by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 18, 2011 | Blog, SAT vs. ACT
The short answer: No.
The long answer: Every now and again, I’ll stumble across some tutoring website announcement declaring that because the ACT is a “content-based” exam, designed to directly measure the kinds of skills that people learn in school, it is much less sensitive to tutoring than the SAT, which is primarily an exam about strategy and “how well someone can take the SAT.” As someone who has spent a good deal of time both writing and helping people prepare for both exams, I’d like to spend a little bit of time debunking that myth. First of all, in response to the idea that the ACT directly tests what students are learning in school, I’d like to say that I’m not really aware of any high school that teaches punctuation with anywhere near the level of thoroughness it’s tested on the ACT.
I’ve worked with numerous students from a particular “top-tier” NYC private school known, as James Atlas puts it, for its “intensely competitive students” (whom it requires to take several years of grammar), and not one of them has come close to knowing everything tested on the English portion of the ACT. In fact, some of them have been among the weakest students I’ve ever worked with.
I’ve also worked with kids from tip-top suburban districts who had idea how to use a colon or identify a non-essential clause. It seems to me that the ACT is testing the content that high schools should be teaching rather than the content they actually are teaching. The fact that the average national ACT score is 21.1 out of 36 seems to testify to that fact.
But does tutoring raise scores? Absolutely. Every one of my students who has put in a reasonable, consistent amount of study time has improved markedly — in some cases by 10 points. Most people scoring in the mid-high 20s can gain a good five points on English from capable tutoring. Some of the questions are very straightforward, but some of it them are extremely subtle (and tricky) and completely impervious to being answered by ear. As is the case for the SAT, you’re almost certain to get certain questions wrong unless you really understand the rules they’re testing. You learn the rules well enough, you get the questions right — it’s usually that simple.
As for the Reading… I’m not going to lie: tutoring ACT Reading can be more challenging than tutoring SAT Reading. The questions are often less predictable, less based on a holistic understanding of the passages, and most people have problems managing their time rather than actually knowing how to work through the questions.
But as I’ve written about before, ACT time management problems are usually something else in disguise. Many of the skills involved in locating information quickly actually involve logic skills similar to those tested on the SAT — how to make reasonable conjectures based on the organization of a passage or paragraph; how to identify important places in a passage based on the presence of particular transitions and punctuation marks; and how to determine the main idea or function of a passage or paragraph from reading key places (e.g. introduction, topic sentences) in the text. Work on the fundamentals enough and you usually see some improvement.
My biggest obstacle is convincing students that the ACT actually tests logic skills, even in a roundabout way, when they’ve fled the SAT precisely to avoid that kind of thinking. So no, the ACT is in no way less coachable than the SAT, at least on the verbal side of things. It has its own quirks and strategies, but the skills and concepts it tests can be taught just as thoroughly as they can for the SAT. As always, there are no guarantees, but in the hands of a competent tutor, most students should be able to raise their scores by at least a few points.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 16, 2011 | Blog, Vocabulary
Let me make it clear that this post is in no way a suggestion that you should *not* study vocabulary for the SAT. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the more vocabulary you learn, the better off you’ll be — especially if your vocabulary isn’t all that strong to begin with.
That said, however, I also feel obligated to point out that the sentence-completion portion of the SAT isn’t just a straightforward vocabulary test. Yes some of the words are a bit on the esoteric side, but the more time I’ve spent tutoring, the more I’ve become aware that the test is deliberately set up so that someone with a fairly strong vocabulary and a reasonable knowledge of roots and prefixes can figure the answers out through a carefully reasoned process of elimination — even if that person doesn’t know what one or more of the words mean. In some ways, just knowing lots of definitions is less helpful than knowing how to figure things out.
I seriously don’t think that the College Board intends for people to spend huge amounts of time trying to memorize 5,000 words; that’s just not what the test is about. (If you’re not a native English speaker or come from a home where the primary language spoken is not English, that’s a little different, however.)
One of the things the SAT tests is the ability to make reasonable conjectures — that is, the ability to use the information you do have in order to figure out the information you don’t have, and to determine the correct answer through a careful process of elimination.
For example, one of the questions that my students routinely have trouble with is the following:
Orangutans are ——- apes: they typically conduct
most of their lives up in the trees of tropical rain forests.
(A) indigenous (B) transitory (C) recessive
(D) pliant (E) arboreal
The question is #5/8, and it’s usually a pretty safe bet that the average test-taker might not be 100% certain what (B), (D), and (E) mean. A lot of people tend to pick indigenous because they have a decent idea of what it means and have heard it used in the context of animals. The answer, though, is actually E, arboreal, a word that makes a lot of people screw up their faces and say, “How was I supposed to know what that meant?”
But here’s the thing: the College Board doesn’t really expect you to have memorized the word. It does, however, assume that you may have some basic knowledge of French or Spanish or Latin (given that most high school students take Spanish, this isn’t a terribly unfair assumption), all of which have words for tree (arbre, arbol, arbor) that are awfully similar to arboreal — and the sentence practically shouts at you that it’s talking about an animal that lives in trees. If you can make that connection, you’ll get the question no problem, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen the word arboreal before in your life. The ability to make that type of connection what the SAT is really testing.
