by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 6, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
As pretty much anyone with more than five minutes of SAT prep experience knows, Critical Reading passages are not exactly chosen for their phenomenal entertainment value. Ecotourism? Snooze. Whale play? Who cares. Copepods? Even I had to force myself to stay awake for that one. (Incidentally, when I was writing lots of reading material, I used a couple of passages that were so boring I actually had trouble mustering sufficient focus to write questions about them! Having to answer the questions may be bad, but I can assure you that writing them can be far, far more excruciating.)
So yes, while occasionally you’ll stumble across a passage on a topic that holds your interest for more than, say, a second-and-a-half, the majority of the time that just won’t be the case. Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the questions, regardless of how much of the passage you’ve tuned out, and if you spend too much time reading and re-reading, desperately trying to absorb everything that’s going on, you’ll already be behind time-wise when you start the questions. Besides, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend reading if you’re not really absorbing anything.
So what’s the solution? Stop trying to understand everything (at least for the first read-through) and just focus on something else: finding the main idea, the tone, and the stuff that the author indicates is important (explanations, italics, anything with the words “important” or the “the goal,” “the point,” etc.). If you actively look for something as you read, it’s a whole lot harder to tune out as you go through the process.
As I’ve written about before, the content of most Critical Reading passages is in some ways deeply irrelevant — that is, provided that you can grasp the basics, it doesn’t really matter what the author happens to be saying, only how s/he structures the argument. If you start reading for function, content becomes secondary.
So say you’re trying to slog through that awful passage about copepods (or something equally hideous), stop reading carefully as soon as you figure out what the basic idea is, and just start worrying about the role that each new paragraph plays — and that’s information you can get in the first couple of sentences. If you see “for example” or “for instance,” that means that the paragraph is pretty much going to support an idea; if you see “however,” or “despite,” that’s a pretty good indicator that the rest of the paragraph is going to refute an idea. Then you can just skim through the rest of it to make sure nothing new and important gets introduced.
If it helps you to do so, you can also write something like “support” or “refute” or “explain” next to the paragraph, just to keep yourself paying attention and give you an outline of the argument. Furthermore, when you get a question about why the author included a particular piece of information in that paragraph, all you’ll have to do is look at your note: if the point of the paragraph is to support, chances are the right answer will start with a positive word; if the point of the paragraph is to disagree, chances are it’ll start with a negative word. It won’t matter if you haven’t gotten every last detail — you’ll have the bit picture, which you can use to make a reasonable guess, and on the SAT that’s what really counts.
Will this give you the answer to every question? Of course not. I’m simplifying a bit here. But you might be surprised at how often working this way 1) keeps you focused, and 2) gets you close to the right answer, even if you’re not really certain you understood everything you read.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 22, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
I’m not opposed to guessing on the SAT. Really I’m not. If you’re actually taking the test, find yourself stuck between two answers, and have a really strong sense that it might be one of them, I generally say to go for it. In my experience, most people have pretty decent instincts, and even if they can’t always put their finger on just why the answer is the answer, their gut instincts usually turns out to be right. In those cases, not guessing is more of a problem.
What I’m opposed to is the notion that the SAT should be treated like some sort of guessing game; that just because there are multiple answers, it shouldn’t be necessary to actually learn how to answer the questions; and that SAT prep should primarily consist of learning how to eliminate answers and play the odds, hoping that if you can get rid of a couple of answers, you’ll get lucky enough to hit the right one often enough to get you a decent score.
The problem with that approach is that it fails to recognize the relationship between question and answer. And as I’ve said before, the presence of multiple answer choices doesn’t make the right answer any less right, or the process of actually learning how to answer the questions any less necessary.
The highest scorers, the ones who score 750 and above, aren’t the best guessers — they’re the ones who know how to figure out the answers for real. In order to accept that idea in regard to Critical Reading, however, you must first accept that the answers aren’t simply a matter of opinion and that there is actually a concrete, logical process that one can employ in order to arrive at the correct one. Once you’ve done that, you’re on your way.
So what this boils down to is one very simple piece of advice: when you’re studying for the SAT and come across a question you’re unsure of how to answer, don’t guess! Stop timing yourself, forget about finishing the section, and try to work through the question.
Experiment — if one approach doesn’t work, try something else. If you’re doing reading, keep going back and forth between the passage and the question. Someone recently sent me one of the hardest CR questions I’ve ever seen, and I must have gone back and forth about twenty times, no exaggeration. No matter how frustrated I got, I kept reminding myself to stick to the process, and eventually I arrived at the answer.
