by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 31, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Because of the nature of my job, I tend to get a lot of students with very significant imbalances between their math and verbal scores. Most people scoring a 760 in Math without much prep just don’t bother with math tutors, although the same people sometimes find themselves stuck in the 600s or even the 500s in Reading and Writing. What I look at the (full) tests of students like these, however, what often strikes me the most is the difference between the sheer amount of stuff they’ve written in the Math sections vs. the CR sections.
Even just glancing at the math, I can see that they’ve really worked those problems out. In fact, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to do otherwise. There are equations scribbled all over the place. Maybe not for every question, but often enough for it to be clear that they haven’t been approaching the SAT like some kind of glorified guessing game but rather solving the problems. They might use their knowledge of a particular rule to eliminate answers quickly, but at no point have they simply decided to abandon working things out in favor of making a guess they hope will be right.
The same, alas, cannot be said for the Reading. Sure, they’ve probably underlined and circled some things in the passages, maybe written the main point and perhaps the tone, but the spaces next to the questions are totally and completely blank. Even if they’ve made an attempt to reason their way through the problem, they haven’t bothered to write down all the steps. More likely, though, it hasn’t really occurred to them that they *can* approach CR in more or less the same way they would approach Math What seems like an obvious way to work through a math problem seems far less obvious when applied to reading — especially since they’ve never been asked to think about reading in quite that way before.
What really gets me, though, is that even after I demonstrate — in some cases, multiple times — how to work through a CR question step by step like a math problem, writing down each part of the process and moving systematically through the choices when the answer isn’t initially obvious, they still refuse to even attempt to replicate the process on their own. (Actually, after I demonstrate the first time, they usually give me a look that says approximately, “Oh s–t! That looks like a lot of work. No way, there has to be an easier way to do it.” Um, no, there isn’t.) It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that this was how I got an 800, and that if they’re really serious about wanting one as well, they need to make themselves go through the entire process. They still want the magical shortcut that’ll get them a perfect score without having to work quite so hard. Guess what, folks: it doesn’t exist. The closest thing to a fail-safe technique I have for getting an 800 on CR is this, take or leave it.
So having said that, I want to work through what is quite possibly the hardest CR question I know of — one that absolutely demands to be worked out like an equation and that pretty much every student I’ve ever had, no matter how high they ultimately scored, screwed up on. (True confession: I actually had to look at the answer the first time I saw it. It was only when I went back that I was able to work out the reasoning behind it). It’s from the College Board Test 4, section 6, question 20, p. 592.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I would actually write all of my reasoning down. Note that I constantly, quasi-obsessively reiterate both what the question is asking and the point of the paragraph. It may seem excessive, but it’s necessary. It’s the only way to leave no room for error.
Paragraph 2
Things that live by night live outside the realm of “normal” time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good, people who have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms. Also night is when we dream, and so reality is warped. After all, we do not see very well at night, we do not need to. But that makes us nearly defenseless after dark. Although we are accustomed to mastering our world by day , in the night we become vulnerable as prey. Thinking of bats as masters of the night threatens the safety we daily take for granted. Though we are at the top of our food chain, if we had to live alone in the rain forest, say, and protect ourselves against roaming predators, we would live partly in terror, as our ancestors did. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw – a ghoul.
Which of the following assertions detracts LEAST from the author’s argument in the second paragraph (lines 25-42)?
(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer’s personal life
Solution:
1. Since the question is phrased in a somewhat convoluted manner, we need to make sure that we are absolutely clear about what is actually being asked before we do anything else. The question is asking us which option detracts LEAST.
That means that the four incorrect answers will detract from (go against) the argument and the correct answer will not detract from the argument.
It does not, however, mean that the correct option will SUPPORT the argument. Just because an idea does not explicitly go against an argument does not mean that it supports it; there might just be no relationship.
So we are simply looking for something that does not contradict the argument.
2. The next step is to determine what the argument actually is. While the question gives us a lot of lines to read, they can be pretty much summed up AND WRITTEN DOWN as follows:
-Humans sleep @ night and think it’s normal, get scared by stuff that’s awake @ night b/c = abnormal.
-Bats don’t sleep @ night, THUS: B/c bats assoc. w/dark = scary.
Notice that I’ve crammed down the paragraph into just the essential, disregarding the details entirely.
3. Before we look at the answers, we need to consider very clearly what we are looking for. The question asks us to find the answer that does NOT explicitly contradict the idea that bats & stuff @ night = scary. It might not support that idea, but it won’t go against it either. So now we consider the answers.
(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
If many people work at night and sleep during the day, they go against typical patterns. But that happens all the time and people don’t get scared. So that DOES detract from the idea that night is only for scary stuff, and we can eliminate the answer.
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
Again, owls go against normal human patterns but NOT scary. So that also detracts from the idea that night = scary stuff. It can be eliminated.
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
But scary stuff is supposed to happen @ night, not during the day. So that detracts from the idea that scary stuff just comes out @ night. It can be eliminated.
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
This is dealing with the other main point in the paragraph: bats = scary. But if bats are really so scary for everyone, then they shouldn’t be associated w/positive qualities. So this DOES detract from the idea that bats = scary. It can be eliminated as well.
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer’s personal life
Since we’ve reasoned through the other options and have determined that they cannot be correct, this must be right. But before we pick it, we’re going to double check it against the original question to make sure that it works. This is part of the whole “not leaving yourself any room for error” thing, and if you want to certain, you can’t leave this step out.
We know that the right answer will not detract from the idea that bats/night = scary, and this option has nothing whatsoever to do with that idea. And if it has nothing to do with that idea, it can detract from it. It does, however, support the idea that bats/night = scary; it just does NOT detract from it. So it’s right.
Most of my students groan when I explain the logic to them; it seems so ridiculously convoluted. And such an outrageous amount of work. But there is no other way to figure it out. Even if some people can get the answer very fast, they’re still going through the entire process — they’re just doing it at warp speed.
