to know that, however.
Being engaged with the adult world does not necessarily entail diligently reading, say, The Economist. When I was in high school, I read plenty of great literature, but I also read all sorts of trash. I had (and still have) a soft spot for detective novels and medical thrillers — books that probably won’t show up on any school’s reading list but that taught me a whole lot about the world beyond high school (as well as a surprising amount of vocabulary) and about the sorts of things that adults cared about. Those junky books no doubt gave me context for understanding debates about “esoteric” topics like global warming and the impact of personal biases on scientific policy, allowing me to quickly situate complexly worded passages in pre-existing “slots” and understand the big picture of what they were trying to say. No one would have ever recommended that I read Michael Crichton and Robin Cook to study for the SAT, but in their own way, they helped me just as much as Dostoyevsky did.
Look: high school juniors and seniors are not children. They’re getting ready to go off to college, where they’ll have to read lots of lots of different things, some of which will be interesting and others of which will not, and most of which will be written at or above the level of the SAT. They don’t get to cherry-pick the interesting bits, and they certainly can’t go to their professor and complain that an assigned book is dumb and about some weird topic that no one really cares about. And they can’t look it up on Sparknotes.com either. If nothing else, the SAT is preparation for that.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 3, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Cross-posted from Kitchen Table Math:
A few nights ago, I was having dinner with a friend and her very smart fourteen year-old son.
My friend told me the story of how her son, who is in eighth grade, had come home from school with an assignment to write an 8-10 page paper.
The exceedingly nebulous instructions included brainstorming a “guiding question” and due dates for various drafts, but other than that, there was not one iota of specific information about how these thirteen and fourteen year-olds were supposed to go about writing the paper.
Never mind high school, it looked like the assignment sheet for a college term paper.
My friend, a teacher herself, was a bit concerned that the assignment was unclear and emailed his teacher. She couldn’t figure out whether the paper was supposed to be thesis-driven or whether it was just a research project, but the teacher wouldn’t give her a straightforward answer.
She asked her son whether he’d been given clearer instructions in class.
He shook his head.
“Do you know whether you need to have a thesis, or is it just research?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Wait,” I said. “M., do you know how to write a thesis?”
He hesitated and looked confused. “What exactly do you mean by thesis…?”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 2, 2013 | Blog, General Tips, Vocabulary
Like familiarity and mastery, certainty and correctness are two concepts that people often have a tendency to get confused out there in standardized test-land.
So for the record, I would like to state unequivocally and without qualification that it is entirely possible to be both absolutely certain and absolutely wrong. I don’t think that that’s a particularly radical — or even disputable — concept, but something about standardized testing makes people go a little cuckoo and reject what would otherwise be relatively commonsense notions.
To reiterate: if you are taking the SAT and are absolutely, totally, utterly convinced that the answer to a particular Critical Reading question cannot possibly be (C), your strong sense of conviction has no bearing whatsoever on whether the answer actually is (C). (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 13, 2013 | Blog, SAT Reading
A couple of times recently, I’ve been working with students when the following scenario has occurred:
-Student encounters question asking them to determine the purpose of the information in, say, lines 47-53.
-Student glances briefly at lines 47-53, can’t figure out the answer immediately, and then proceeds to jump to the beginning of the passage and reads somewhere around line 20. Or, worse yet, ignores lines 47-53 entirely and starts reading around line 20. Or keeps going until s/he hits line 65.
Student: Is it (C)?
Me: Ok, why do you think that?
Student: Well, in line 20 the author is kind of like talking about-
Me: Whoa, wait a second. Why are you looking over there? The question asked you to look at lines 47-53.
Student: But isn’t the guy like basically saying the same thing here?
Me: Number one, no he actually isn’t, and number two, what on earth possessed you to look in line 20 when the question told you exactly where to look?
Student looks mystified.
Me: I know I told you to look at the end of the first paragraph for number 14, but that was a primary purpose question. It was asking you for the big picture, and the author is usually going to give you that in the intro (that’s the point of an introduction!) But if it’s not a “big picture” question, you need to stick to the lines they give you because the question isn’t asking you to consider the context of the whole passage, just that immediate area of the passage. You might be able to get the answer by knowing the point, but it also might have nothing to do with the point. So you have to check those lines out first and work from there.