Precisely the same logic applies to a word like “membranous,” often of late cited as the sort of “obscure” word the new SAT will no longer test. It’s true that it’s not a word that regularly gets thrown around in everyday conversation, but if you know what a membrane is (which should be the case for anyone who’s taken a halfway decent Biology class) and that adding “-ous” onto a noun turns it into an adjective, you’re pretty much set.
The SAT is also testing your knowledge of connotations. Another question that my students tend to have a terrible time with is this one:
Lewis Latimer’s inexpensive method of producing
carbon filaments ——- the nascent electric industry by
making electric lamps commercially ——-.
(A) cheapened…affordable
(B) transformed…viable
(C) revolutionized…prohibitive
(D) provoked…improbable
(E) stimulated…inaccessible
Most people can get it down to (A) and (B) pretty quickly by looking at the second side: prohibitive, improbable, and inaccessible are all negative, and the phrase inexpensive method suggests that Latimer did something positive.
The problem generally hinges on the word cheapened: most people assume that it simply means “made cheaper” and that it goes along with the idea that Latimer lamps were less expensive. The problem, though, is that to cheapen means not to make cheaper but rather to debase or to reduce the quality of. It is a decidedly negative word, but the sentence is suggesting that Latimer did something positive to the electric industry. The answer is therefore (B).
While this may look like a “trick” question, the reality is that it’s simply testing whether you understand that a word can have a connotation apart from the one it literally appears to denote. Using cheapen in a more neutral way in your own writing wouldn’t make that usage of it any more correct.
Now, words like cheapen are unlikely to show up on any “hard words” list; it simply wouldn’t occur to anyone that they could be made hard. And unfortunately, there really aren’t any surefire ways to study for them — other than reading a whole lot.
So what to do? Well, you do need to know the top few hundred “hard” words, ones like trite and laconic, equivocate, and ineffable, which show up a whole lot. But beyond that, it’s probably not worth it to sit and try to memorize the dictionary. You’re better off reading Dickens (admittedly, I’m not much of a fan of his, but he uses a ton of SAT-level vocabulary) or Jane Austen or Oliver Sacks or Foreign Policy, for that matter. And when you look at sentence completions, take a minute and really think about just what it is they’re asking for. Provided you have some basic tools, there’s a chance you can figure it out.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 13, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
When, in the course of going over a Writing section with a student, I mention the term “comma splice, I am almost inevitably met with something between a groan and an eye-roll. I can almost see a bubble with the words, “ok, enough already, will she please stop going on about the stupid comma-thingies already?” floating above their heads.
Unfortunately, though, it’s a point I feel compelled to belabor. Of all the grammatical concepts tested on the SAT, this is by far one of the most important.
I’m the first to admit that there are plenty of grammar rules tested on the SAT that you can get away with fudging in real life: if you use most rather than more when comparing only two things, there’s a pretty good chance no one’s going to call you on it.
Likewise, if you use a collective noun (team, jury, agency, university, organization, etc.) with a plural verb or pronoun, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will care — or probably even notice, for that matter. The College Board’s insistence that collective nouns be considered immutably singular is one of its quirks.
Not so for comma splices. In my experience, people who can’t always recognize when a comma is being used to separate two complete sentences tend to demonstrate the same problem in their own writing. And usually that indicates a larger problem: they don’t really know how to recognize a sentence.
Now, call me stodgy and old fashioned, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that high school students know what does and does not constitute a sentence by the time they graduate. Not be able to define it in grammatical terms or discourse about it at length, but simply to recognize when something is a complete, stand-alone statement.
Why? Well, in practical terms, let’s just say that you’ve probably been taking it more or less for granted that you don’t have to work terribly hard to follow my argument here. It’s pretty clear where the divisions between thoughts are.
But what if I were to write like this?
I dislike being the bearer of bad news but when people out there in the real world (employers) see writing (resumes and cover letters) that contains flagrant grammatical errors they won’t be particularly eager to hire you, as a matter of fact they probably won’t even be terribly eager to give you an interview. Surveys have shown that the number one skill employers think is missing from their new hires is: the ability to write well, this is particularly true for people with degrees in fields like business. If you’re lucky enough to get hired by company and can’t even write memos clearly you’re not going to win yourself any points, you’re also definitely not going to be first in line for a promotion.
Ok, so I threw in a few extra mistakes, but I think I’ve made my point. Reading writing that contains a lot of comma splices requires effort — it’s certainly comprehensible, but it’s also tiring and annoying to have to constantly figure out where one thought stops and the next starts. In the end, it has nothing to do with having to write about The Great Gatsby or The Declaration of Independence, and everything to do with making yourself understood.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 11, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
I’m writing this in response to the SAT Reading vs. Math post over at Kitchen Table Math. In case you don’t want to read the entire post, the gist of it was essentially that college tend to be more impressed by high Critical Reading scores than they are by high Math scores because SAT Reading scores essentially can’t be raised through tutored (although Catherine was nice enough to cite me as the exception to that rule!). So, as someone who spends a good deal of time on this purportedly impossible task, my response to the assertion that CR is somehow un-tutorable would be no and yes. Or rather, it depends.