Now to be fair, this question is very extreme. Most don’t have anywhere near this level of complexity. The problem is that there are always a couple of outliers that have something close to it, and those are the questions that separate the 800s from the mid-700s. I’ll admit that working like this does not initially feel natural. It can be time consuming (although in reality no more time consuming than staring blankly at the answers), but it’s also the sort of thing that gets faster the more you practice it. You have to be able to do it before you can do do it fast. Even if you screw it up the first few (or twenty) times you try to do it, practicing the approach is what counts. You’re dealing with the SAT in terms of what it’s actually testing — your ability to reason your way logically through complex material — and that’ll get you a lot further than looking at it just about any other way.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 18, 2011 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
As I’ve said before, I’m generally suspicious when people claim to have timing issues on Critical Reading. While I certainly appreciate that some people read much faster than others and do work on timing when necessary, the time itself is almost never the real root of the problem. Upon doing a bit of probing, I typically discover one of two things:
1) The student has genuine comprehension issues, weak vocabulary skills, and rereads portions of a passage three or four times just trying to understand what’s literally being said. Ditto for the answer choices.
2) The student has solid comprehension skills but an incomplete understanding of what they’re looking for when they read the passages. Like the students in the first category, they tend to waste a lot of time staring at answer choices and trying to distinguish between them without really understanding how to relate them back to the passage. Equipped with some tools for understanding just what to look out for, however, they tend to get rid of their timing issues very quickly.
If you fall into category #2, this post is for you.
Part of the problem for people in this category often comes from not fully understanding what line references mean: if a question refers to “the historians in line 18,” that only means that the word “historians” appears in line 18 — not that the answer to the question is in line 18. The answer could be anywhere.
Usually, this type of misunderstanding plays out in the following way:
You encounter a question that says something like, “In lines 25-37, the author’s description of photo albums serves primarily to,” and so of course you go and read lines 25-37 because those are the lines that the question gave you.
But when you read lines 25-37 and then look at the answers, nothing seems to work. At that point, you start to wonder whether you were missing something.
There are a couple of answers that just totally don’t make sense, so you cross those off, but out of the two or three answers you have left, it seems any of them could work. So you go back and read lines 25-37 again, trying to match them to one of the answers. But it still seems terribly ambiguous.
At that point, you go back and start to read the lines again, only now you realize that you’re wasting an awful lot of time on the question and start to skim through without really knowing what you’re looking for.
Then you start to think, “well maybe if I interpret it this way, it could be (B).” The author must be trying to suggest it without really saying so directly. Yeah, that must be it. So you pick B and move on but still really aren’t sure. Your mind keeps going back to it as you work through the rest of the questions in for that passage, so your concentration is compromised, and you end up missing other things that you could have gotten right.
When this happens, there’s a really good chance that the answer was actually spelled out for you somewhere around line 23. Why? Because the question was asking you what purpose the lines served (i.e. what point did they support?), not what the lines themselves said, and usually the information necessary to determine that purpose is found before the lines themselves. In these cases, the lines are only important insofar as they relate to that point — for the purposes of answering the question, they’re virtually irrelevant.
Plenty of times, of course, it doesn’t work that way, and the answer can in fact be found in the given lines. The problems is that just as often they can’t, and you really have no way of knowing in advance which category a particular question will fall into before you actually look at the passage.
So if you’re a slow-ish reader and don’t want to waste time by always backing up and reading a sentence or two before, try this: read the lines you’re given, and see whether you can definitely answer the question from what you’ve read. Not, “well if I interpret it this way, (C) might kind of work,” but “the answer must be A because this passage says xyz.” If you can’t answer the question from those lines you’ve been given, there’s a good chance the answer isn’t there. And if it isn’t there, it has has to be located someplace else. Your job is to locate that someplace else: if it isn’t right before, it’s probably right after. It doesn’t matter if it takes a little more time to go back and read that extra bit; there’s essentially no other way to determine the answer, and you’ll be far worse served if you just keep looking at the lines given in the question. Just keep in mind that if your comprehension skills really are good, the problem is most likely not that you’ve overlooked something or didn’t interpret the lines in the way the SAT wanted you to. It’s just that the answer was probably never there in the first place.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 12, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Among the tidbits of wisdom that I attempt to impart to my students is the fact that it doesn’t really matter if they understand a particular rule/concept/strategy after I’ve explained it to them once. The real test is whether they can apply at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning, when they’re still not 100% awake, and, oh yeah, are in the middle of taking an exam that will play a very significant role in determining where they spend the next four years of their lives.
In general, I do my best not to pile on the pressure for my students (they’re certainly under enough already, and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for anyone having a nervous breakdown!), but every now and then, when someone needs a reality check about what’s involved in really and truly mastering a concept, I give them that little speech. Usually it’s met with a small giggle and a look of minor incredulousness. Until they actually go through the process of taking the SAT and end up sitting in front of question 9 in section 10, desperately trying to wade through four-and-a-half hours of test-taking fatigue and figure out just what is wrong with the stupid sentence already, most people don’t fully appreciate what it means to understand comma splices.
So let me spell it out. If you haven’t taken the SAT yet, you might not quite believe, but trust me, it’s something to keep in mind as you prepare. True mastery of a particular concept, whether it be comma splices, dangling modifiers, or right triangles, means that you can always recognize when it’s being tested. Always. No matter how tired you are, no matter what you were doing beforehand, no matter how much room the people in the next room are making, no matter what angle it’s being tested from — the knowledge is just there.
If you can usually recognize comma splices on the SAT but use them rampantly in your own writing, that means you don’t fully understand them — which means that you still have the potential to get fooled on the exam.
Likewise, if formulating a clear thesis statement and composing an argument that adheres consistently to it something that’s just beginning to sink in for you, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to pull it off on the real test. This is not just a question of “getting familiar” with how the SAT works. Until you get to the point where it’s an extension of a real-life skill, one that you consistently apply in your actual schoolwork, there will always be an element of chance. (If you don’t believe me, ask a kid who got a 12 on the essay without doing a single practice run: I can virtually guarantee that coming up with a clear thesis and keeping their argument directly focused on it is something they can do in their sleep.)
I think, by the way, that this is part of why so many people perceive the SAT to be so “tricky.” If you’ve just brushed up on a couple of things for the test but haven’t fully assimilated them, of course you’re going to miss things; it’s inevitable, especially since the test is written to exploit those misunderstandings.