This is inevitably one of those I-don’t know-whether-I-should-laugh-or-bang-my-head-against-the-wall moments. These are smart kids, yet these conversations drive home to me just how much mental gymnastics the SAT requires. Think about the main point. Now don’t think about the main point. Think about where key information in the passage is likely to be located. No, only worry about the lines you’re given in the question. Think about the “point of view” in context of the passage. No, think about it in isolation. There’s so much flipping back and forth that it’s a wonder anyone can keep it straight.
But let me try to make it simple. Unless you’re dealing with a “big picture” question (main point, primary purpose, one that doesn’t include a line reference), start by assuming that the answer is located somewhere in the close vicinity of the lines you’re given. That doesn’t mean the answer will always be in the lines referenced; it might be a little bit before or a little bit after. But it’ll almost certainly be close by. And even though it might true that information from the other end of the passage might be related, you won’t need to look all the way over there to find the answer.
So if you find yourself looking all over the passage when the question tells you (approximately) where the information you need to answer the question is located, know that you’re probably costing yourself a lot of time. And even if you’re getting the questions right, you’re probably making the process a lot more complicated that it needs to be.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 4, 2013 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Established fact: a statement can be true in the real world but still be an incorrect answer on the SAT or ACT.
Pretty much every test-prep book you’ll ever read will tell you this. So, for example, you see an answer that says that Shakespeare is one of the greatest dramatists in the English language, you shouldn’t automatically assume it’s true because that statement might not actually be supported by the passage. I’m not about to disagree with that.
What no one talks about, however, is the fact that statements are NOT true in the real world are, for all intents and purposes, NOT correct answers to SAT questions.
So, for example, an answer choice that reads “scientists have made no progress in solving problems,” or “scientific and artistic achievement are fundamentally incompatible” is more or less guaranteed not to be correct. Those answers aren’t just extreme — they’re blatantly at odds with reality. And it’s fair to say that the SAT is biased in favor of reality.
Now, theoretically there could be an exception, but the chances of one occurring are pretty darn slim. (Maybe on a “which of the following would most undermine the assertion in lines 25-37?” question. But otherwise, it’s a very big stretch).
Yet I consistently see students — even high-scoring one — pick answers like these. When I point out that these answers have no basis in the real world, they’re surprised; it never even occurred to them to look at the test that way. I suspect that at some level they’ve been so brainwashed by the whole “the SAT is trying to trick you” and “the only thing that the SAT tests is how well you take the SAT” mentality that they don’t quite realize just what the test will and will not do. This is part of why I hate the whole “tricky” thing so much — it tends to make people jettison their common sense, and much of doing well on the SAT is simply about pushing common sense to its absolute extreme.
As a side note, that’s the other thing I keep telling my students: the test is set up so that you can figure things out, even if you don’t know 100% what you’re doing. Your job is to focus on what you do know and use that to get to what you don’t.
But back to the issue at hand — why couldn’t the test just be trying to trick you by making the correct answer some bizarre thing has nothing to do with reality?
Here’s why:
One of the things no one ever seems to mention about the SAT and ACT is that they are designed to mimic the kind of academic and journalist “conversation” that happens in the real, adult world beyond high school. You know, the sorts of things you’ll tend to encounter in college (if you bother to do your reading, that is). On the reading side, at least, it’s partly a test of how familiar you are with the sort of language and ideas you find in publications like, say, The New York Times. So if you know who Angela Merkel is and what her economic policies are doing to Greece, chances are you won’t get weirded out if a sentence completion requires you to know what “fiscal austerity” is.
Standardized-test reading might feel very fake, and in many ways it is very inauthentic, but given the unavoidable limits of the standardized-testing format, it actually does a pretty good job of doing what it’s intended to do. (Passage 1/Passage 2 is based on the same principle as NYT’s “Room for Debate” series — and interestingly, commenters often exhibit the same comprehension errors that many test-takers fall prey to, most often ascribing much more extreme positions to writers than those that they actually espouse.)
