by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things I’ve noticed is that people hate to skip questions on the SAT. Even though they know that getting a question wrong will set them back an additional quarter of a point, they’d rather guess and risk lowering their score further than play it safe and move on. Skipping a question on the SAT is like admitting defeat: it means that you’re effectively giving up on the possibility of getting a perfect score, even if you’ve been consistently scoring in the mid 600s.
But guess what: while it does pretty much work that way for Math and Writing, on which even four missed questions can pretty much kill your chances of scoring in the 700s, Critical Reading has a much more generous curve. It is not necessary to answer every single question in order to obtain a high score. In fact, on some tests it’s actually possible to miss up to three questions and still get an 800. In contrast, four missed Writing questions along with an 8 essay will give you a score of about 670.
If you are actually trying to get an 800, I wouldn’t suggest that you skip Critical Reading questions (and if you are a serious contender for an 800, you really shouldn’t need to skip questions). But even if you’re just trying to break 700, you need to be open to the possibility of skipping a question or two if you really just have no idea about the answer.
To give you some cold, hard facts: In order to obtain a 700, it is usually necessary to obtain a raw score of about 57/67. Assuming that you skip 10 (!) questions and get all of the rest correct, that’s a 700 right there. Although I understand that skipping so many questions sounds far too risky to entertain, consider that choosing to skip 5 questions and then going for — and missing — another 5 that you’re not sure about will actually give you a score of 690. That’s a very important 10 points right there.
If you’re just trying to break 600, you have even more latitude. To hit 600, you only need a raw score of 45, or 2/3 of the questions right. Theoretically, if you skipped 22 questions and only answered the ones you were absolutely certain about, you could still pull a 600 (although I wouldn’t really advocate that you skip 22 questions).
A more likely scenario is that you skip 10 questions (which gets you to a raw score of 57), then miss another 8 for a raw score of 47 (8 x .25 = 2, and 49-2 = 47), for a scaled score of 610. If, on the other hand, you had tried to answer all 10 of the questions that you had skipped and gotten all of them wrong (statistically unlikely but possible if you really have no idea about them), that would give you a raw score of 42 and scaled 580.
So the bottom line is that sometimes you have be willing to give up the possibility of perfection in order to achieve something that’s merely very good. If you know that you always miss the last couple of vocab questions, plan to skip them; or, if you know that inference questions always trip you up, forget about them. It might just be enough to push your score to the next level.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 20, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
Remember the movie Awakenings? Actually, if you’re in high school now, you’re probably way too young to actually remember the movie, but you may have stumbled across it on late-night cable at some point: it’s the one with Robert DeNiro, about a guy who suddenly wakes up after being in a coma for decades… It got nominated for a couple of Academy Awards.
Anyway, if you’re wondering what on earth a movie released all the way back in 1990 could possibly have to do with standardized test-prep in 2011, the answer is: quite a bit. You see, Awakenings is based on a book of the same name, a book that was written by a man named Oliver Sacks. Sacks is a neurologist who happens to have a fascination with unusual illnesses involving the brain: people who have strokes and suddenly develop extraordinary musical abilities, or those who are unable to identify the faces of their loved ones, despite having perfect vision (an affiction from which Sacks himself suffers). He is also one of the authors whose works appear on both SAT Critical Reading and ACT Reading Comprehension.
I think that there are a couple of reasons why test-makers are so partial to Sacks’ work: its written in a style just accessible enough to be comprehensible to non-specialists but also just sophisticated enough to be challenging to many high school students. It deals with a subject matter that is culturally neutral but that at the same time presents a distinct point of view.
In short, it’s the College Board and the ACT’s dream come true. It’s also incredibly interesting reading, particulary when not condensed into 85 lines and accompanied by 10-12 questions. So if you’re looking to acquaint yourself with the kind of reading material that tends to show up on these tests, you can start by reading something by Oliver Sacks. Who knows? You might even like it.
Books by Oliver Sacks:
–Awakenings
–An Anthropologist on Mars
–The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
–The Island of the Colorblind
–Musicophilia
-Hallucinations
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 19, 2011 | ACT Reading
As I’ve discussed before, the point of skimming is not simply to read everything fast, but rather to read many things fast in order to identify the handful of places you need to slowly.
While this is generally true for the ACT, there are also some quirks particular to the Reading Comprehension section that make it necessary to approach skimming a bit differently.