What does this mean in terms of studying? Well… I’ll put it this way. For most people, the inclination is to study until they’ve gotten more or less where they want to be. And then stop. But that doesn’t really work: just because you did incredibly well on one practice test doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily do as well on the next test (unless, of course, you really do know what you’re doing). So take another one. And another one. Do it until there’s absolutely no way you can possibly score below a certain level, even on your worst possible day. And when you go back and review the questions you’ve missed, make sure that you’re not just looking at the questions themselves but rather at the underlying concepts they’re testing. If you have trouble with subject-verb agreement, take a book and try to identify the subject and verb in every single sentence; if your ability to identify dangling modifiers is hit or miss, try writing some of your own. If you can produce it correctly, you’ll be a lot less likely to overlook someone else’s error.
You might not be able to master everything, but you can pick a handful of concepts that seem well within your control and focus on them. Even three or four more questions per section could boost your score well over 100 points.
The bottom line is that you never know just what’s going to happen when you go in and take the test. If you perceive your score as the result of chance, whether particular the test is “easy” or “hard”… well, chances are you’re not going to do nearly as well as you could have. Or, at the very least, you’re going to feel as if the whole experience is somehow beyond your control. But if you’ve trained yourself past the point of mastery, the whole experience might actually border on. . .maybe not quite pleasant, but at least not so bad.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 7, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Update: Somehow or other, I neglected to notice that PSAT scores were coming out just as I posted this (usually my students flip out about them, but this year everyone seems remarkably laid back about the whole thing, so I apparently I’m the last to know;) Anyway, I wanted to add a couple of things in light of that fact. First, if you’re less than thrilled with your score, don’t panic — a lot of people are in exactly the same situation. A weaker-than-expected PSAT score is in no way a harbinger of doom — it’s simply an indication of the approximate score you would get if you were to take the SAT tomorrow, without any additional studying.
That said, however, PSAT can be a major wake-up call for a lot of people who thought they were going to skate through standardized testing. (I always cringe internally whenever a junior that I know really needs to work on things tells me that the PSAT was “easy;” it’s usually an indicator that they fell into every trap in the book, and seeing scores 100+ points lower than what they expected can be a major blow.) It can be exciting to hit junior year and actually start the whole college process you’ve been hearing everyone go on about forever, but getting a less than stellar PSAT score can suddenly make the whole process get old really fast.
Here’s the thing: your improvement from here on largely depends on your attitude: if you get disgusted with the whole process now and decide that it’s futile to even try to raise your score, you probably won’t. If, on the other hand, you can accept it as what it is — a diagnostic — and use the information it gives you to motivate you and focus your study process, you have the potential to make truly massive gains.
I’m not going to lie: it can be a lot of work, but provided you have the basics in place, it is totally doable. I’ve had students who improved literally hundreds of points from the PSAT to the SAT — and yes, that includes major (150+ point) increases in Critical Reading. Yes, I did help them, but they also put in huge amounts of work independently.
Despite claims to the contrary, what’s tested on the (P)SAT is not some sort of undefinable “aptitude” but rather a set of concrete skills. They may not be tested in quite the same way that you’re accustomed to being tested in school, but that doesn’t make them any less real. And as a result, there are specific steps that you can take to improve them. For that reason, it can be helpful to view your scores not as some sort of ultimate, immutable indicator of your ability, but rather as a general indicator of where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and of what sorts of things you need to focus on improving.
Looking at your score as feedback makes the process more neutral. Yes, of course SAT scores do ultimately count for a lot in the admissions process; I’m not about to deny that. But they’re also a relatively accurate, unbiased measure of where you stand in some key areas — how to recognize the point that an author is trying to make; how to distinguish between what they think and what they think about what other people think (!); and how to read objectively without allowing your own opinion to cloud your understanding of what’s literally being said. It could be that you simply need to practice taking the test or work more carefully, but chances are that there’s a skill or two you need to brush up on — even if it doesn’t seem to obviously correlate with the questions you missed.
Look at it this way: you missed the questions you missed for a reason. Even if you really did know how to do them, there wasn’t some mysterious force that forced your hand to pick up that #2 pencil and bubble in B rather than C. Something in your process went awry, and that resulted in your getting the question wrong. The way to improve your score is to try to identify the problem at its core and deal with it from there.
If, for example, you misread a Math question and solved for x instead of 2x, that’s a sign that you need to read more carefully; it doesn’t matter how good you are at math in school. The Math portion of the SAT is a math-basedreasoning test, not a math test per se, and it asks you to integrate English and math skills simultaneously in the same way that Critical Reading asks you to use logic skills similar to those used in Math. Blaming the test for asking a question in a way that you weren’t expecting won’t help. What will help is putting your finger on the page as you read the question, taking a moment to reiterate for yourself exactly what it’s asking, and, if necessary, scribbling yourself a note so that you don’t forget. Those are important skills too. But that said, pretty much every math tutor I’ve ever talked to has told me that plenty of kids in AP Calc are missing some of the fundamentals, either because they forgot them or because they never really mastered them in the first place. If you’re so convinced that you’re above going back and reviewing the math on the test, you probably won’t get your score up anywhere near as much as you hoped.
Likewise, if you’re a straight-A student in AP English but can’t get past 650 on Critical Reading, it won’t do you any good to get indignant. You need to look honestly and objectively at why you’re making so many mistakes. If your score reflects the fact that you consistently get down to two answers but tend to pick the wrong one, you need to look at why you always pick the wrong one. It could be because you’re not going back to the passage and really checking things out (or are reading too quickly or not extensively enough when you do), but it could also be because you have a tendency to insert your own knowledge and not look closely at what’s actually being said. It could also be that you have trouble recognizing how specific words contribute to the creation of a particular tone, or in decoding particularly unfamiliar types of syntax or phrasing — things that have absolutely nothing to do with your test-taking ability. In that case, you need to spend some serious time reading SAT-level material. One of my students who got himself up 100 points in CR did so in part by devouring Oliver Sacks’ books, passages from which frequently show up on the SAT (it helped that he absolutely loved the books, though); the level of his comprehension skyrocketed.