One thing I have to occasionally remind my students of is that I’m not some sort of magician when it comes to the SAT. Even though I can often answer questions almost instantaneously, I’m still going through the entire process of figuring out exactly what the question is asking, going back to the text, summing up the answer in my own words, and writing it down — I’m just doing it really fast. But I almost never skip steps, and when I do, I sometimes get questions wrong (at which point I hold myself up as an example of why you should never skip steps). Occasionally, I also start from faulty premises and work through an entire question, only to discover that the answer I’ve come up with isn’t there. At that point, I start all over by reevaluating my initial assumption, and I usually make my students watch me rework the question from scratch, just to show them that sometimes there actually isn’t a shortcut.
But regardless, chances are, any form of logic you apply to the question will get you somewhere. The SAT is in part designed to test whether you can use the knowledge you do have to deduce the answers to material that is in all likelihood unfamiliar. The College Board doesn’t necessary expect you to have memorized the definition of “multifarious,” but they do expect you to be able to figure out that “multi” means “many” and make an educated guess based on that knowledge. The bottom line is that you need to practice developing the idea that the SAT isn’t about guessing. When you don’t see the answer immediately, you’re far better served by stopping and thinking the question through carefully and methodically than by leaping to guess. If you have to spend half an hour on a single question, fine. You’ll get faster eventually. All that counts is that you learn something process-related that you can apply to working through other questions in the future. Otherwise, to invoke the old cliché, you’re just spinning your wheels.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 20, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Occasionally, ETS comes out with a question that is so utterly diabolical in its simplicity that I have to give them major kudos for it. Debbie Stier sent me this question, and when I first looked at it, I was puzzled for a moment, but when the answer hit me, I felt obliged to write about it. It’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of just how absolutely and completely literal it is necessary to be when doing SAT Critical Reading questions.
I really cannot emphasize this point enough: in order to understand anything about the role a detail or piece of information plays within the context of a passage, you must first try to understand what is says as precisely as possible. If you go even a centimeter beyond what the author says, you can easily fall into the realm of speculation and miss things that are right under your nose.
Here goes:
When we came home, Aunt Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was part of her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think (5) she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a world full of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.
9. The reference to Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in line 4 serves to
(A) capture a distinctive regional dialect
(B) highlight a double meaning of a word
(C) provide an ominous foreshadowing
(D) underscore a particular misconception
(E) give evidence of a contrary personality
First, let’s examine some traps that someone could easily fall into: (A) can be eliminated pretty easily because it’s completely outside the scope of the passage, but (C) seems like it might be able to work. After all, darkness is usually a bad thing in books, and the passage is about darkness, so maybe the author is suggesting that something bad is going to happen.
(D) also seems vaguely plausible. It seems kind of weird that someone would want to sit in the dark, and so that’s sort of like a misconception.
(E) seems like it could work for the same reason. Most people don’t want to sit in the dark, and so someone who wants to do so must be contrary, right?
But here’s how you actually solve it:
Remember the whole reading word-by-by word thing? This is how it works, and I hope the answer to this question illustrates just how absolutely necessary it is.
What does the author say about Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in line 4? That she gave the word “evening” three syllables: e-ven-ing. That’s it, the only information we have to go on, so that’s the only information we can use to answer the question.
Now, literally, “evening” of course means “the time when it gets dark out,” but when used as a verb, it means “to make even,” literally “to smooth” (as the author states in line 5) or to remove inconsistencies from a surface. In other words, the word “evening” has two meanings, and the author calls attention to Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in order to call attention to (=highlight) that fact.
The answer must therefore be (B).
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 18, 2011 | Blog, Issues in Education, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
For many people, the tendency to interpret what they read is one of the biggest stumbling blocks they encounter on the SAT. After all, their English teachers have told them for years that reading is about interpreting; it therefore seems natural that the College Board would want them to do the same. It doesn’t.
Among the myriad things that never get explained to most people when they first start studying for the SAT is the fact that Critical Reading is not an English test in the sense they’ve come to understand English in school. As a result, many strong students who have always received high grades in English class are surprised when their Critical Reading scores are barely above average. So if this describes your (or your child’s) situation, please consider the following. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 16, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that when they first start working with me, a lot of my students aren’t quite clear on the difference between describing the content of a passage and summarizing the argument it contains. Since the ability to summarize arguments quickly, lucidly, and effectively is perhaps the the skill that is most crucial for success on the Critical Reading portion of the SAT, this is a serious problem. Regardless, once a student has finished reading their first passage, the initial conversation usually goes something like this:
Me: So now I want you to sum up the author’s argument in your own words. What’s the basic point that he or she is trying to make here?
Student: Well, the author talks about x… and then he sort of mentions y…oh yeah, and then there was this thing that he said about z that I didn’t really get.