1) Initial read-through
One of the particular challenges that ACT passages pose is that they can either focus primarily on a single argument and its supporting and/or contradicting evidence, or on a collection of facts and details that revolve around a particular topic. In the case of the former, you need to focus on the key places in the argument, the places where supporting and/or contradicting information is introduced.
These key places may only occur every other paragraph or even every third paragraph, but if you focus on topic sentences and keep an eye out for transitions such as therefore and for example, and punctuation such as dashes and colons (which signal explanations) you should be able to pick them out pretty easily. In case of the latter (especially Prose Fiction), you do actually need to read everything quickly in order to get a general impression of what’s going on — there’s just no other way to do it. As you skim, however, circle major transitions, explanations, and words like important to help you when you:
2) Go back to the passage in order to answer specific questions
Since the ACT does not usually give line numbers, Reading Comprehension can feel like some sort of twisted scavenger hunt. The trick is to identify one or two key words in the question and look only for them. If a question asks about the architectural significance of Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, for (real) example, look only for the words Stata Center and ignore everything else. If you have no idea where those words could possibly be, don’t just start reading random bits of the passage — chances are you’ll just get lost and miss important information when it does appear. Instead, focus on reading topic sentences to figure out which paragraph is most likely to contain those words.
As your eye moves down the page, draw your index finger along with it
Establishing a physical connection with the passage helps to focus you and makes it easier to spot the words you’re looking for.
Then, when you’ve found them, read the full sentences in which they appear, thoroughly, from beginning to end, and without skipping over anything. If you have to, put your finger on the page in order to make sure that you don’t miss a single word. Pay particular attention to any major transitions you’ve circled in or near those sentences because there’s a good chance the necessary information will be located near them. If you can’t answer the question from the information in that sentence, read the sentence before AND the sentence after it. There’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 16, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
If you’ve already spent a reasonable amount of time studying for SAT Writing, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen parallelism questions that look like this:
Incorrect: Susan likes running, playing soccer, and to hike.
Correct: Susan likes running, playing soccer, and hiking.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the rule, it’s that all of the items in a list (typically three) must be in the same format: either verb, verb, verb; noun, noun, noun; or gerund, gerund, gerund. No mixing and matching!
But “lists” involving three items aren’t the only of parallelism that gets tested on the SAT. In fact, there’s another kind that only deals with two items.
Two-part parallelism, while based on the same principle, is a little bit trickier. Instead of dealing with words, it deals with entire phrases. Furthermore, because most prep books don’t even cover it, many people get caught off guard when they encounter it on the actual test.
In addition, this structure often tested in conjunction with word pairs. Spot the word pair, and you can answer the question quickly.
Here’s the rule:
The construction of a phrase on one side of a given conjunction must match the construction of the phrase on the other side of that conjunction as closely as possible.
I realize that’s very abstract, so let me give you an example:
Incorrect: The researchers called for enforcement of tobacco regulations as well as investigating motivations for smoking.
The first thing we can notice about this sentence is that it contains a conjunction, “as well as,” and that there is a phrase on either side of it. So what were the two things researchers called for?
1) Enforcement of tobacco regulations (noun + of + adjective + noun)
2) Investigating motivations for smoking (gerund + noun + preposition + noun)
Clearly, the two sides do not match. The SAT will virtually always ask you to correct the second side, and so we need to rewrite the second side in accordance with the structure “noun + of + noun,” which is the absolute classic structure that the SAT loves to use.
Correct: The researchers called for the enforcement of tobacco regulations as well as an investigation of motivations for smoking.
If it helps, think of it as the English equivalent of balancing an equation.
Now here’s why it’s really important that you be able to both recognize and correct this type of error with little to no effort: it usually shows up at the end of Fixing Sentences — typically as either the last or the second-to-last question of the section (#10 or 11 on the first section; #13 or 14 on the second), so there’s a very good chance you’ll see it after sitting through four-and-a-half hours or more of testing. You won’t have the energy to think about it. The good news is that if you can recognize what the question is testing, you can usually jump right to the answer choice.
For example, let’s consider the following real question (October ’06 test, section 10, #14):
Acquaintances of Alexei have commented that he is at once annoying because of his unpredictability but his imagination is still a delight.
(A) but his imagination is still a delight
(B) although he is delightfully imaginative
(C) and he is delightful in his imagination too
(D) while being imaginative and they are delighted
(E) and delightful because of his imagination
If you can recognize the word pair “at once…and,” that immediately gets you down to (C) and (E).