It’s important to keep that real-world framework in mind in terms of “reading the test,” and it’s something I now go way out of my way to remind my students about. So as you’re reading through those answers tomorrow, trying to figure out which ones you can truly eliminate, ask yourself whether they make sense… like, for real.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 2, 2013 | Blog, Tutoring
1) Do not take anything for granted
The more I tutor, the less I assume about what any given student can or cannot do. In fact, now assume that my students do *not* possess any given skill until they’ve clearly demonstrated to me that they’ve mastered it — and that includes reading the words that are actually on the page. Harsh? Perhaps, but I’ve learned the hard way that students, even high scoring ones, often have unexpected and sometimes very large gaps that need to be addressed as quickly and directly as possible.
Here’s a brief sampling of things students of mine have not known:
-SAT passages have arguments; they’re not just “talking about stuff.”
-Introductions and conclusions contain important information
-Discussing an idea is not the same thing as agreeing with that idea; phrases like “some people think” indicate that an author is introducing an idea they do NOT agree with.
-Main ideas usually come before, not after, specific examples.
-The word “important” is important>
-A colon can be used to introduce an explanation.
-“Is,” “are,” and “were” are all parts of the verb “to be.”
-Singular verbs end in an -s; plural verbs do not.
-How to sound out unfamiliar words (thank you whole language!)
And the following vocabulary words: permanent (two students in the same week, both native English speakers — I’m still reeling from that one), surrender, compromise (first meaning), tendency, and chronicle.
2) Take everything your students say in stride
Do not *ever* criticize or make fun or them for not knowing as much as you or your other students. You have no idea what they have or haven’t covered in school, and I’ve met some pretty bright kids who were missing some pretty serious basics. It’s nice that you could figure things out on your own, but alas, the same does not hold true for everyone else. No matter how surprised you are by something they sincerely don’t know (and aren’t just being lazy about), try not to react. Your students are starting from where they’re starting from, and jumping on them for not knowing what *you* think they should know won’t really accomplish anything. Explain what you need to as neutrally as possible (or have them look it up) and move on.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine had her daughter try a session with a tutor she’d met by chance at the gym. She didn’t know anything about him, but he talked her into a trial session. When he met with her daughter, however, he spent virtually the entire session berating her for not knowing things that “all” his other students knew, and he made a point of telling her that they were scoring 2200+. That’s nice for his other students, but guess who lost a job?
3) You are there to focus on your student, not yourself
Doing well on the SAT and teaching someone else to do well on the SAT are two totally different skills, and what worked for you might or might not work for them. Don’t get hung up on your own accomplishments; they’re only relevant insofar as they allow you to help other people achieve their goals.
4) Be precise, but don’t over-explain
You might be able to recognize all those picky little grammar rules without knowing what anything is called, but your students will most likely need to be taught things directly. Avoid saying things like “well… it’s kinda like this,” or “you’ll just know how to recognize it after a while.”
There’s a fine line between giving someone just enough terminology to be able to understand a concept clearly and giving them so much information that they start to feel overwhelmed. It’s your job to know what information is relevant to the test and how to explain the necessary underlying concepts, and which information is superfluous or likely to be confusing.
5) Don’t ask students whether they understand, just test them or have them explain it back to you in their own words
Kids are not always the most accurate judges of what they know, and plenty of times they’ll just say “yes” to get you off their back. Go by what they do, not by what they say.
6) Adjust your approach to the student’s level and needs
This might sound very obvious, but different students may have very different sets of needs — a student with a weaker background may need things explained slowly and repeatedly, while one with stronger preparation may only need to hear things once. If you treat the former like the latter, they’ll end up confused and frustrated; if you treat the latter like the former, they’ll get bored and tune out. One of the fabulous things about private tutoring is that you don’t have to follow a one-size-fits all approach; you’re free to focus on whatever the student needs to focus on. A student scoring below 600 usually requires a very different approach than one scoring 730 and aiming for 800.
7) Use College Board or ACT material only
This is exceedingly important for Critical Reading: most College Board passages are based on the “they say/I say” structure; they’re designed to gauge students’ ability to follow arguments throughout a passage and keep track of various points of view and attitudes. The passages used in most commercial test-prep books do not include this structure (or, if they do, include it in a too-obvious way), and students will not have the opportunity to practice identifying it and employing the many shortcuts that quick recognition of it can create.