Before I launch into my reasons, however, I’d like to say that tutoring CR is one of the hardest parts of my job. For starters, it’s completely exhausting — I spent about three-and-a-half hours one day this past weekend just doing CR (one of those hours was devoted *just* to working on how to determine a main point), and I had to go home and sleep afterward. Teaching CR ruins me for the day; it wears me out mentally so much that I often just have to wander around the city aimlessly for a few hours to recover.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy teaching it, and when I finally have a breakthrough with someone, it’s hugely rewarding. But it is hard. I think that this is because teaching CR– at least the way I do it — is not just about the SAT; it’s actually about teaching people to read closely (“Don’t tell me approximately what the author says. Look at the passage — no, look at the passage — and tell me exactly what the author is saying. Exactly as in word for word.”) and to draw relationships between specific words and their functions or the more abstract categories they represent (“Yes, the passage talks specifically about women artists, but the fact that they’re referred to as a group of individuals in the answer choice doesn’t mean you should eliminate it. Think about whom that phrase is referring to”). A few of my students see these relationships naturally. Most do not. Some lack the decoding skills to even begin to draw these relationships, but the majority fall some somewhere in between.
But back to the original question: when it tutoring effective for raising a CR score, and when is it not?
My first response would be, “define raise.” Are we talking 50 points? 100 points? 200 points? Most people will get something out of high-quality tutoring, but it’s probably unrealistic to expect someone with a 550 to try for an 800 — at least in the short term. And the higher scores go, the harder it is to raise them — the margin of error is so tiny, sometimes even a question or two out of 67, that it almost comes down to chance. (For the record, I have gotten people from the mid-600s to 800, but they had virtually no comprehension problems and were willing to work very, very carefully and do everything I said).
The second thing I would say is that the crucial factor isn’t the person’s baseline score but rather their actual skill at understanding relationships between words (for sentence completions) and comprehending the meaning of relatively sophisticated texts. Kids who have no trouble understanding what the passages are literally saying but who work too quickly and fall for wrong answers because they don’t read carefully or think through the questions probably have at least the potential to score in the high 600s or 700s. I’ve had students in this category who started around 500 (junior PSAT) and ended up close to 700 (senior SAT).
On the other hand, someone with a poor vocabulary and trouble perceiving relationships between words, plus weak comprehension skills is probably not going to make it past 600 with strategy-based tutoring alone. If the person is willing to spend very significant amounts of time reading and working on vocabulary independently, that’s a different story, but that is not realistically the case for most high school juniors. I’ve helped students in that situation move from the low to the high 500s, but they all got stuck below the 600 line. In that case, the SAT does precisely what it was designed to do: it reveals persistent weaknesses in comprehension, and there’s really no way to “beat” it past a certain point.
So in general, I think that high-quality CR tutoring can be effective insofar as it allows people to take the fullest advantage of the reading skills they do have. But the “600” and “700 walls” are there for a reason — students who don’t read much on their own and who don’t really understand how texts work (how authors play with language to convey a point, how very common words can be used in unexpected ways to mean different things, and how specific phrasings relate to broader concepts), and no amount of test-prep alone will typically get them past it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 2, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
On Fixing Sentences, a lot gets made out of the intrinsic wrongness of the word being. Yes, it’s awful, yes it’s dangerous, yes it’s wrong 98% of the time. But it’s not the only dangerous word on Fixing Sentences. In fact, I would argue that along with it, which is also wrong a very high percentage of the time, this is probably the next most dangerous word on the Writing section, particularly Fixing sentences. And it really shows up a lot.
If you’re looking for a very general rule, here goes: When this is immediately followed by a noun (e.g. this book, this fact, this idea), it’s right; when there’s no noun, it’s wrong. Usually there won’t be a noun.
Now for the explanation. Like it, this is a singular pronoun, which means that it must refer to a specific singular noun (or pronoun or gerund) that appears in the sentence. If the specific noun to which this refers (the antecedent) does not appear, the sentence is incorrect. For example:
Incorrect: Members of the local government have requested that more traffic lights be installed throughout the city because they believe that this will help to prevent accidents.
What does this refer to? it could refer to the traffic lights, but that’s plural. It could also refer to the installation of the traffic lights, but installation is a noun, and only installed, a verb, appears in the sentence. So there are a couple of ways to fix the sentence. You could provide a noun that clearly specifies what is being referred to:
Correct: Members of the local government have requested the installation of more traffic lights throughout the city because they believe that the lights will help to prevent accidents.
OR you can simply add a noun after this and specify what it refers to.
Correct: Members of the local government has requested the installation of more traffic lights throughout the city because they believe that this addition will help to prevent accidents.
Now, onto that:
Unlike this, that is usually correct when it shows up in a sentence. When it’s underlined in Error-IDs, it’s usually used this way:
Correct: The local believes that installing more traffic lights throughout the city will help to prevent accidents.
OR
Correct: The additional traffic lights that have recently been installed throughout the city are expected to help prevent accidents.
In the latter case, you might wondering why that rather than which should be used. The short answer is that which is always preceded by a comma and used to set off a non-essential clause (e.g. The additional traffic lights, which have recently been installed throughout the city, are expected to help prevent accidents.) That, on the other hand, is never preceded by a comma.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 30, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I’m convinced that one of the top reasons people lose points unnecessarily on Fixing Sentences is that they neglect to actually plug their chosen answer back into the sentence and consider it in context.