At which point I explain that I’m not interested in hearing a play-by-play recount of what the author says, but rather a condensed version of the main argument he or she is making. I’ve now gotten so many puzzled looks at that statement that I think I’m just going to nix the question completely and start by explaining the difference.
Most of my students pick it up pretty quickly after I give them some examples and walk them through the steps a couple of times; however, the fact that I seem to be having this conversation repeatedly suggests a couple of thing to me. First, it suggests that schools (at least the ones my students come from) do not ever explicitly teach students the difference between summarizing and arguing. It also suggests that even if the distinction has been covered at some point, they’ve never been asked to apply it in any meaningful way.
Incidentally, this weakness is not limited to high school students; I’ve also encountered it with GRE and GMAT students. Perhaps it’s one of those skills that teachers assume students will pick up along the way. Or perhaps that’s the sort of test prepp-y trick they pride themselves on avoiding (which is shame because it’s really not about test prep). More likely, though, it simply doesn’t ever occur to them that it needs to be taught. After all, they understand the difference. (To any teachers who may be reading this, please don’t take offense; I’m just describing what I experience.) Unfortunately, however, there is a very important distinction between giving a description of content and giving a summary of an argument, and on the SAT, not knowing the difference can cost you literally hundreds of points.
Describing Content = recounting the information presented in the text without necessarily distinguishing between main points and supporting evidence and/or counter-arguments. The goal is simply to relate what is being said, often in a very concrete “first x, then y, and finally z” form.
Summarizing an Argument = identifying the essential point that the author wants to convey and eliminating any superfluous detail. The goal is not to cover all of the information presented or to relate it in the sequence it appears in the passage, but rather to pinpoint the overarching idea that determines the content (supporting details, potential counter-arguments, etc.) of the passage. Summarizing an argument requires you to make a leap from concrete to abstract because you must move beyond simply recounting the information presented to recognizing which parts of it are of primary vs. secondary importance. Let’s look at an example. I’m going to use the passage from yesterday’s post about transitions — the version with the transitions, of course! My apologies for making you read it again, but hey, no one ever said that SAT passages were chosen for their entertainment value. Besides, there are many, many ways to read any given piece of text. But that’s something I’m not going to get into now. Passage
The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises because they don’t realize how difficult they actually are, yet respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected, as the Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts were later to do. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal also shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt even by the exploited laborers, who still shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers and nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. Despite improvements in sanitation, it was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares, but he also recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. In fact, many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.
Content Description (more or less what I hear when I ask someone to summarize): So, um, the author talks about this guy Albert O. Hirschman’s “hiding hand” idea, which I think, like, basically says that people don’t know how difficult things are when they start but then they find out and overcome them. And then he talks about this documentary called Panama Canal, which showed like about how technology was important in the early 20th century, and how workers were exploited and how awful conditions were for them while they were working. He mentions a guy whose grandfather worked on the Panama Canal, and he says that his grandfather said that it was really bad and stuff… Oh yeah, and then there was something about, uh, decolonization I think, but I don’t know if I really got that.
Notice the how vague this version is. It doesn’t really distinguish between primary and secondary information; everything gets mushed in together. If this were an SAT passage, the summary would give us zero help in terms of figuring out the main point.
Argument Summary (as I would put it): Workers faced immense obstacles and terrible conditions while working on the Panama Canal but persevered and were inspired to begin decolonization process.
Notice how this version doesn’t try to pack in a lot of information — it just hits the big theme.
Argument Summary in condensed SAT terms: PC workers survived awful conditions — > decolonization
Now notice how this version cuts out absolutely everything except the absolute total utter bare essentials. It doesn’t even attempt to incorporate any sort of detail or anything beyond the main focus of the passage and (awful conditions during the building of the Panama Canal) and its result (the “so what?”, the part that tells us why the main focus of the passage is important). If we were to treat this as a short SAT passage, that effect (it set off the decolonization process) would be our focus. It is mentioned in the last sentence, and the last sentence is where the main point usually is. So in six words and an arrow, we’ve managed to capture the essential information — information that we will almost certainly need to answer at least one of the questions.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 14, 2011 | ACT Essay, ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), SAT Essay
In many ways, I think that the Verbal portion of the SAT is fundamentally about transitions. Or at least the Critical Reading and Essay portions of it. Let me explain what I mean by this: the SAT is essentially designed to test your ability to perceive relationships between ideas and arguments.
Do two piece of information discuss the same idea or different ideas? Does one idea build on or support the previous one, or does it contradict it and move the argument in a new direction? Does it emphasize a point? Refute a point? Explain a point?