8) Be realistic about what you can and cannot accomplish, and don’t make guarantees
If you’ve only worked with a relatively homogeneous, well-prepared group of students and have never encountered a student who couldn’t sound out “methodology” or didn’t know that “to found” could be a verb, it’s easy to overestimate what you can accomplish. Unless you’ve worked with the extreme low end (300s), persistent 400/500-range scorers, and/or students who were never properly taught to read, you have no idea how challenging it can be to help some students improve.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 1, 2013 | ACT English/SAT Writing
I think it’s fair to say that the ACT really, really likes to test commas. I’ve never done a statistical analysis, but I’d wager that it’s around 15-20%.
But while the ACT does test commas in many different ways, the reality is that you don’t have to know every last rule governing comma usage. As long as you know the major ways in which commas are used correctly, you can probably identify when a comma is not being used correctly.
So that said, here are the contexts tested on the ACT that require you to absolutely, conclusively use a comma:
1) Before a FANBOYS (coordinating) conjunction when joining two independent clauses
Example: London is a very old city, and it contains buildings from many different eras.
2) To set off a non-essential clause that can be removed from a sentence
Example: London, which is a very old city, contains buildings from many different eras.
3) Between items in a list
Example: London contains buildings from time periods including the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Victorian era. The third comma is optional, by the way. Since the sentence is correct both with and without it, you’ll never be tested on that particular usage.
4) To separate multiple adjectives whose order could be reversed
Example: London contains many interesting, eclectic neighborhoods, OR London contains many eclectic, interesting neighborhoods.
When you see a comma, ask yourself whether it’s being used in one of the above ways. If it isn’t, you can be relatively certain that you should choose an answer that doesn’t include it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 2, 2013 | Blog, General Tips
Just wanted to take a moment and point out a point that often gets overlooked:
It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been exposed to a particular concept if you don’t actually understand that concept.
Nothing, nothing annoys me like the idea that doing well on the SAT or ACT is just a matter of “getting familiar with the test.”
It does not matter how many times you look at a vocabulary word and say, “Yeah, I’ve seen that before” if you do not actually know what the word means. Ditto for functions, Venn diagrams, dangling modifiers, and pretty much everything else that could get tested.
And by the way, it’s really not enough to go over a given concept once of twice. Just because you learn something on Saturday doesn’t mean you’ll still understand it on Tuesday, or that you’ll be able to recognize when it’s being tested the opposite way around, especially when you’ve been up since 6am and can’t stop listening to the kid in the next row tapping his pencil against his desk.
I’ve had students with whom I spent weeks going over comma splices. They were certainly very familiar with the idea of comma splices, and they could even spit back the correct definition of them (well, most of the time).
What they could not do, however, was either consistently recognize or correct them. And why could they do neither of these things? Because they had never learned to recognize what a sentence was, and thus had no idea when they needed to put a period or a semicolon rather than a comma between statements — something they should have mastered in elementary school. (Yes, I am actually suggesting that elementary school students be explicitly taught to recognize sentences — the horror!)
The problem had nothing whatsoever to do with the test itself; it showed up in their actual writing as well. The test was simply catching the problem, not creating it. In other words, it was doing exactly what it was designed to do. And ultimately there was no way to truly compensate for 10+ years of not knowing in a handful of sessions. We’d go over the concept, do 10 or 20 or 30 examples, they’d seem to get it just fine, and the next week we were back at square one. These were, incidentally, students scoring in the high 600s/low 700s — not the sort of kids who are typically thought of as needing remediation.
So to be clear:
“Familiarity” means being familiar with something. That’s it. It’s often related to understanding, but it does not by itself lead to understanding.
“Mastery” means understanding something at such a deep level that you pretty much can’t get it wrong, no matter how tired or stressed you are. It means you can roll out of bed and nail it, even if you haven’t really studied it for a while and it’s presented in a slightly different way than you’re used to seeing it.
It’s possible to have very little familiarity with the SAT or the ACT and still do extremely well on them; it’s also possible to be extremely familiar with those tests and still do very poorly.
Mastery is what ultimately leads to improvement, but it takes a lot more work to achieve.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 1, 2013 | ACT English/SAT Writing
The SAT and ACT do test a version of the “who vs. whom” rule, but only at a relatively superficial level. There are only two things you need to know:
1) Whom should not come before a verb
2) Whom should come after a preposition
For example:
Many people are familiar with the story of how the Pilgrim settlers met a Pawtuxet
tribe member named Squanto whom befriended them, taught them how to survive in
their new wilderness home, showed them how to plant crops, and acted as an interpreter
with the Wampanoag tribe and its chief, Massasoit.