While in some cases an answer may be clearly better worded or more grammatically correct than all the others, in many other cases multiple answers may appear perfectly correct on their own. In such cases — especially ones in which you are dealing with a large amount of underlined information — you should take the extra time and double-check that your answer actually works in terms of syntax, clarity, and punctuation.
It is crucial that you pay attention to the punctuation aspect, particularly to the existing (non-underlined) commas within a sentence. This is because the comma splice (two full sentences joined only by a comma) is among the two or three most common types of wrong answer choices, and it shows up constantly. Constantly. If you’re facing a full sentence on one side a comma, you can’t have a full sentence on the other side. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds or how much sense it makes in context — it’s always going to be wrong.
For example:
During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, whereby they forbade artisans to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
(A) whereby they forbade artisans to leave
(B) as a result artisans were forbidden
(C) artisans were thus forbidden
(D) it being forbidden for artisans to leave
(E) and so artisans were forbidden
(A) and (D) are pretty clearly wrong, but (B), (C), and (E) all seem relatively plausible, right? Here’s the problem, though: the non-underlined portion of the sentence contains full sentence + comma, meaning that another full sentence cannot follow the comma without creating a comma splice.
If we plug these options into the sentence in turn, we get: (B) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, as a result artisans were forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
That’s two sentences separated by a comma, so that’s out.
(C) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, artisans were thus forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
That’s also two sentences separated by a comma, so it’s out too. It is very important to note that the second clause really is a full, grammatical stand-alone statement, even though it may not make logical sense outside of any context.
(E) During the Renaissance, glass products made on the island of Murano could only be crafted according to traditional techniques, and so artisans were forbidden to leave and set up shop elsewhere.
This answer correctly uses a FANBOYS conjunction to join the two sentences, thus eliminating the comma-splice problem.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 27, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
As I’ve written about before, one very helpful time and energy saving strategy on Fixing Sentences is to always start by looking at the shortest answer. Since one of the things that the SAT Writing section tests is your ability to eliminate wordy and awkward constructions, it follows logically that shorter answers are typically more likely than longer ones to be correct. Identifying the shortest answer, however, is not always as straightforward as it might seem.
Here why: One of the subtler tricks that the College Board likes to play involves altering the spacing of answer choices on the first line so that the various options appear closer to one another in length than they actually are. As a result, the shortest answer often appears to be virtually the same length as a substantially longer answer.
For example:
Traveling through Yosemite, the scenery of waterfalls
and granite peaks, which we photographed, was
beautiful.
(A) the scenery of waterfalls and granite peaks, which
we photographed, was beautiful
(B) the waterfalls and granite peaks were the beautiful
scenery we photographed
(C) we photographed the beautiful scenery of
waterfalls and granite peaks
(D) we photographed the scenery of waterfalls and
granite peaks, being beautiful
(E) what we photographed was the beautiful scenery
of waterfalls and granite peaks
All the answers look about the same, right? But actually they’re not. Look again at choice (C). Another word or two could easily fit on the top line, but it’s been truncated quite substantially so that the length of the second line will appear equal to the second line of the other answers. Even though (C), the correct answer, is only a word or two shorter than some of the other answer, it takes up a lot less space — and ETS doesn’t want that difference to be too obvious.
So when you’re looking for the shortest option, don’t just compare the ends of the answers — look at the first line, and you may be surprised at just how much of a variation there actually.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The infamous marshmallow test popped up again today in the New York Times. For those of you unfamiliar with the experiment, a group of four year-olds were given the choice between receiving one marshmallow that they could eat immediately and waiting 30 seconds for a second marshmallow. More than a decade later, their standardized-test performance was tracked, with some rather remarkable results:
The difference between a 4-year-old who can wait 30 seconds for a marshmallow, and one who can wait 15 minutes was 210 points on the SAT,” (neuroscientist Jonah) Lehrer reported. He stressed that the key to success – in test-taking, in college and beyond – is discipline, and the key to discipline is, rather ironically, learning to distract oneself. As evidence, he mentioned the children who had been successful in resisting temptation: those who turned their backs on treats or closed their eyes.
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that you’re doomed on the SAT if you were in fact the sort of four year-old who just couldn’t bear to wait an extra 30 seconds for a marshmallow. Even if you’ve never had a problem with delayed gratification, it still wouldn’t hurt to take Lehrer’s words to heart, particularly when it comes to Critical Reading.
You see, vocabulary weaknesses aside, the single biggest stumbling block for relatively high scorers (650-700) who want to make it into the stratosphere (750-800) is the unwillingness to delay gratification — that is, to avoid looking at the answer choices until after they’ve worked out the entire problem for themselves, and to avoid jumping to a particular answer just so that they can get the question over with and move on. They simply assume — repeatedly and incorrectly — that they’ll always be able to identify the correct answer when they read through the options. They therefore see no reason to cross things out or mark them or sum them up and right them down… Frankly, that’s unpleasant. It takes, well, work. Besides they’re getting pretty much everything right already. And they want that marshmallow now. That’s why their scores have a nasty tendency to plateau, leading to frustration and an even stronger desire to just get it over with. Cue the vicious cycle.