I recognize that it can be hard to identify just what you’re missing, especially if you’re trying to do it all on your own, and it can be even harder to be brutally honest with yourself about just what you need to work on. But the key is not to take it personally. If you can leave your ego at the door and focus on solidifying some of the fundamentals that got lost along the way, you might even learn something in the process.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 5, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
Sometimes I feel like the SAT is a kind of Rorschach test. It’s so laden down with cultural baggage and anxieties (about race, class, social mobility, you name it) that people’s opinions — and they tend to be very, very strong opinions — seem to reveal more about their own concerns than they do about the actual test itself. I also sometimes feel as if people who complain about the SAT’s purported “trickiness” are missing the point of the it: both the questions and the incorrect answer choices are deliberately written to exploit the kinds of mistakes that people are most likely to make when working through the various kinds of questions. The real issue is whether that whole setup is a valid means of testing, well… whatever it is that the SAT is supposed to be testing (which is of course something that no one can agree on anyway).
I do feel obligated to point out that for the small percentage of test-takers whose skills are such that they can disregard the multiple-choice aspect and simply answer the questions, the whole concept of trickiness is essentially a moot point. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 27, 2011 | Uncategorized
A lot of test-prep discussions seem to center on guessing: when to do it, when not to do it, and how many answer choices you should eliminate before trying to do it.
Interestingly, though, no one ever seems to discuss just what it means to guess. I think that this is largely because most people assume that the term is self-evident: a “guess” is what you take what you take when you’ve eliminated at least one or two option(s) but have absolutely no idea what the real answer is and don’t want to leave a question blank.
What largely gets overlooked in these discussion, however, is the fact that there are different kinds of guessing, and they are not at all alike. In general, I find that there are three major types of guesses, and I want to discuss each one in turn:
1) Wild guesses
2) “Gut feeling” guesses
3) Educated Guesses
Wild Guesses
I’m going to come right out and say that I’m not a big fan of this type of guessing, no matter how many answer choices you’ve eliminated. Not simply because I’m a cautious person when it comes to test-taking (although anyone who’s seen me work through an SAT Critical Reading section will testify that I don’t *ever* pick an answer without double-checking that it’s actually backed up by something in the text) but because also because from what I’ve observed, most wild guesses tend to be wrong — even when you’re down to two answers.
Repeated wild guessing on questions you really don’t know how to answer has the potential to drag your score down a whole lot. Especially if you’re trying to top 750 or even 700, you need to be very careful about answering questions you don’t really know the answer to (and if you have the chops to pull above a 700, you shouldn’t see more than a question or two per test that fall into that category anyway).
The other reason that I dislike wild guessing is that doing it habitually, especially for a relatively high scorer, reinforces the idea that the SAT CR is fundamentally a guessing game. It isn’t, and treating it that way can get you in a lot of trouble.
“Gut Feeling” Guesses
Interestingly enough, I find that these guesses tend to almost always be right, and more often than not I have to convince people that it’s ok to make them! In fact, I feel as if I have the “trust your instinct” conversation at least once every tutoring session. That’s totally understandable. “Gut feeling” guesses are scary because they don’t seem to be based on anything, and no one wants to ruin their score by going on a feeling. But usually people get questions wrong because they don’t trust their instincts, not because they do!
Here’s the thing: these guesses are usually based on something, even if it can’t be put into words. If you’re generally a strong reader, it’s perfectly possible to grasp in some corner of your mind what’s fundamentally going on in a passage but lack the vocabulary to put it explicitly into words. That glimmer of understanding is usually enough to get you the right answer.
For example, even if you’ve never actually learned that many words with anglo-saxon roots tend to sound clearly negative or positive, you can probably guess that “dolt” is something negative. If you have a decent ear for language, you can probably intuit that it’s bad, whether or not you know how you did so.
From what I’ve seen, the most effective way to know whether this kind of guessing will actually be effective is to take a bunch of tests and practice doing it. It can be incredibly scary to trust yourself at first, especially if you’re not 100% sure of the answer, but if you take a bunch of practice tests and consistently get questions right because you trusted your instincts, you’ll start to feel more comfortable.
If, on the other hand, you discover that your instincts tend to lead you in the wrong direction, you can learn to deal accordingly. In any case, you NEED to test this out beforehand; you can’t just wing it when you get to the real test.
Educated Guesses
Even more often that “gut feeling” guesses, this kind of guess usually ends up being correct — in large part because the SAT is test of logical conjecture, designed so that you can reason your way through the questions. In general, my rule is that if you’ve arrived at any answer by employing some sort of logical process (provided that it isn’t too farfetched), you should go ahead and pick it because it’s probably right.
There are a couple of different ways in which this type of guess can manifest itself, the first being simple process of elimination. If you can conclusively discard four answers, the remaining one must be correct. Even if you don’t know why the right answer is the right answer, you can still pick it with a fair degree of confidence.
In addition, on sentence completions, you can choose an answer that includes unfamiliar words based on your knowledge of roots. So even if you don’t know what “multifarious” and “polymath” mean, you know they probably go along with the idea of diversity or many of something. As I’ve said before, the SAT isn’t just based on how many words you can memorize — it’s also based on how you can use your knowledge about language to put words together (or take them apart). If you can relate an unfamiliar word to French or Latin or Spanish, you might not get the exact meaning, but you’ll probably get it close enough to answer the question. Furthermore, understanding how the SAT is constructed can also go a long way toward helping you make these kinds of guesses. Knowing, for example, that the correct answer to many passage-based questions will essentially be a rephrasing of the passage’s main point can help you identify the likely answer — even if you can’t find the necessary evidence to back it up and/or don’t 100% understand what the question is asking. Granted you still have to nail the main point, but provided you can do that, you’ll almost certainly be right.
This is also where the question of “implied authorship” comes into play — the idea that the writers of the test have their own set of biases to which correct answers tend to conform. That means that extreme answers are usually wrong; women and minorities are portrayed positively (and tone questions relating to them typically have positive answers); and challenging conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to science, is a good thing. Knowing that the right answers tend to slant this way does not guarantee that you’ll get a question correct, but it can significantly up your chances.
So to sum up, if you’re about to take a wild guess just for the sake of not leaving a question blank, you might want to think twice; but if you have good reason for picking the answer you’re picking, you should probably go for it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 24, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The SAT makes people do some strange things. I think it’s safe to say that in everyday life, most people don’t pick up a book, open to a random page, start reading in the middle of a sentence, and then wonder why they don’t fully understand what’s going on. Barring some sort of bizarre circumstances, it just doesn’t happen. But it happens constantly on the SAT.