A. NO CHANGE
B. which befriended
C. who befriended
D. and befriending
Yes, “who vs. whom” is clearly being tested here, but there’s a decent chance that you can hear that whom befriended sounds extremely awkward, and that who befriended sounds a lot better.
In grammatical terms, the simplest version of the rule here is that whom should never be used right before a verb. (Befriend is a verb because you can say to befriend). That’s it. In order to apply the rule, you do need to be able to accurately recognize verbs, but if you can do that, you’re pretty much set.
Now, here’s part two of what you’re likely to see.
Many people are familiar with the story of how the Pilgrim settlers met Squanto, a
Pawtuxet tribe member from whom they learned about planting crops and surviving
in the New World.
A. NO CHANGE
B. from who
C. by which
D. from which
There are two straightforward rules being tested here:
1) Who and whom = people; which = thing
2) Whom, not who, must follow a preposition
Therefore:
C and D can be easily eliminated because which should only refer to things.
B is incorrect because from is a preposition, and prepositions should be followed by whom, not who.
That leaves A, which correctly uses whom.
Generally speaking, the SAT and ACT are a lot more interested in testing whether people know the basics of correct English and are able to recognize flagrant mistakes than with how well they know complex grammar rules.
That means you’re exceedingly unlikely to see a question that looks like this:
Many people are familiar with the story of how the Pilgrim settlers met Squanto, a
Pawtuxet tribe member who they encountered shortly after arriving in the New World.
A. NO CHANGE
B. whom they encountered
C. which they encountered
D. they encountered him
To answer this question, you need to be able to recognize that the correct answer is the direct object of the verb encounter – that is, you would say encounter him (object pronoun), not encounter he (subject pronoun).
Whom is correct because it is an object pronoun, whereas who is a subject pronoun. Only an object pronoun can replace an object pronoun (him —-> whom).
But again, the chance of your encountering a question that tests the rule at this level of subtlety is so small that it’s not even really worth worrying about.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 23, 2013 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
On the surface, the answer to that question might seem pretty simple. If Critical Reading is a reading test, then wouldn’t the obvious way to raise one’s score be to read more? Well… maybe. But also maybe not. Like most thing involving the SAT, it depends where you’re starting from, what you know, and where you want to get to. And if you’re looking for a summer study plan, then you need to think about what you can realistically accomplish in the space of a few months.
If you’re not one of the “lucky” people who’s read so much since childhood that you can simply intuit the answers to Critical Reading questions, then spending your summer trying to slog your way through Dickens or Dostoevsky probably won’t miraculously allow you to acquire that skill — especially if you don’t actually enjoy reading five-hundred page nineteenth-century novels and will spend most of your time trying not to tune out while reading them. You might pick up some vocabulary, especially if you keep a list of unfamiliar words, look up every single one, and go out of your way to learn how they’re actually used, but if you’re not a strong reader in the first place, a Great Work or two won’t suddenly compensate for years of just reading things like Harry Potter or Twilight (or nothing at all). As a matter of fact, reading fiction will most likely have limited value in terms of helping you recognize and summarize arguments, understand rhetorical strategies, and make inferences in the precise way that the SAT requires.
A couple of months back, I stumbled across a paper in which Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein discusses the difficulties that the Common Core’s emphasis on non-fiction pose for English teachers. Bauerlein makes the very valid point that English teachers are trained to teach literature, not “informational texts,” and that requiring them to shift their focus to non-fiction would not only require them to abandon their area of expertise but would essentially create a curriculum that would place a physics textbook on the same aesthetic footing as Hamlet.
I’m not entirely convinced by Bauerlein’s next claim, however, namely that students who are continuously exposed to a rigorous curriculum consisting primarily of challenging classic works of fiction do not really need to study non-fiction because they will be able to automatically transfer the comprehension skills they’ve developed over to non-fiction texts for tests like the SAT. As evidence, Bauerlein cites Massachusetts pubic schools, which do generally offer a traditional curriculum based on challenging works of fiction and whose students consistently obtain some of the highest reading scores in the country.