But how to decide between them? The structure before the conjunction is “adjective + because of + noun” (annoying because of his unpredictability) you know that the other side must contain that same construction as well.
If you just look for the words “because of,” that leads you right to (E), which is indeed the answer.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 15, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Perhaps some of you have heard of Adam Mansbach’s surprise best-seller Go the F**k to Sleep. The parent of a toddler, Mansbach wrote the book, which promptly rose to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, to convey the sheer hell of living with a three year-old who simply will not go to sleep.
While I don’t deal much with toddlers, there is one frustration I confront regularly that makes me believe I understand Mansbach’s exact sentiment — that is, a student’s total and utter unwillingness to go back to a Critical Reading passage and read. And at those moments, after I’ve said five or six times, “what does the author say?” only to be met with repeated blank stares, or “well, I feel like he’s saying…”, I do in fact want to say: “Go back to the f**ing passage and tell me, as literally as you possibly can, what it actually says. Not what you think you remember it says. Not what you feel it might be saying. Not what it makes you think of. What is actually says.”
I have lost track of the number of times a student, upon discovering that the answer is, say, (E) rather than (B), proclaims that he or she doesn’t really feel that the scenario described in (E) occurs in the passage. At which point I promptly go back to the passage and read an entire paragraph’s worth of exactly what was described in (E). It’s usually so obvious that the student can’t even argue.
So newsflash: going back and reading very carefully is the only way to be 100% certain that your answer checks out. If you are not willing to do this, the bottom line is that your score will most likely not improve dramatically regardless of how many practice tests you take.
Again, let me reiterate: if you refuse to go back and read, you have virtually zero chance of getting a score above 750 and a very minimal chance of getting one above 700.
Maybe you’ve heard about the 700 wall? This is often what it comes down to. I’ve had many students who came to me scoring in the 600s. Those who were willing to accept that they needed to go back and check everything out — and who saw that they actually got the answer that way, rather than just playing Russian roulette with process of elimination — ended up with scores in the 700s, in some cases very high in the 700s.
The ones who kept on insisting they didn’t need to check, who consistently refused to try to see the relationship between the correct answer and the specific wording in the text, and who remained perennially stuck on what they thought rather than trying to figure out what the author was saying, simply could not break 700 no matter how hard they tried. It was always hit or miss, not steady improvement. Yes, they got most of the answers right, but they also always got just enough answers wrong so that it really hurt their score. And some of them took literally dozens more practice tests than my higher-scoring students did — even if both had started out in approximately the same place.
Now, if you’re already consistently going back to the passage and having trouble understanding what it’s actually saying or are not certain how to locate the information necessary to answer the questions (not necessarily in the line numbers given), that’s a different story. You need to either work on building your literal comprehension (learning vocabulary and/or familiarizing yourself with “serious” college/adult-level writing) or on learning the types of words and phrases that you need to look out for.
But if neither of things is an issue for you, just go back and read the f**g passage.
Trust me. It works.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 13, 2011 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
They’re a waste of time. Seriously. The College Board can ask anything. There are no patterns, no logic, no way to guess what’ll show up.
Your main concern needs to be fully mastering the things you can control, and you cannot control prepositions. There are too many, and they’re too random. Sitting for hours trying to memorize lists of them does not constitute an effective use of your time.Making sure that you can recognize dangling modifiers, comma splices, subject-verb disagreements, pronoun disagreements, and problems in parallel structure does.
Besides, there will usually be a grand total of two preposition questions on SAT Writing, and sometimes not even that. Even if you miss them, you can still score an 800. And frankly, as long you’re above 750, no one really cares all that much. On occasion, people even get into top schools with — get ready for this one — scores in the low 700s!
Now, if you have truly and thoroughly mastered every single other grammar rule tested on the SAT — to the point at which you do not ever miss a single non-idiom/preposition question — you can consider looking at some prepositions. But at that point, it’s just not really worth your time to sit there memorizing idiom after idiom when you could be doing things that will actually make you an interesting, appealing candidate to colleges (or simply an interesting person period).
So please, do yourself a favor and go finish your physics homework instead.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 12, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
When I used to tell students to write down every step of their reasoning process on Reading questions, their typical reaction was, “But doesn’t that take too much time?” While perfectly understandable, that thinking is based on the assumption that writing things down on a standardized test is somehow akin to writing in, say, English class. It isn’t. As a matter of fact, it’s not even close. It’s not about thinking things over leisurely or making them sound nice or being original. It’s about keeping yourself actively and sharply focused on the information you’re looking for, and it needs to be done fast. So in the service of that end, here are some general rules:
1) Keep it very, very short
Five or six words tops for your main point, three or so for anything else. Note-taking should not noticeably cut into the time you spend either reading or answering questions. That means:
2) Abbreviate like there’s no tomorrow.