Now, I fully admit there are some aspects of SAT Reading that are different from the types of reading most test-takers have been asked to thus far, but contrary to conventional test-prep wisdom, SAT Reading is not completely detached from the normal act of reading. That means that you need to read words and phrases within the larger context of the sentences where they appear. Always.
I realize that this is one of those pieces of advice that might sound pretty obvious, but please just hear me out. One of the biggest mistakes that I see my students consistently make when they answer Critical Reading questions is to focus only on the word/phrase/line references given and ignore the surrounding information — which is what they actually need to read in order to answer the question correctly. Not backing up and starting from a sentence or two above is bad enough, but actually starting in the middle of the sentence has the potential to cause a lot of problems.
For example (passage excerpt):
…Now that I am passionately involved with thinking critically about Black people and representation, I can confess that those walls of photographs empowered me, and that I feel their absence in my life. Right now I long for those walls, those curatorial spaces in the home that express our will to make and display images.
Question:
In line 26, “absence” refers metaphorically to a lack of a
(A) constraining force
(B) cluttered space
(C) negative influence
(D) sustaining tradition
(E) joyful occasion
By SAT standards, the question is right in the middle of the road difficulty-wise. In fact, it’s a level 3. The reason that people tend to get into trouble with questions like it, however, is as follows: the question refers specifically to the word “absence,” then tells us that the word appears in line 26 — a piece of information that leads most people to begin reading at the word “absence” in line 26, then continue down to the rest of the paragraph (and often, when they can’t find the answer, to the paragraph below it).
In other words, they start reading halfway through the sentence, but they’re so focused on the word “absence” that it never even occurs to them that they might be missing something important. And once they hit the phrase “curatorial spaces,” they so hung up on the fact that they don’t quite understand what it means that it never occurs to them that they might be missing something a lot more straightforward.
The problem is that the answer is found in the first part of the sentence: the photographs were absent, and they empowered the narrator. Empowered = sustaining (more or less), hence (D). (The beginning of the passage also makes quite clear that those photographs were an important tradition in her family.) But if you don’t read the beginning of the sentence, you miss the context and end up going in the completely wrong direction. In addition, the word “absence” usually has negative connotations, which means that in the absence of context, you’re a lot more likely to pick (A), (B), or (C). If you go back and see that the photographs were “empowering,” however,” you won’t fall into that trap.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 21, 2011 | Blog, Vocabulary
I’ve been doing some thinking about the relationship between the Critical Reading and Math sections of the SAT, particularly in relation to the the idea of associative interference — the notion that unrelated concepts have a tendency to get tied up with one another and interfere with understanding. Catherine Johnson at Kitchen Table Math has written about it in relation to the Math section, but I would venture to say that for most people, it’s actually much more of a problem on Critical Reading section. Here’s why:
One of the things that the SAT tests is the ability to draw conclusions based solely on the information in front of you and to ignore any preconceived notions or biases you may bring with you into the test. In terms of the math section, this means that you need to be able to understand the concept of a variable — that is, that the letter “a” or “x” or “y”(or whatever else happens to be used) stands for whatever it happens to mean within the context of a particular problem, regardless of how you’re used to seeing it elsewhere.
I think that in general, this is not a terribly foreign concept for most people who have achieved a reasonably high level of mathematical understanding. If you don’t really get what a variable is but are still attempting to take any sort of advanced math class, you’re going to get thrown the second you see a familiar letter in an unfamiliar context, and that’s probably going to cause you some trouble in math class at some point. In other words, “school” math does often overlap with SAT math in this regard, and if there’s a serious weakness in your understanding of the concept, there’s a halfway decent chance it’ll get picked up on eventually.
When a similar issue emerges on the verbal side of things, however, there chances of it being caught are comparatively slim. I think it’s safe to say that most high school students have never been explicitly asked to think about words in quite the way the SAT tests them — namely, that a word can be made to mean almost anything that an author wants it to mean, even the exact opposite of what it usually means. Or, to draw a math analogy, that words = variables. In other words, sometimes it doesn’t matter how a word is usually used, only how it’s being used in that particular context at that particular moment. (In order to answer higher-level questions dealing with things like irony and mockery and skepticism, it is of course necessary to understand whyan author would use a word to mean its opposite, but in order to get there, you first have to understand what’s literally being said. And in my experience, plenty of kids who take AP English struggle even with that.)
In this sense, the SAT is exactly the opposite of a traditional vocabulary test. It’s also the exact opposite of the kind of English assignment that asks you to connect what you’re reading to your own experiences — which, as far as I can tell, seems to comprise a substantial portion of the English assignments at a lot of schools. Knowing the dictionary definition of a word, pondering what it reminds you of, or remembering how your Aunt Sally used it last weekend will get you exactly nowhere. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even matter if you know the definition of the word being tested — all that matters is that you know the definitions of the words in the answer choices.
So what this means, practically speaking, is that when you see a question that that says, “In line 17, suffered most nearly means,” you need to rephrase the question as, “In line 17, x most nearly means.” The fact that the word “suffered,” as opposed to some other word, happens to be used in the original text is almost entirely incidental. Yes, knowing that “suffered” is negative might help you make some headway in eliminating answer choices, but if the passage indicates otherwise, that knowledge might actually drag you in the wrong direction.
Thinking about vocabulary words as variables also eliminates the option that you’ll try to answer the question without looking back at the passage — you might think you know what “suffering” means, but you probably wouldn’t dare to guess what “x” meant without checking out the context. Even if you think you remember, you’ll be a whole lot more likely to play it safe.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 16, 2011 | Blog, SAT Essay
So much gets made out of the “right” way to write the SAT essay: plug in a couple of examples about The Great Gatsby or the Civil Rights movement, throw in a bunch of big SAT words whether or not you really know their definitions, stick in some transitions, and presto….! You’ve just written pretty much the same essay as a hundred thousand other people. So don’t be shocked when you get an 8.
Even though I frequently remind my students that if they write a paint-by-numbers essay, they’re likely to end up with average score, I’m still a little surprised by just how risk-averse they are. On one hand, I of course understand why: it’s the SAT, for crying out loud! One false step and you’ve ruined your chances at the school you’ve dreamed about going to since you were five and, by extension, the entire rest of your life. But on the other hand, you’re not particularly likely to get a stellar store on the essay if you don’t step out of your comfort zone and do something a little more interesting. Something that actually holds your reader’s interest and gives them a break from the tedium of reading hundreds if not thousands of essays about MLK and Hitler. This does not, however, mean trying to sound like a 50 year-old and overloading your writing with ten dollar words. Simple does not necessarily equal unsophisticated.