Transitions are the signposts, so to speak, that make clear (or elucidate) these relationships. Without words such as “and,” “for example,” and “however,” it becomes much more difficult to tease out just what two words (or sentences or paragraphs or passages) have to do with one another. Transitions are thus where Critical Reading and Writing meet — just aspaying attention to transitions can help you follow an author’s argument in a reading passage, so can including transitions in your own writing help your reader follow your argument.
Remember: your reader should have to exert as little effort as possible to follow your argument. The harder your reader has to work, the lower your score is likely to be. You need to make the relationships among your ideas explicit, whether you’re talking about your championship soccer team from last season or War and Peace.
Here’s an experiment: below are two version of the same passage. I’ve rewritten the first version in order to remove all the transitions. Read it and try to get the gist.
No Transitions
The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises. They don’t realize how difficult they are. They respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected. The Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts did this. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt by the exploited laborers, who shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers died. Nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. There were improvements in sanitation. It was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares. He recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. Many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.
You probably got the basic point, but you also probably noticed that that there were places where sentences sat side by side with no obvious logical connection to one another (“There were improvements in sanitation. It was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares.”)
While I’ve exaggerated here for effect, I do often see students omit transitions between their thoughts in their essays — particularly between paragraphs — thereby forcing the reader to scramble to re-situate him/herself in the argument. It’s subtler, but there’s always a moment of, “Wait, what is this person actually trying to say here?” Don’t make your reader go through the equivalent of what you just read.
Now try it with transitions:
The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises becausethey don’t realize how difficult they actually are, yet respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected, as the Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts were later to do. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal also shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt even by the exploited laborers, who still shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers and nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. Despiteimprovements in sanitation, it was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares, but he also recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. In fact, many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.
A lot easier to understand, right?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 10, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
I will freely admit that the use of pens during tutoring sessions is one of my biggest pet peeves. In everyday life, I have nothing against them (I actually like them quite a bit), but when it comes to the SAT, I loathe them. I’ve been known to rummage in my purse for up to five minutes in a desperate attempt to circumvent the necessity of working in ink.
Here why: When you use a pen, you can’t erase things (let’s assume we’re not talking about erasable pens), and when you can’t erase things, you tend to get very cautious about crossing them out. And that can be a major problem. In order to work most effectively, you need to be free to eliminate answers conclusively, to draw lines all the way through them and totally remove them from consideration. If you work in pen, you probably won’t do this. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 4, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Try explaining it to someone else. Friend, sibling, parent…anyone. It doesn’t even matter whether or not that person is actually going to take the test. The only thing that counts is that they’re willing to humor you and sit with a Blue Book for an hour or two.
There’s a reason I always ask my students to explain to me why they’re doing what they’re doing: in about two seconds, it usually becomes exceedingly obvious whether or not they really get it. If someone says that they know but can’t really explain it, chances are they actually don’t. (For a great explanation of that phenomenon, see this article by Daniel Willingham). It’s one thing to shrug and say, “Yeah, that makes sense” when someone explains the answer to you; it’s something very different to work out all of the steps necessary on your own and explain them to someone else.
If you’re already scoring very well (high 600s+), I would argue that this is actually one of the most productive ways to study. Having to explain something to another person forces you to clarify your own thought process. Things you formerly took for granted suddenly seem bizarrely murky, and you start to wonder just how you know to do x instead of y. You have no choice but to break the process into smaller, more precise steps in order to explain why the answer must be B rather than E. The result is that you learn exactly what you do and don’t know. Furthermore, you gain an awareness of your own thought processes — an awareness that leads to a much stronger sense of confidence and control when you actually take the test.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 28, 2011 | Grammar (SAT & ACT)
In discussions about choosing answers on Fixing Sentences, the word “gerund” is often used as a blanket term covering just about anything that ends in -ing. It’s not quite that simple, however. Yes, gerunds are formed by tacking -ing onto verb (e.g. go —> going, talk —> talking), but participles are also formed exactly the same way.
While gerunds are usually bad, participles…well, not so much. They actually have very little effect on whether an answer is wrong or right.
This means that if you’re indiscriminately eliminating answer choices just because they contain words ending in “-ing,” you might get yourself into some trouble.
Here’s the distinction:
Gerund: A gerund is a verb that acts as a noun. It usually follows a possessive adjective such as her, your, or their (e.g. I was annoyed by his whistling).
Participle: A participle is a verb that acts as an adjective. It precedes a noun, exactly the way an adjective does (e.g. I was annoyed by the whistling boy).
Consider this sentence:
Correct: Although it lacks traditional circus elements such as animals and clowns, Cirque du Soleil is regarded as an exciting spectacle.
The sentence is fine because “exciting” functions as an adjective modifying “spectacle,” not as a gerund.
In addition, participles are often used to fix comma splices:
Incorrect: Cirque de Soleil is regarded as an exciting spectacle, it features beautiful costumes and thrilling acts.