So if this happens to apply to you, remember: the answer choices are there to distract you. They’re written to sound entirely plausible, even if they’re completely preposterous. The best way to distract yourself from falling for those distractions (!) is to work systematically through every step of the problem and determine as much as you can about the correct answer so that you can’t be fooled when you look at the answer choices. Take the extra five or ten or even thirty seconds. You’ll probably get more questions right. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get yourself a marshmallow either. I’m sure you could use the sugar rush;)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 21, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
In discussions about skimming, one question that often arises is how to know when various sections of passages should be read slowly vs. skimmed through.
What makes this question so important is that it cuts to the heart of what a lot of standardized-test reading targets — namely, the ability to sort essential information (main ideas) from information of secondary importance (supporting details), and to use the “clues” that an author provides within a text to identify just what that important information is.
What that means, practically speaking, is that while you do need to read slowly enough to get the gist of a passage, you don’t have to read everything slowly — at least not the first time through. Very often, what looks like a time problem is really a problem of recognizing when it’s ok to skim through things and, consequently, of getting overly caught up in irrelevant details. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 19, 2011 | Blog, Issues in Education
The New York Times reported several days ago that SAT Verbal scores are down.
Granted the drop isn’t immense — three points in Reading (to 497), two in Writing (to 489) — but it’s still generating a fair amount of hand-wringing. Given that the Writing section is the most straightforward section to prep for, I find it perversely impressive that 1) Writing scores have been consistently lower than scores in the other two sections; and that 2) average Writing scores have actually dropped every year since the section was introduced in 2005 (although the number of 700-800 scores spiked by about 5,000 this year).
Among the proposed reasons for the drop are shifting demographics, including an increasing number of students who speak more than one language at home (27 percent up from 19 percent a decade ago) and an increasingly narrow focus on preparation for state-mandated standardized tests.
Based on what I’ve observed, I think that there’s also something else going on here. As a disclaimer, let me say that most of the students I work with are decidedly not disadvantaged (some of them attend schools that are more selective than most of the Ivy League — for kindergarten), but nevertheless, I have noticed some disturbing trends in their schoolwork, trends that I suspect are probably echoed at schools both private and public.
First, the total, utter absence of vocabulary tests. Some of my students tell me that the last vocabulary test they had was in fifth grade. Some of them tell me that they’ve just plain never had a vocabulary test. It’s no wonder that they have spend their time cramming hundreds or even thousands of words before the SAT — they’re trying to stuff into a period of months the kind of knowledge that is better acquired over a period of years. And because they’re memorizing words from lists or flash cards rather than encountering them in the more organic context of actual reading, they often miss the kinds of nuances and/or second meanings that the SAT is fond of testing (e.g. “to embroider” can mean “to invent,” not just “to sew.”)
Which brings me to my second point: more and more, I’m encountering students who, with the exception of a Shakespeare play or two, rarely have to read works written before the twentieth century.
Occasionally I’ll be called on to help someone with a paper on Dickens or Twain, but very, very rarely anything before that. Far more frequently, my students are required to read novels written over the past few decades. While there’s nothing wrong with contemporary fiction per se, I’m going to pull out my uber (literary) conservative Harold Bloom-esque claws and say that a lot of it just shouldn’t have a place in the high school classroom. By focusing on works that students can relate to, schools deprive them of the chance to grapple with unfamiliar vocabulary, characters, and situations, as well as the opportunity to decode challenging literal meanings. If these skills aren’t built up steadily over a long period of time, they can be almost impossible to develop in a flash when the SAT rolls around. It’s no surprise that most students are utterly flummoxed by the “Miss Keeldar” and “Trabb’s boy” passages in the Blue Book — the language and diction are so foreign to them that they simply have no idea how to make sense of what’s being said.
As for the Writing section… well, let’s just say that I’m overjoyed, not to mention shocked, when a student can actually identify a preposition, never mind a prepositional phrase. I’ve had maybe five students who could absolutely nail comma splices off the bat (indicating they knew what a sentence was), and many have continued to struggle with the distinction between the simple past (“went”) and the past perfect (“had gone”) for months. Even when they’ve covered the same grammar in French or Spanish, they’ve learned it so poorly that they can’t establish any relationship between it and the English grammar on the SAT.
While I don’t doubt that there are a handful of very rigorous high schools that are still doing an exceptional job of inculcating the skills necessary to ace the SAT, the vast majority — at least from what I can tell — are simply not.
So what to do?
Dump the test (as Fair Test would have it)? Or, perhaps, take a good, hard look at what’s actually being taught in American schools…?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 14, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The more time I spend tutoring, the more I become aware of the need for flexibility in my approach. The truth is that no one technique will work for everyone, and rigidly insisting on a strategy that simply doesn’t make sense to a student is likely a recipe for a disaster. I once got fired from a tutoring company because I refused to stick to its “script,” and although I was initially upset about losing the work, I realized that the job never would have worked out anyway. People think too differently, (mis)interpret things in too many ways, and have too many quirks for a one-size-fits-all approach to be effective — and if I’ve learned one thing from all this tutoring, it’s that you can basically *never* assume that someone will automatically understand a passage or sentence or turn of phrase in the way the SAT requires them to understand it.