One of the things I want to emphasize, though, is that the best essays often don’t feel forced. They don’t even always feel as if they were written for the SAT. They don’t scream, “Please give me a high score because see, look how much big vocabulary I used and how sophisticated I tried to sound even though I don’t really know what half of these words mean.” They just tell a story, albeit one that has a lot of detail and whose relationship to the prompt is absolutely clear. Incidentally, that’s the danger in making up examples: they tend to be bland and vague. If you’re a strong writer and know how to use detail effectively, however, essays that focus on a single (personal) incident can really work.
I’m not saying that this will always work; 25 minutes is not a long time, and if you get thrown a question you just don’t have great examples for, it’s easy to flounder. But in general, if you approach the essay from the standpoint of trying to engage your reader, to interest them, not just to impress them, you might do a lot better than you expected.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 9, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
Granted I’m no math expert, but from following some of the debates over just why SAT Math is so difficult, it seems to me that there’s a very fundamental difference between that section and Critical Reading — a difference that accounts for a lot of the trouble many people have in raising their CR score as compared to raising their Math score.
From what I gather (and please correct me if I’m wrong), many of the difficulties that people encounter on the Math section stem from the fact that the SAT requires them to deal with relatively familiar concepts in highly unfamiliar ways, and to combine and apply principles in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. The specifics of the test might be different from what they’ve seen in school and can often be very hard, but the general principles behind them aren’t fundamentally new for most people who’ve gone through a couple of years of algebra and geometry. So even they miss a question because they’re used to solving for x instead of (x-y), they’ve still seen plenty of problems in math class that involve variables and parentheses.
The Critical Reading section is different. For a lot of high school students, it’s the verbal equivalent of BC Calculus rather than algebra and geometry. In other words, it tests material of a level and content that they have never actually been exposed to, and it requires them to maneuver with it in ways that they’ve never encountered in school. Even in AP English.
Consider this: in sophomore and junior English class, the average American high school student probably reads a Shakespeare play or two and a handful of classics such as Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and maybe some Thoreau, Austen, Dickens, or in an advanced class, Joyce. The point is that pretty much all of it is fictional, and it’s usually set in an English-speaking country sometime in the past. SAT passages, on the other hand, are largely non-fiction and are drawn from contemporary sources — books that were published in the last couple of decades and that include subject matter only the most sophisticated independent high school readers will have even a passing familiarity with: art and media criticism, anthropology, cognitive science, and method acting to name a few. The novels that do appear are just as likely to be written by a nineteenth century Russian author as by a twentieth-century American one, and often the cultural milieux and scenarios are wildly unfamiliar.
The other piece of this is the level at which most of the texts are written — at the risk of sounding reductive, if SAT Math is essentially middle school competition math, as some people have asserted, then Critical Reading is essentially introductory-level college reading. Those texts those passages are taken from are not written specifically to test high school students’ reading ability (even though ETS will often edit them to make them somewhat more digestible) — they’re either written by professional academics for other professional academics, or by specialists in a subject for educated adult readers. And they sound like it.
It seems fair to say that most high school students have simply never been asked to deal with a text that reads like the following: “The question “Why have there been no great women artists?” is simply the top of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky ideas about the nature of art and the situation of its making, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this…Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art.” (from Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” featured on the October 2009 SAT.)
The syntax of last part in particular is so unfamiliar that it tends to stop a lot of kids cold: “Basic to question…?” Are you even allowed to start a sentence that way? (Yes, you are.) And that first sentence is really long — isn’t it a run-on? (No, it isn’t, it’s ok to have a sentence that long.) And why does it have to sound so confusing? (Because that’s just how academics write.) The only way you get comfortable dealing with sentences like that is to read lots of them. There’s no shortcut, no trick. If you haven’t been regularly exposed to people who talk and think and write like that, the reality is that you just can’t compensate in a few weeks or even a few months. Most of the major test-prep companies do not even acknowledge the presence of this level/type of passage when they write their own materials, which is part of why people often get shocked by the difficulty of the real test.
The other problem is that most English classes revolve primarily around discussions, which are easily tuned out, and papers, which can be pulled together with minimal effort via a combination of Sparknotes and Wikipedia. The teacher might give a couple of quizzes just to make sure people are doing their reading, but those are easily dealt with.
In terms of rhetoric, figures such as metaphors and personification might be covered, but that’s about it. Rarely if never are students asked to study how the text functions at its most basic level: how form and syntax and diction all work together to create meaning. Rather, the meaning itself is taken as the starting point for discussion (What do you think about that? Do you agree? Disagree? How does it relate to your own life?). The notion that a text is a rhetorical construction designed to elicit a particular reaction from the reader never enters into play. So it’s no wonder that Critical Reading, whose questions tend to revolve around the relationship between form and meaning, comes as a shock. Besides, if you’ve always been asked for your own personal interpretation in English class, the idea that your own personal interpretation is totally and utterly irrelevant on the SAT can be hard to stomach.
Finally, most high school students are never introduced to the notion that different kinds of texts require different kinds of reading. Because they are only exposed to literary fiction in English class, they develop the idea that “real” reading involves carefully underlining and annotating and note-taking and “analyzing” (although a lot of these supposedly careful readers display a remarkably weak grasp of what the passages as well as the questions are actually saying). As a matter of fact, it isn’t uncommon for students to take offense when I ask them to try reading for the main ideas and skimming over everything else; they consider it a betrayal of everything they’ve been taught and take it as further evidence of the stupidity of standardized testing.
And if the test is so stupid, why would you waste your time studying for it anyway?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 8, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
I’m the first person to admit that I have a terrible short-term memory. Terrible. I think it used to be halfway decent, but then my senior year of college hit, and that was that. Now it isn’t uncommon for me to get halfway through a sentence and drift off halfway through, unable to recall the point I was attempting to make.