Correct: Cirque de Soleil is regarded as an exciting spectacle, featuring beautiful costumes and thrilling acts.
On the other hand, answers that contain gerunds are usually wrong either because they are wordy and awkward or because they are fragments.
Wordy and awkward: In spite of its lacking traditional circus elements such as animals and clowns, Cirque du Soleil is regarded as an exciting spectacle.
Correct: Although it lacks traditional circus elements such as animals and clowns, Cirque du Soleil is regarded as an exciting spectacle.
Fragment: Cirque de Soleil being regarded as an exciting spectacle.
Correct: Cirque de Soleil is regarded as an exciting spectacle
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 27, 2011 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
One of the top reasons the Error-ID section can be tricky is that there are so many underlined words and phrases that seem strange, as if they could potentially contain an error. I truly cannot count the number of times I’ve had a student look at sentence, screw up his or her face, and promptly announce, “That sounds funny!”
Well guess what. Error-ID sentences are chosen precisely because they contain phrasings that most test-takers will be unfamiliar with and will therefore find strange.
That does not, however, mean that they are wrong.
Error-ID answer choices are wrong only if they are always wrong; they are never wrong if they represent one of several possible correct ways to write phrase or if “you would say it differently.” Your personal preference, dear test-taker, does not enter into the equation.
Furthermore, Error-ID options can be wrong in three ways and three ways only:
1) Grammatically
2) Logically
3) Idiomatically
If a suspicious word or phrase does not fall into one of those categories, it cannot be wrong. I’m going to illustrate with a question that a number of my students have found tricky:
(A) At the reception (B) were the (C) chattering guests, the
three-tiered cake, and the lively music that have become
(D) characteristic of many wedding receptions. (E) No error
Many of my students have chosen (D) for this question because they thought there was a noun agreement problem (that is, the chattering guests, three-tiered cake, and lively music are three things and thus must be characteristics of).
The problem with this interpretation of the question is that it does not take into account the fact that “characteristic of” is a fixed phrase that is unaffected by the number of the things it is modifying. In fact, “characteristic of” is the option more in accordance with standard usage in this case, although the other would be acceptable.
The sentence would only be wrong if it read: “At the reception were the chattering guests, the three-tiered cake, and the lively music that have become a characteristic of many wedding receptions.”
The point, however, is that if there are in fact two right answers, the answer given on the test will never be wrong. So the answer to the above question is in fact “No error.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 25, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
As I mentioned to Debbie Stier today, Fixing Paragraphs often feels like the neglected step-child of the SAT. It doesn’t seem as fun as the other Writing sections (relatively speaking), and no one seems to spend much time talking about it. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be underestimated. Missing just four multiple choice Writing questions is enough to get you from an 800 to a 700, and if stumbling on just one or two Fixing Paragraphs questions can have serious consequences if you don’t absolutely nail Error-IDs and Fixing Sentences. So here goes.
“Fixing Paragraphs” may be part of the Writing portion of the SAT, but its placement there is somewhat deceptive. The reality is that Fixing Paragraphs does test some writing skills, but it also tests reading skills. To do well on the section, it is therefore necessary to know which questions require which approach.
Fixing Sentences questions fall into two general categories:
1) Grammar and style questions require you to either choose the best version of a particular sentence or two choose the best way of combining two sentences. These are essentially Writing questions, and the rules for answering them are essentially the same as those for Fixing Sentences: shorter answers are more likely to be correct, gerunds are bad, and passive voice is bad. While it is not crucial that you go back to the passage to examine the sentence(s) in context, it may be necessary to do so.
2) Paragraph organization and rhetoric questions require you to identify main ideas and understand the relationships between ideas and paragraphs. These are essentially Reading questions (I call them “Critical Reading-lite”), and when you answer them, you need to approach them the basic same way that you would approach Critical Reading questions.
While tone is generally irrelevant, main point is still of the utmost importance. In order to determine where a particular piece of information should be inserted or moved within a given paragraph, you need to be able to distinguish between information whose function is to introduce an idea or provide an overview (i.e. a topic sentence) and information designed to provide supporting detail…neither of which you can do without first determining the point.
For these questions, you should plan to look back at the passage, ideally before you look at the answers. Go back and read, try to get an idea of the answer for yourself, and only then look at the choices. If there’s an option that’s more or less what you came up with, it will almost certainly be right.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 23, 2011 | Blog, Time Management
I think that far too much gets made of the fact that the SAT is a timed test. Yes, you do need to practice finishing sections within the allotted time and take a full-length test or two before the real thing in order to learn how to pace yourself, but in your actual studying, your goal needs to be mastering the actual material, not just doing timed section after timed section and seeing how fast you can get.