I think that a lot of Critical Reading prep is ineffective because it’s based on the assumption that people will of course be able to understand the literal meaning of the passage with relatively little effort. While I’ve certainly worked with plenty of students who do fall into this category (and for whom test prep essentially consists of being reminded endlessly to slow down, work methodically through the questions, and go back to the passage to check out the answers), I think that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most people who are capable of understanding exactly — not just approximately — what the passages are saying and of nailing the main point on their own will typically score in the 650+ range with little to no prep, but needless to say, the average CR score is nowhere near 650 (it’s actually about 150 points lower).
Anyway, I digress. The point I’m attempting to make is that if you 1) are a slow reader who just can’t seem to finish CR sections in time, and 2) don’t always fully understand what the passages are saying, then reading the passage, trying the main point, and only then looking at the questions might not be the best strategy for you sometimes. It might work on the shorter passages, but on the longer ones — and especially on Passage 1/Passage 2 — it’s just going to be way too time consuming. You’ll get confused an bogged down and start to panic, then slow down even more.
Now, I am *not* going to suggest you read the questions first — if you do that, you’re almost certainly going to miss important contextual pieces of information when you go back to the passage, and because you’ll only have a partial view of things, you’ll overlook answers that would otherwise be much more straightforward.
What I am going to suggest, however, is a compromise, namely that you answer the questions while you read the passage . So you read, say, the first paragraph and answer perhaps the first question, maybe the second. The you read another short chunk, answer the next question or two, and so on. If it helps you to look ahead at the line numbers in the next couple of questions before you read, just to give yourself a sense of how far you need to go in order to be able to answer, by all means do so, but try not to avoid reading the question itself — you won’t approach the passage with a clear mind, and you risk being so focused on the question that you can’t actually absorb what the author is saying.
If you need to focus on the detail questions first and skip over the “big picture” ones until you’ve finished the passage, that’s fine. In fact, you’ll probably have to work this way. But doing the detail questions first will allow you to get to more questions than you might be able to otherwise — you also won’t be sacrificing questions you could answer in order to spend time pondering questions you’re really not sure about. And the more you see that you can actually finish sections in time, the calmer you’ll be approaching the test.
Note, however, that this is simply a strategy for getting yourself to answer more questions more quickly — it doesn’t mean that you can just coast. The answers to many questions are still unlikely to be in the actual lines given, and you may still have to go back and read above and below in order to determine the answer. Transitions, “interesting” punctuation, and strong language are still of utmost importance. So is trying to get a general sense of what the answer might be before you look at the choices (or, at the very least, immediately eliminating all answers that don’t make sense in context). But if you keep these things in mind and break the passage/questions into small, manageable bits, you might find that things get a lot easier.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 11, 2011 | Blog, Time Management
Disclaimer: if you always finish right at time or are forced to leave a couple of questions blank because you just couldn’t get to them, this article does not apply to you. For the rest of you, but especially the ones who finish sections with five or ten minutes left over and aren’t scoring consistent 800s on them, slow down!
And when I say “slow down,” I don’t just mean “stop racing.” I mean give yourself the time you need to fully process each question, determine exactly what it requires, work through every step of the problem, and make sure you’re choosing the answer you actually intended to choose. If you think you need an extra five seconds, take ten instead. If you’re finishing 24-question sections in 20 minutes rather than 25, that gives you about 12.5 extra seconds per question to play around with. Assuming that you won’t really need all those extra seconds for some of the easier questions, you can probably spend up to 20 or 30 more seconds on the couple of hardest ones.
Working this way can be scary: it forces you to stop going on instinct (and hoping that you get lucky) and actually prove the answer before you pick it. It means you can’t justify a wrong answer by saying that you had to guess because you were afraid you’d run out of time (even though you were finishing with ten minutes to spare). It means you have to be really, really careful.
But here’s the thing: it works. If you’re scoring 650 Reading and are trying to break 700, chances are you need to be a little more meticulous. Slowing down, making sure that you really consider whether there’s one word in an answer choice that doesn’t quite work, going back to the passage to check things out… that might just be enough to get you there.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 6, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
Given the amount of weight admissions officers give to standardized test scores, I realize that everyone not applying only to test-optional schools is therefore entitled to a reasonable amount of stress over them. Yes, they count for a lot, and having to deal with them can be exhausting and overwhelming when piled on top of everything else the average high school junior or senior is trying to accomplish. What concerns me, though, is the tendency to confuse worrying (and talking) compulsively about the SAT with getting a good score on it.
If I may play armchair psychologist for a moment, I think that all that talking serves a distinct purpose, namely that it creates the illusion of control. If you can expound upon every last thing that could possibly be on the test (and, of course, the distribution of “hard” and “easy” tests throughout the year), then you can beat it. And thus the more you expound on it, the better you’re likely to do.
Only it doesn’t quite work that way. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 4, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Among critics of the SAT, “shortcut” is often viewed as a bad word. Doing well on the SAT, they claim dismissively, is only a matter of learning the right shortcuts (like reading the questions before the passage), which of course have nothing to do with any sort of understanding beyond the SAT.
While I disagree with part two of that statement (the skills tested on the SAT extend far beyond the test itself), I actually agree completely with part one — I’ll even take it a step further. Not only is doing well on the SAT a matter of learning the right tricks, but the right tricks — the real ones, the ones that allow you get the answer to what appear to be incredibly complex questions at warp speed — *are* the test.