This happens with alarming frequency when I’m tutoring, at which point I typically ask my student what I was saying. What really disturbs me, however, is that most of the time my student can’t remember what I was saying either. I’m sorry, but you just shouldn’t be losing your memory at sixteen. You have the entire rest of your life for that to happen. Besides, you need to have something to look forward to in middle age! (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 5, 2011 | Blog, Issues in Education, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
A couple of years ago, I tutored a pair of best friends for the SAT. Although one of them was considerably more motivated than the other, both were smart, intellectually curious, and lots of fun to work with. Neither, however, was what you would call a natural standardized test-taker when it came to Critical Reading: both had junior PSAT Reading scores around 500. I worked with them regularly starting in the fall of junior year, and fortunately they both managed to pull up their scores quite a bit: by the spring of their junior year, they were both reliably scoring more than 100 points higher, and both ultimately attained scores in the high 600s.
I wish that I could say that their experiences were typical, but unfortunately they were the exception rather than the rule. Critical Reading scores, unlike Writing and Math scores, are notoriously difficult to raise. While I’ve had many students who did manage to raise their CR scores by 100+ points, I’ve had others whose scores I simply could not get to budge, no matter how many different approaches I tried. (As I explained to their parents, I may be very good at what I do, but I do not actually possess magical powers when it comes to the SAT.) (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 1, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
I find that it can sometimes help to think of the SAT as the standardized-testing equivalent of a parlor trick, a sleight of hand if you will. Questions that appear at first glance to be exceedingly complicated can often be solved quickly and simply, and answers that would initially seem to be located in a particular place may be located somewhere else entirely. One of the places where this gap is most striking involves the line references that accompany most Critical Reading questions.
On one hand, it’s rather generous of ETS to at least be willing to tell you where to look — unlike, for example, the writers of the ACT, who basically leave you to fend for yourself in terms of figuring out where information is located. On the other hand, however, line references are not always quite the gift that they appear to be. As a matter of fact, in some cases they can be downright misleading. In order to understand why, it helps to understand just what the SAT is and is not doing when a specific line reference appears.
Take, for example, the following question:
The author’s attitude toward the “subfield” (line 65) is best characterized as one of:
(A) approval
(B) curiosity
(C) uncertainty
(D) surprise
(E) dismay
A question that is phrased this way is giving us exactly one piece of information: that the word “subfield” appears in line 65. The question is not, however, telling us that the information necessary to answer the question — information that will reveal the author’s attitude about the subfield — is in line 65. Now, the answer will most likely be in the general vicinity of line 65, but we don’t know where. It might come before, but it also might come after. In other words, it may be in line 63. Or 61. Or 68. It might even be in line 59 or line 70.
This is because the question is not asking us about the subfield itself. It is only concerned with the subfield insofar as it relates to the author’s opinion of it. Establishing the author’s tone is what counts; without it, there is no effective way to answer the question.
What this means, practically speaking, is that if you’ve spent your time carefully marking line 65 and the answer comes five lines earlier, you’re out of luck. Especially if you start at a particular line and keep on reading without considering that the answer might precede the line in question.
I’m not suggesting that marking line references is completely worthless, just that it shouldn’t be overestimated as a strategy. Yes, it can very effective in terms of making you focus on the text, but used alone, it does have its limits. When people get 800s using it, they pull in other skills subconsciously as well. It’s fine to tell yourself to read carefully around a particular area, but if you’re just reading carefully without really knowing what you’re reading carefully for, you might end up wasting a huge amount of time.
Yes, many questions can be answered by looking only at the lines cited in the questions, but many others cannot. On the SAT, it’s the big picture — the relationship between detail and context — that generally counts. And assiduously marking line references just for the sake of marking line references will not give you that relationship; you still have to take the time to figure it out on your own.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 30, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Very often, before I even attempt to explain a particularly nasty concept involving verb tense to someone, I ask whether they’ve covered the tense in question during Spanish/French/Latin class. And almost inevitably, the response I get is something along the lines of, “Well, it sounds kind of familiar… I think we might have covered it, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”
People, I have some news for you: I’m sorry to say it, but most American high schools — even supposedly very good ones — do not teach grammar in English class. At all. Sure, they might cover how to use a comma or, if they’re really ambitious, the difference between a compound and a complex sentence, but I have yet to meet anyone who did a thorough review of verb tenses or got drilled on the difference between direct and indirect object pronouns. When I ask my new students how much grammar they’ve had and get the predictably embarrassed response of, “None, my school doesn’t really teach grammar,” I have to reassure them that they’re in exactly the same situation as almost everyone else. The ones who *have* done grammar in school are the anomalies (although they don’t necessarily understand the grammar they have done very well).
So that said, there is exactly one place that you’re likely to acquire some actual grammatical knowledge, knowledge that — surprise, surprise — might actually come in handy on the SAT. And that place is foreign language class.
Now granted taking Chinese probably isn’t going to help you all that much. But if you take French or Spanish, there’s a huge amount of cross-over; many common grammatical concepts in those languages carry over pretty directly into English, and many common vocabulary words are similar to some of the more esoteric vocabulary words you’re likely find on the SAT. If you’re lucky enough to be in a class sufficiently advanced to cover concepts such as the past perfect and the subjunctive, it would strongly behoove you to pay very close attention because those are two of the concepts that regularly give people the most trouble on the Writing section. Even if you’re not in an advanced class, you can still learn an awful lot about past participles and direct and indirect objects. Thrilling? If you’re like most people, probably not. But highly useful when it comes to understanding the basics of how English is put together.
People are frequently surprised to learn that my degree is French rather than English, but I learned pretty much all of the grammar I know through foreign languages. I only translated that understanding back to English, so to speak, much later. As a result, when a student has a reasonably strong basis in the grammar of a foreign language, I find myself offering to teach certain thorny concepts through that language. More than once, I’ve found myself using French to teach English to a native English speaker! Bizarrely enough, it’s actually easier that way. (As a side note, majoring in French also taught me infinitely more about teaching Critical Reading than majoring in English would have, but that’s another story.)
I do recognize that learning a foreign language comes more naturally to some people than to others, and I’m not saying you have to become an all-out aficionado. But at the very least, try not to completely tune out the next time your French/Spanish/Italian/Latin, etc. teacher starts rattling on about the past conditional or object pronouns. You might end up being surprised at how much sense the Writing section makes later.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 24, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I’m aware that there’s a debate raging on College Confidential over the following question from the October SAT, and I’d like to weigh in:
Although New Zealand (had fostered) music for decades, it was not until the 1980s (when) musicians began (to reach) an international audience. (No Error)
First, the sentence should correctly read as follows:
Although New Zealand had fostered music for decades, it was not until the 1980s THAT musicians began to reach an international audience.