I’ve had a couple of students come to me seriously concerned about time issues and wanting to focus on improving their speed. They were all a bit surprised to learn that I don’t usually deal directly with speed in the sense that I rarely time people or, with the exception of ACT Reading, talk about how much time they *should* be spending on any given section of a test. Why? Because speed is what results when you strengthen the actual (logical, mathematical, grammatical, etc.) skills that you’re being tested on rather than a technique in and of itself. If you just focus on the speed at the expense of the actual skills, you end up short-circuiting the entire process. You might get faster, but your score probably won’t go up all that much. On the other hand, if you improve your skills sufficiently, you won’t waste time pondering answer choices rather than actively solving problems, and the time issue usually takes care of itself.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 22, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
When it comes to answer patterns, one of the easiest to spot on SAT Writing is undoubtedly the general wrongness of options containing the word “being.” What I think often gets overlooked in these discussions, however, is the fact that the rule regarding “being” — and gerunds in general — often plays out somewhat differently in Error-IDs and Fixing Sentences. Granted I haven’t done a statistical analysis, but I have spent enough time looking at tests to be able to say this with a fair amount of confidence.
In general it is true that in Fixing Sentences, an answer choice that contains the word “being” is virtually guaranteed to be wrong, either because the word is used in place of a main verb (e.g. Mark Twain being one of the best-known satirists of the nineteenth century) or because it is used to create an unnecessarily wordy and awkward construction (e.g. “Mark Twain is very well known today being that he was a brilliant satirist” rather than “Mark Twain is very well known today because he was a brilliant satirist”).
In Error-IDs, however, the same doesn’t quite hold true. Yes, “being” is perhaps somewhat more likely to be incorrect, particularly on the very easiest questions (where it may be used very obviously to replace a main verb), but otherwise it’s just as likely to be a distractor answer. This is in part because the only real error category that “being” falls into is gerund vs. infinitive, and it is highly unlikely that any given Error-ID section will include more than or or two such questions.
So yes, on Fixing Sentences, you should be very, very suspicious of any answer choice that contains the word “being,” but if the word is underlined on Error-IDs, take good look at your other options before you jump to pick it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 21, 2011 | GRE, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Please note: this post was written in regard to the Reading section of the old (pre-2016) SAT. While it is still applicable to some social and natural science passages, which frequently discuss old models or theories vs. new/emerging ones, the overall writing tends to be more straightforward and journalistic than it was on the old test. If you are studying for a graduate exam such as the GRE, the GMAT, or the LSAT, however, the passages on those tests continue to be more more academic in nature.
While working with Debbie Stier this past weekend, I had something of an epiphany about the Critical Reading section (I think Debbie had a Critical Reading epiphany as well, but I’ll let her discuss that herself!). It is has to with the structure of many passages and the significance of that structure in terms of the SAT’s larger goal.
Let me back up a moment. In all the brouhaha over the “real meaning” of the SAT, it is to forget that it — like the ACT — is essentially a measure of college readiness. Regardless of what the SAT started out as, it is now recognized as a having validity only as a predictor of freshman college grades. And in my experience, a student’s comprehension of the passages on the Critical Reading section is, in general, a remarkably accurate gauge of whether she or he is prepared to handle college-level reading and thinking.
Here’s why: one of the classic structures of SAT passages — and indeed of passages on pretty much all of the graduate exams, including the GRE, the LSAT, and the GMAT — is exactly the same as one of the most common structures of an academic article.
Part I: Introduces the topic, often through an anecdote. Provides general and/or historical overview
Part II: What “they” say
Discusses the standard interpretation, “received wisdom” surrounding that topic
Part III: Problematizes the standard interpretation: raises objections, points out inconsistencies and places where the argument doesn’t hold up
Part IV: What “I” say
Offers own interpretation, either in the form of a more nuanced version of the standard interpretation or, on occasion, the complete opposite of the standard interpretation
Why is it so important to be able to distinguish these parts, to be able to understand what an author offers up as standard interpretation versus what she or he actually thinks?
Well, because that’s exactly what college-level thinking ultimately entails: being able to understand and synthesize other people’s arguments in order to be able to formulate a well-reasoned, well-supported response with precision and nuance. And it is impossible to formulate such a response without truly understand how the existing arguments work and what their implications are.
If you take an economics class and reading an article about the limits of Keynesian theory, for example, you need to be able to distinguish the description of Keynesian theory from the author’s discussion of the standard interpretation of Keynesian theory (what other people think) from the author’s own argument (what I think) in order to even begin to think up a response.