But unlike the SAT’s critics, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Here’s why: there’s almost no way to answer those types of questions efficiently and with certainty unless you have an absolutely, totally, crystal clear understanding of what they are in fact asking you to do and of what skills or concepts are required to solve them. The ability to apply a shortcut is thus a reflection of the ability to instantaneously pinpoint the requisite knowledge and to apply it in ways that might not seem immediately obvious to the majority of test takers, who will plod obligingly through each answer, weighing its pros and cons and pondering whether it’s some kind of trick.
In other words, your ability to answer questions is actually a reflection of your knowledge (shocking, I know). And if test-prep teaches you something about the ways in which arguments are put together, so be it.
Let me give an example from Critical Reading. Consider the following question:
The author does which of the following in lines 25-27?
Lines 25-27 read as follows: “They were saying that pulling on the rope need not make the bell ring. The bell itself — the mind — could stop it.”
(A) Employs a previously used comparison to explain a newly introduced idea
(B) Cites an aforementioned study to disprove a recently published claim
(C) Signals a digression from the main line of the argument
(D) Invokes figurative language to note the drawbacks of an approach
(E) Uses personification to explain the intricacies of a theory
Seems like you have absolutely nothing to go on, right? No context, no information, zip, zilch, nada.
Think again.
This is actually a rhetorical strategy question, which means that you don’t actually need any context to answer it — you don’t even really have to understand precisely what it’s saying. You just need to get a sense of where it might fit into a larger argument, and what role it might play in either developing or refuting that argument.
The key phrase here is, “They were saying.” Pretty much the only time someone would use the phrase “they were saying” would be if they wanted to clarify or to explain another idea — that is by definition the function of that phrase, the only reason it would be used in the first place.
So it is necessary to look for an answer that contains one of those words. The only option that suggest that function is (A) because it includes the word “explain.”
Now, is it necessary to go back and double check that the comparison in question has already been used? Yes, of course, but that one word, “explain,” is almost enough to nail it. You might think that one phrase is just too little to go on to get the right answer, that you couldn’t really be sure unless you read everything else in those lines plus all the answer choices carefully, but in fact that would be unnecessary. The question is testing whether you recognize the function of the information presented, and that phrase is the only thing that gives away its function. If you can recognize that, you can answer the question in a couple of seconds. A shortcut? Yes. But easy… well, if you can do that without too much trouble, that’s a pretty good sign that you can ace the test.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 3, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
One of the things that inevitably drives me crazy is when a student proudly announces to me that he or she is determined to take the SAT in a particular month because that’s when either 1) the test is always easier, or 2) that’s when all the stupid people take it, and so of course they’ll beat the curve that way.
Newsflash: the SAT is a *standardized* test. If the test is on the harder side, the curve will adjust accordingly and be a bit more generous. If the test is easier, the curve will be harsher. And without significant work on their weakest areas, most people will repeatedly score within the same 20 or 30 point-range — regardless of how easy or difficult they perceive a particular test to be.
Besides, you are not just competing against the math whiz in your physics class (she’s taking it in November, so clearly that’s going to blow the curve!) or the moron in Spanish (well he’s taking it in June, so that must be when all the dumb people take it). You are competing against the hundreds of thousands of people taking it in Iowa and Mississippi and Alaska, not to mention Singapore and Sao Paolo, many of whom will have had very minimal prep and who will thus keep the average pulling toward about 500 across the board. Forget about “smart” juniors taking and early and “dumb” seniors taking it late. So many people take the test each time it’s offered that the average is always going to be about the same.
If you’re more concerned with trying to pull tricks that’ll give you a tiny little leg up on your classmates than with actually learning the material, you’re wasting your time. Tricks don’t get you to a top score, only knowledge and a willingness to be utterly, ruthlessly meticulous about your work. If you’re spending your time trying to figure out the easiest month to take the SAT, that’s a sign that your skills might not actually be solid enough to get you the kind of score you want.
Every single kid I’ve worked with who wanted to focus on these kinds of easy outs at the expense of getting to the root of their problems 1) did in fact have some form of underlying weakness that they didn’t want to address, and 2) consistently failed to make the kind of improvement they wanted. The kids who get the very top scores — the ones for whom a 770 CR constitutes a bad day — don’t spend their time worrying about those things. Their skills are so strong that it doesn’t really matter whether most people think that the test is “hard” or “easy.” If you want to be seriously competitive with them, you need to focus on getting yourself to that point as well. The other stuff…well, it’s peripheral at best.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 1, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Making things look more complicated than they are is one of the SAT’s specialties, and nowhere is this more apparent than on questions that look like the following:
Unlike the author of Passage 1, the author of Passage 2
(A) criticizes a practice
(B) offers an example
(C) proposes a solution
(D) states an opinion
(E) quotes an expert
When confronted with something like this, most people react in one of two highly inefficient ways:
1) They stare at the answers, convinced that if they just think about it long enough, they’ll remember just what Passage 2 contained that Passage 1 didn’t.
Needless to say (I hope), this is not the most effective way of working. Most people’s memories are not nearly as reliable as they’d like to think, and furthermore, most people’s memories are considerably less reliable than normal when they’ve been up since 6 a.m. and are taking a test that has the potential to impact the rest of their lives.