As a product of the Massachusetts public school system who studied a curriculum much like the one Bauerlein describes, and who went on to achieve top Verbal scores with minimal formal prep, I think Bauerlein is generally correct in stating that the comprehension skills developed through the study of complex classic work of fiction do carry over to non-fiction.
At the same time, however, there are important differences between the two genres, and it seems like an oversight for schools to focus on developing the former at the expense of the latter (especially since so much of college is based on non-fiction reading). The type of character/plot/theme-based analysis I did in school and the kind of structural/rhetorical/inferential reading required by the SAT required two very different approaches, and the fact that I literally understood what I was reading on the SAT did not make what it was demanding of me any less foreign. I intuited the gist of what it was trying to accomplish well enough to figure out what I needed to give it, but it would have been much, much easier if someone had sat me down with a “complex text” like, say, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and directly taught me to analyze its arguments rhetorically and logically à la the SAT.
But I digress.
The point I’m trying to make is that unless you fall into the very small minority of people who have somehow automatically absorbed everything the SAT tests just by reading, the best way to improve your Critical Reading score is to practice reading critically — the extent to which you can do that outside the structured format of SAT practice tests depends on you. But if you are going to do some independent reading for the specific purpose of prepping for the SAT, here are some suggestions.
1) Focus on relatively short pieces of non-fiction. They don’t have to be as short as CR passages, but they should be short enough for you to practice looking at how they’re organized. That’s much easier to do in a three-page article than in a twenty-five page one.
I would strongly suggest that you go on Arts & Letters Daily and pick an article or a couple of articles to read every day; pretty much everything on there is written at or above the level of the SAT. The New York Times Opinionator is also great.
2) Look out for pieces that discuss some of its most common topics and themes: string theory, the effects of technology on the reading/writing and the humanities, animal cognition, the body/mind problem, immigrant/minority experience. (There are LOTS of articles that touch on these subjects on Arts & Letters Daily because these are hot topics in the real world.) After a while, you’ll start to get familiar with the conventional arguments surrounding these debates, which means you’ll have to waste a lot less energy just trying to figure out what they’re literally saying.
3) Look up every unfamiliar reference, not just vocabulary words — names, places, concepts. Never heard of de Tocqueville or Hegel or Stanislavsky? Go find out who they were and why people care about them. Critical Reading does not exist in a box; it’s designed to reflect the Common Core, and passages are deliberately drawn from a wide range of topics in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. The more you know about the world, the easier it will be to literally comprehend readings about an incredibly wide range of topics (it’s much harder to appreciate a passage about an anthropologist if you don’t know what an anthropologist does.) It’ll also give you lots of fodder for the essay.
4) Treat everything you read like an SAT passage. Pay particular attention to the introduction and the conclusion when looking for the point, and see how quickly you can figure it out. Make sure you’re clear on when an author is expressing their own ideas vs. someone else’s ideas, and look at the words and phrases they use to indicate or suggest agreement vs. disagreement. Notice when an author is supporting their point with personal anecdotes vs. hard facts vs. broad generalizations, using extreme language (expressing “the strength of a conviction”), and using common words in alternate meanings.
Provided you understand what you’re reading and can accurately identify the elements discussed above, pending even thirty minutes a day reading this way will most likely help you go just as far — if not farther — toward increasing your Critical Reading score as simply sitting with a Princeton Review book and taking practice test after practice test. You’re also a lot more likely to learn something in the process.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 15, 2013 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
When I’m working through Critical Reading questions with a student, I regularly encounter the following scenario:
The student reads and understands the question without a problem.
The student goes back to the passage, re-reads and accurately summarizes the section in question, then formulates a general idea about what information the correct answer should contain.
The student looks at the answers but fails to see one that clearly fits.
The student’s eyes start to glaze over with panic as he stares at the page.
At this point, I usually interject nonchalantly, “So what are you going to do now?”
Student (looking sheepish): Uhhh… I don’t know?
Me: What happens when you work through the whole question carefully and then nothing seems to work?
Student: Is it (C)?
Me: Don’t guess. What do you do when you think you know what the right answer is going to say but none of the answers say it?
Student: No, wait, I think it might actually be (B).