The world of academia essentially consists of an ongoing dialogue between scholars, sometimes separated by hundreds of years — sometimes the result is brilliant and sometimes it’s nothing more than inane and petty squabbles (far more the latter than the former!), but it’s a dialogue nonetheless.
This is not something one is generally made aware of in high school, where the goal is simply to memorize and regurgitate as much information as possible in the shortest period of time, but it is the underlying context for much of what shows up on the SAT. And simply having that knowledge can go a long way toward putting Critical Reading into perspective.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 18, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
This post was inspired by Akil Bello’s Best SAT Prep Tip Ever on the Bellcurves blog. While I agree 100% that reading the full question (along with reading full answers) is indeed one of the most important things you can do on the SAT, I also think that advice takes a bit too much for granted because it assumes that most test-takers will understand what a question is asking, provided that they read it carefully enough. In my experience, however, that’s simply not the case.
I think there’s a tendency to forget that vocabulary issues can crop in passage-based questions themselves as well as in passages and answer choices. If you don’t understand precisely what a question is requiring you to do when it asks you which of the following would most undermine a given theory, it’s very hard to answer that question correctly!
Take inference questions. When a question asks you make an inference about what a particular person mentioned in a passage would believe, it is generally asking you to make a reasonable assumption about that person’s beliefs based on specific information that the author says about that person. It is not simply asking you to summarize what that person says or believes. It is asking you to form a general, often more abstract idea that will not be found word-for-word in the text. But if you don’t make that distinction, if you just try to summarize what the person says or thinks, you’ll be lost when you look at the answer choices.
Or, to give a slightly more concrete example, it will be very hard for you to answer a question that uses the word “analogous” if you don’t really know what that means.
So I’m going to suggest two things.
First, treat any unfamiliar vocabulary you find in the actual questions the exact same way you would treat any other SAT vocabulary — write it down and learn it.
Second, try rephrasing the questions in your own words to make sure you actually understand what you need to do. For example, if a question asks you what “transition is marked” in a particular line, you can rephrase it as “what change happens in the passage here?” Define, sum up, simplify. Whatever you have to do to make sure you understand.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 18, 2011 | Blog, General Tips, Tutoring
When proclaiming that the SAT and the ACT are not tests that can be effectively coached, the College Board and the ACT like to trot out the following statistic, courtesy of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling
Existing academic research suggests average gains as a result of commercial test preparation are in the neighborhood of 30 points on the SAT and less than one point on the ACT, substantially lower than gains marketed by test preparation companies.
Let’s take a moment and unpack this assertion. First, one of the key words here is “commercial test prep” (e.g. Kaplan and Princeton Review); nowhere is tutoring through “boutique” companies or private tutoring mentioned. As someone who has helped more than one student increase their verbal scores alone by 350+ points on the SAT and 10+ points on the ACT, I have some grounds for disputing the idea that the shortcomings of commercial test-prep should not be extended to test-prep in general.
That’s not, however, what I really want to focus on here. What interests me, rather, is the idea of average gains and the way in which that average was determined. I’ve been thinking about this thanks to Debbie Stier, who put up a very interesting blog link to the following article by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia.
Willingham makes the point that:
When a teacher presents a reading strategy to students, we can assume that there are three types of students in the class: students who have already discovered the strategy (or something similar) on their own, students who are not fluent enough decoders to use the strategy, and students who are good decoders but don’t know the strategy. Only the last group of students will benefit from reading strategy instruction. When a researcher finds an average effect size of d=0.33 for teaching students the strategy, that effect is probably actually composed of many students who showed no benefit and a smaller number of students who showed a large benefit.
I think that something very similar is going on in many strategy-based prep classes. My guess is that only around half of the people who take those tests (those scoring 500+) actually have solid enough literal comprehension skills to even make any sort of strategy-based prep worthwhile.
What this means is that if someone’s comprehension skills are truly up to par (meaning, more or less, that they can pick up a College Board Critical Reading passage at random, understand the gist of it, and summarize the main point and tone), they actually stand to benefit immensely from strategy-based prep. It probably won’t help for the ones scoring 750+ from the start because they’re already using many of the standard strategies, even unconsciously, but for many of the still-small percentage scoring in the 600 to low 700 range, the increase can be very substantial. Many of the ones who persistently score in the 500s, however, won’t succeed in raising their scores at all because they lack the core skills on which to base the strategies they learn.
This points to a disturbing conclusion: the real problem isn’t that people can game the test by learning strategies (aka “tricks”) but rather that many test-takers don’t even even have strong enough comprehension skills to be helped by those strategies in the first place.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 16, 2011 | Blog, The Mental Game
I used to use the words “zen” and “test prep” in the same sentence only in the most tongue-in-cheek manner, but I’ve been thinking about it seriously of late, and I actually think there’s a connection.