Before I start in on why “when” is wrong, I’d like to go through the other options being debated:
1) had fostered
In this case, the past perfect is correct because it describes an event in the past (fostering music) that clearly occurred before a second event (musicians began to reach an international audience). Now, the present perfect (has fostered) could also work, implying that New Zealand is *still* fostering music, but there’s nothing in the sentence that demands it rather than the past perfect. Remember: if two options are both grammatically acceptable, neither can be considered wrong. Style and personal preference don’t count.
2) to reach
To reach = infinitive. Infinitives get flipped with gerunds. “Began reaching” is also fine, but it isn’t inherently better than “to reach” (if anything, it’s a bit more awkward). Same issue: two acceptable options, both fine.
(Btw, I have no idea what the last option was — I’m going by the version of the question that was sent to me and that I found on CC.)
Ok, here goes for why “when” is wrong. It’s actually a question of standard usage more than anything else. The fixed construction is “it was not until x that y occurred” (the other variation of the phrase would be the inverted verb structure “not until x did y occur”).
What ETS has done to confuse everyone, however, is to insert a decoy relative pronoun, “when,” which looks and sounds as if it could be correct because it’s placed immediately after a date (1980s) — and everyone knows that “when” is supposed to refer to dates.
The problem is, however, is that the fixed construction “It was not until x that y occurred” trumps everything. It’s like a word pair (e.g. “not only…but also”): you just can’t separate the two parts (at least not in SAT land). That’s what’s actually being tested, even if it looks like something else.
(Side note: ETS often uses “when” to create incorrect logical relationships. It frequently replaces a stronger, clearer conjunction such as “however” or “because.”)
Now, to add a further level of complication, there is a situation in which “when” could be legitimately placed after the date, namely if a non-essential clause were to be inserted. For example:
Although New Zealand had fostered music for decades, it was not until the 1980s, when new forms of media technology became widespread, that musicians began to reach an international audience.
But note that this version still includes “that!”
To be fair, it’s a very hard question, as well as an unpredictable one by SAT standards, but there’s absolutely nothing unfair or subjective about it. Standard English usage requires “that,” not when, be used with “it was not until.” If someone were to write that sentence in a paper and use “when” rather than “that,” it would still be wrong. As a matter of fact, it’s the kind of error that college professors see in students’ writing all the time. And that’s exactly why it was on the test.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 24, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
One of the most telling exchanges I can have with a student typically goes something like this:
Me: So what’s the author saying in lines 34-37?
Student: Umm…. So I feel like the author is trying to say…
Me: Ok, but the question isn’t asking about what you feel like the author is saying. Look back at the passage and tell me exactly what the author is saying. As in word for word.
At which point the student typically glances back at the lines, pulls out a random phrase or two, and then gives me a look that clearly says “So what?” (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 20, 2011 | Blog, College Admissions
A while back, one of my students came to me mystified about why a classmate of hers with an SAT score of only 2170 had been admitted to Princeton. She was perplexed by the fact that Princeton had picked him over thousands of applicants with higher SAT scores. My response was that the score, while a bit on the low side for Princeton, was nevertheless high enough to put him in the range for consideration, and that he must have had some characteristic that made him particularly interesting to Princeton despite his comparatively “low” test scores.
I put the conversation out of my mind until the 2012 edition of the US News and World Report rankings came out. As I was flipping through it, I noticed a story about a boy with a 2170 SAT score who had been admitted to Princeton. That sounded vaguely familiar, so I kept reading. It turned out that he did in fact attend my student’s high school, and from various details in the articles, it became clear that he was the boy she had mentioned to me.
So why did Princeton take him? Although he may not have broken 2200, he was, of all things, a countertenor — quite possibly the only countertenor to apply out of 30,000+ applicants, and an accomplished one at that. Faced with 10,000 seemingly identical soccer-team captains and newspaper editors, the admissions committee must have been thrilled to see something so unusual. (The fact that Princeton is trying to make itself a tad more attractive to “artsy” students certainly didn’t hurt him either.)
That’s obviously an extreme case, which is undoubtedly why USNWR chose to profile him, but it does confirm my observation: if a school is faced with a super high-scoring but otherwise average applicant and slightly lower-scoring applicant that has something really interesting about them, the school will pretty much always choose the second kid.
Remember: Harvard could admit an entire class of near-perfect scorers, but sometimes it rejects those kids in favor of people with score 100-150 points lower. So if your scores are a little (e.g. 50 points) on the low side for your dream school, it doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily out. It just means that you have to put in a bit more effort everywhere else. Admissions officers are generally quite adept at figuring out who’s a good match for their school. While scores are undeniably important, they’re not the whole story either. That’s what “holistic” means.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 19, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I’m normally very cautious about not correcting people’s grammar in daily speech, for fear of coming off as an inveterate snob. As a matter of fact, it makes me very self-conscious when people not preparing for the SAT or the ACT make jibes about how they’d better watch their grammar around me. Unless explicitly asked to comment, I keep my mouth shut. That said, the one thing that truly makes me grimace when I hear it in public conversation is a statement along the lines of the following:
“Well, if we only would have known the store was going to close at 6, we would have come sooner.”
I confess, I practically have to physically restrain myself from commenting; it’s like nails screeching on a blackboard. I know that the construction is (unfortunately) common, but it’s still flat-out wrong.
Here’s the short version of the rule: a clause beginning with if should contain have, not would have. However, a different clause in the same sentence may contain would have.
The reason is that both would and if both signal the conditional — that is, they refer to events that could have happened but that did not actually happen. To include both of these terms in the same clause is therefore redundant.
Incorrect: If we would have known the store was going to closer, we would have come sooner.
The sentence can also be correctly written this way:
Correct: If we had known the store was going to closer, we would have come sooner.
Correct: Had we known the store was going to closer, we would have come sooner.
So If I would have, If you would have, If they would have…. All wrong. The correct phrases are, If I had, If you had, If she had, etc.
So the next time you start to say, “If I would have only known…” you might want to think twice.