Me: I said don’t guess. What’s the question you need to ask yourself when this happens?
Student: Uhh… I don’t remember
Me: I somehow feel that we’ve had this conversation already. Like, oh I don’t know, two or three or five hundred times. C’mon, this is probably going to happen when you take the test, and you need to know how to handle it.
Student stares blankly.
Me: What am I missing? What am I not seeing? That’s the question I always ask myself. If I’ve worked through the whole thing carefully but still don’t see the answer, that’s a sign that I’ve missed something. I’m either focusing on the wrong thing, or I’m just plain thinking in the wrong direction, and that means I need to go back and reconsider my original assumption. See how I’m turning it back on myself and taking responsibility for not knowing the answer? The people at ETS didn’t mess up; the answer is there, it’s just not something I’m not expecting. If I’m not getting it it means I’ve overlooked the necessary information.
Look, I did the exact same steps you did, and I wasn’t sure about the answer either. That happens to me too. But the difference is that I didn’t just decide to guess when I didn’t see the answer right away — I went back and tried to figure out where I went wrong. And if you seriously want to get every question right, you have to be willing to do that as well.
—–
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I tend to have this conversation most frequently with students scoring 700+ — they’re so accustomed to spotting the answer immediately that they’re simply flummoxed when they don’t, and then go into all-out panicking/guessing mode. Needless to say, this is not a particularly helpful strategy for getting to 800.
So for the record, when you think you’ve figured everything out but actually haven’t, here’s what to do:
1) Assuming that you’ve correctly understood both the question and the passage, start by crossing out the answers that absolutely, clearly do not make sense. Make sure you cross out the whole answer, not just the letter; when your visual field isn’t being cluttered by extraneous information, it’s easier to focus on what’s left.
2) Now, carefully read the answers that remain. You might have simply misread something or overlooked a key word the first time around. If that’s the case, you’re done. But if not…
3) Go back to the passage and look for specific textual elements that usually indicate importance: if you have a colon or dashes or italics or strong language (e.g. “most”) or a major transition like “however” or “therefore,” the information around it is probably going to be key, and the correct answer will probably restate it in some form.
Make sure also that you have the necessary context for the lines in question; sometimes the right answer won’t make sense if you only consider the lines referenced. Remember that “function” or “purpose” questions regularly go either way: sometimes you need to focus on the lines given, and sometimes you need to focus on what comes before or after, and there’s absolutely no way to tell upfront which one it will be. If you haven’t read both places and can’t figure out the answer, chances are you’ve been focusing on the wrong place.
4) If you’re still stumped, start with the most specific (usually the longest) answers and pick a concrete aspect to check out. If an answer mentions that an author was criticized on “moral grounds” but the passage only indicates that she was criticized because her work was challenging aesthetically (i.e. it didn’t conform to traditional notions of beauty), you can eliminate that answer.
Remember that the correct answer might be phrased in much more neutral or general terms than the passage itself; if an answer accurately describes what’s going on in the passage but does so neutrally while the passage is fairly negative or positive, it’s probably the answer.
Remember also that you shouldn’t eliminate answers simply because you find them confusing; your understanding has no bearing on whether they’re wrong or right.
5) If you still truly have no idea, skip the question and come back to it if you have time. It’s not worth wasting five minutes on if there are other things you can answer more easily.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 13, 2013 | Blog, General Tips, Tutoring
When people “SAT prep,” they have a tendency to lump it all together in one undifferentiated mass. So here I want to talk about the differences between these kinds of preparation and what different types of students can realistically expect to gain from them.
Short-Term Prep
I tend to classify anything from a couple of sessions through about three months as short-term prep.
Short-term prep itself falls into two categories: the kind that focuses narrowly on improving a small number of skills, and the kind that focuses primarily on finding strategies that will best leverage the student’s existing skills. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 7, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Along with E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit, one of the most incisive critiques of contemporary education I’ve encountered. Although Christodoulou teaches in the UK, nearly all of what she has to say is equally applicable to the American system.
The seven myths, courtesy of Daisy Christodoulou:
1) Facts prevent understanding
2) Teacher-led instruction is passive
3) The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4) You can always just look it up
5) We should teach transferable skills
6) Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7) Teaching knowledge is indoctrination