First, though, lest you think I’ve gotten all new-agey, let me make it clear that I am not talking about meditating in order to get yourself in test-taking mode or reduce your anxiety or anything of that ilk. There are test-prep companies that do that sort of thing, but I’ll refrain from voicing my opinion about them. Suffice it to say that I am a firm believer in the principle that the best way to reduce test anxiety is simply to master the material on the test.
What I’m talking about is the attitude with which you approach the entire test-preparation process. One of the things I’ve noticed is that students who come to me knowing that they have big gaps in their knowledge and that they don’t really know what they’re doing tend to end up with higher scores in the long run than students who come to me with relatively high scores, convinced that they only have to find the one trick that’ll make everything perfect. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 16, 2011 | ACT Reading
The most common issue that students have on ACT Reading is time. Granted, the timing is tight: 35 minutes for four passages and 40 questions, or precisely 8 minutes and 45 seconds per passage/ten question set. The timing, however, is not the whole story.
In reality, what presents itself as a time issue is often something else entirely. Most people assume that they have problems on ACT Reading because they can’t read fast enough when the real problem is that they don’t know how to read effectively enough to locate the requisite information in time. Yes, it is true that many ACT Reading questions are detailed-based and require the identification of a particular fact buried in the middle of a paragraph, but what many test-takers overlook is the fact that there are many strategies they can employ to quickly locate the necessary information — even if they have no recollection whatsoever of where it is.
In a roundabout way, the ACT can actually be more of a reasoning test than the SAT, and if you really want to improve your score dramatically, you need to treat it like one. Simply reading each passage fully, trying to absorb all of the information, and then going through the questions in order will have little to no long-term effect on your score.
The bottom line is that if you want to get through all four passages in time and obtain a high score, you must be willing to be flexible and shift your strategy to fit the question.That includes doing the following:
1) Skip around
When students with solid comprehension skills get stuck below a certain score on ACT Reading, it’s usually not because they spend a little too much time on every question, but rather because they spend far too much time on a handful of questions. When they learn to identify those potentially time-consuming questions upfront and go into the test planning to skip them, their score often jumps two or three points right away.
In general, if a question looks hard or time-consuming, skip it upfront and come back to it if you have time. Figure out a marking system so that you don’t forget do so. Your goal is to get as many questions right as you possibly can, so don’t sacrifice questions you can answer easily for questions that will take a lot of time and that you may not even get right. For example, if you know that “main point” questions are consistently problematic, don’t even look at them until you’ve answered every other question that set.
2) Learn to distinguish between “detail” passages and “argument” passages and treat them accordingly
For passages that focus more on details or descriptions without a real point, you can ignore this process; it won’t really get you anywhere.
For the passages that do focus on a single argument, however, you need to take the time to both determine and write down the main point. Keeping that information in mind when you answer the questions can save you unbelievable amounts of time.
3) Learn what information you can skip initially
This is another strategy that comes primarily into play when you’re dealing with a straightforward “argument” passage. Whenever you encounter a topic sentence that clearly indicates that the rest of the paragraph will just offer supporting details, you can skip the rest of the paragraph. If a question asks specifically about those lines, you can go back and read them closely, but remember: the topic sentence has already told you why those details were important, and there’s a decent chance that’s what the ACT will ask about.
4) Think logically about where information is most likely to be located
This may sound obvious, but very often when asked to locate a piece of information that they don’t recall, people begin re-reading the passage from the beginning. Don’t. If the passage discusses a movement chronologically and the question asks about an event that clearly must have happened toward the end of the movement, focus on the end of the passage.
In addition, when you’re trying to locate information that you simply don’t remember reading, just focus on the topic sentences to help you figure out where the topic is discussed. If you try to skim through the interiors of paragraphs, you’ll most likely just end up lost.
5) Circle major transitions and important information…
and don’t forget to consult those spots when you look back. That’s where the information that gets asked about will probably be. It’s a waste of time to make notes if you just end up ignoring them and skimming through random sections.
6) Take shortcuts
The ACT can be exactly like the SAT here, in the sense that there’s often a “back door” that will let you quickly answer what appears to be a complicated question.
For example: if a question asks about the order of a series of events and the answers list four different combinations, each with a different event first, you just have to figure out the first event. By default, only the answer that lists that event first can be right.
7) Learn when to look at the answers first and when to look at the passage (or your notes) first
Again, this requires that you be willing to shift your strategy to fit the question. If it’s a main point of passage question, you need to consult your notes about the main point. If it’s a main point of paragraph question, you need to read the topic sentence of the paragraph in question. If it’s an “all of the following EXCEPT’ question, you need to look at the answer choices first. You just have to do whatever will get you the answer fastest.