2) They start checking out all of the answers in order, reading first through one passage and then the other for each option and trying to decide just what constitutes, say, “offering an example”
While this a considerably more reliable strategy than #1 — given enough time, a good number of people will actually come up with the correct answer this way — it’s also very time consuming and tends to leave open the possibility of reading too much into the answer choices. And just to reiterate: the SAT is not asking whether maybe possibly you might be able to understand a particular line as “offering an example.” It is asking you to identify a straightforward, concrete, indisputable distinction between the two texts. (As a side note, it’s actually an important skill: how an author chooses to argue his or her point is often crucial to the validity of his or her argument. But unfortunately, you don’t get to care about that on the SAT.) The keyword here is straightforward.
Typically, the College Board will include answer choices that range from the highly concrete (quotes an expert) to the relatively abstract (criticizes a practice). The more abstract the option, the more it is open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, and the more crucial it is that you be capable of making precise distinctions between ideas (e.g. example vs. criticism vs. solution).
The trick, however, is to save yourself the trouble of worrying about the more abstract options by focusing on the more concrete ones first. More often than not, the correct answer will actually among them. And the beauty (?) of it is that checking them out requires you to neither read nor think! Usually, the more concrete options include quotes (quoting an expert), question marks (asking rhetorical questions), and the word “I” (personal anecdote). To check them out, all you have to have to do is scan — not read! — the passage or passages for these visual cues. You don’t need to read anything, just look. If you see quotes in one passage but not the other, that’s almost certainly the answer. The whole thing takes about ten seconds. No going back and forth, no deliberating, no angst, just right to the answer.
By the way, your ability to use this kind of logical shortcut is a big part of what the SAT tests. Yes, there are other ways to get the right answer, but working this way leaves you clearheaded to deal with the questions that require a lot more thinking. You don’t get tired and distracted, and consequently you’re less likely to to make silly mistakes or overlook obvious things on other parts of the test. Because that’s what gets most people: lots of small errors that accumulate just enough to really hurt. The real trick is to prevent yourself from being in a position to make them.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 25, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog
The ACT English section tests both reading and writing skills simultaneously, and it is necessary to change your approach based on the type of question you are being asked. While grammar questions require you to recall specific rules, rhetoric questions require you to apply specific concepts about how paragraphs and essays work: what makes an effective transition (what is the logical relationship between two ideas?); how a paragraph is most logically developed; and what constitutes relevant vs. irrelevant information.
Unlike grammar questions, rhetoric questions can be absolutely, perfectly grammatically correct yet still be wrong. You can’t be fooled by how they sound — you actually have to think (yes, think!) about whether they go along with the main idea of the passage or paragraph in question.
In short, they’re reading questions, not writing questions. And because this is the case, you have to treat them like reading questions.
That means going back to the passage, figuring out the gist of the section you’re being asked to deal with, and figuring out what sort of information would be relevant.
One of the biggest mistakes I consistently see people make on rhetoric questions is to start by looking at the answers and assuming they’ll remember the content well enough to sort everything out rather than going back to the passage and working out the answer for themselves beforehand.
When most people read the passages as they’re working through the questions, though, they’re usually only really paying attention to grammar rather than content. They’re not thinking about main ideas and supporting information but rather about whether that comma in #27 was really supposed to be there. So when they’re asked to insert/delete information, they don’t really have the full context for it.
Remember: the readings on the English section are pretty simple. It’s usually not too hard to figure out their main idea and thus whether a particular sentence or part of a sentence should be used to support it. Yes, it may take a whole 30 seconds, but that’s time better spent actually figuring out the answer than staring at two options and trying to decide between them. So to sum up:
1) Read the question and identify exactly what you’re being asked to insert or delete.
2) Go back to the passage and read as much as you need to figure out the main idea of the passage or paragraph. For questions that ask about the passage as a whole, check the title: it’s there to tell you what the passage is about. For questions that ask you about the middle of a paragraph, read the topic sentence. Conversely, if you’re asked to insert the first sentence of a paragraph, jump ahead and read the middle of the paragraph.
3) Ask yourself whether the information in question is relevant to that topic and why/why not.
4) Look at the answers. The right one should pretty much pop out at you.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 8, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Present perfect = has written
The present perfect is used to describe an action that began in the past and that is continuing into the present. It is usually used in conjunction with the words for and since, which serve as “tip-offs” that this tense is required.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels since 1977.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels for more than thirty years.
Although these sentences describe actions that began in the past, they both clearly imply that that Leslie Marmon Silko is *still* a best-selling author.
Simple past = wrote
The simple past is used to describe an action that began and ended in the past.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
OR
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko was twenty-nine years old when she published her first novel.
On the SAT, sentences that require the simple past typically include a date or time period that clearly indicates a past action or event (e.g. 1815, The Renaissance, etc.).
Past perfect = had written
This is the tense that people tend to have the hardest time with. It is used only in the following case: when you have two finished actions in the past, the past perfect is used to describe the one that happened first.
In other words, if a sentence does not clearly indicate two separate actions, you should not use the past perfect!
Correct: Before Leslie Marmon Silko published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she had already written a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #1: Leslie Marmon Silko published a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #2: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
The past perfect is therefore used to describe the first action.
Under no circumstances is the following correct:
Incorrect: Before Leslie Marmon Silko had published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she wrote a number of well-regarded short stories.