Draw symbols, arrows, whatever you need to get the point across fast. Vowels and full words are your enemies. No one is grading you on your eloquence. The only thing that matters is that you understand what you mean and are able to use that information effectively.
Compare, for example, the following two versions of the main point for an imaginary passage about the effect of World War II on women’s roles in American society
Way too long: World War II had a positive effect on the lives of American women because it expanded their traditional roles by allowing them to find jobs outside of their homes for the first time.
Good Length: WWII + b/c women ? jobs
The first version takes up a lot of time to write, the second one virtually none. Guess which one is more effective at keeping you focused.
3) Write down arguments, not facts
Let’s go back to that pretend WWII passage and imagine that it’s about Rosie the Riveter (come to think of it, this might actually be in a real passage somewhere). You can’t just write “Rosie the Riveter;” that tells you nothing.
Instead, you want to write something like, “RR impt b/c inspired US wmn” (Rosie the Riveter was important because she inspired American women).
4) Circle transitions, not nouns
Transitions such as “however” and “furthermore,” and “because” tell you why information is important. Simply underlining the information itself will tell you nothing and will probably do little to help you answer the questions. Do not ever circle any form of the verb “to be.”
5) Focus on the argument of the overall passage, not the individual paragraphs
You don’t need to to write the argument of every paragraph when you do an initial read-through. Figuring out where a particular paragraph fits into a passage’s overall argument in something you can deal with when you encounter a specific question about that paragraph. At absolute most, you could do something like +, +, – for two paragraphs that support a point and one that contradicts it, but anything more will get
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 11, 2011 | GMAT
The question of when to use which vs. that is one of the most common issues that people studying for the GMAT face. I’ve done some hunting around on the web, and while there are a lot of articles explaining the distinction, most of them present the issue is much more complicated terms than is necessary. Knowing the grammar behind the rule might occasionally come in handy, but the reality is that most of the time it’s pretty irrelevant. In this post, I’m going to give you the shortcut.
The most important thing to know is that which follows a comma and that does not. In other words, comma = which, no comma = that.
Incorrect: The treaty of Tordesillas, that was signed on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and the Crown of Castile.
Correct: The treaty of Tordesillas, which was signed on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and the Crown of Castile.
Incorrect: The treaty which was signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and the Crown of Castile.
Correct: The treaty that was signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and the Crown of Castile.
Note that the GMAT almost always tests this rule by incorrectly using which without a comma rather than that with a comma, as in the second set of sentences above.
Why? Because the use of which without a comma is much more difficult for most people to identify as an error. That’s hardly a surprise since that construction is considered perfectly acceptable in everyday writing, particularly in British English. The GMAT, alas, is entirely uninterested in that fact and insists that you adhere strictly to the “only use which after a comma” rule.
Regardless of what you happen to think of that, knowing the GMAT’s preference can help you quickly eliminate answers on questions like this:
The treaty which was signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and the Crown of Castile.
(A) The treaty which was signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated
(B) The treaty signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated
(C) The treaty which was signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and being authenticated
(D) The treaty of Tordesillas, signed on June 7, 1494, and it was authenticated
(E) The treaty that was signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, its authentication
Sorry, you didn’t think I was going to make things overly straightforward here, did you?
Even if you can’t use the rule we just covered to get all the way to the answer, (B), you can at least cross out (A) and (C) right away. That allows you more room to work carefully through the other answers. (D) and (E) both create awkward and ungrammatical constructions, so they can be eliminated.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 11, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
On the SAT Writing section, there are five conjunctions that must always be preceded by a semicolon when they are used to begin a clause.
However
Therefore
Moreover
Consequently
Nevertheless
The first two appear very frequently while the other three are less common, but the rule is the same for all of them. The inclusion of these conjunctions is usually a dead giveaway that a question is testing semicolon usage, so if you see one of them, first check whether there is an answer that includes a semicolon; it will virtually always be correct. For example:
Researchers believe that genes could affect the amount of caffeine people consume, environmental factors are known to play an important role as well.
(A) consume, environmental factors are known to play an important role
(B) consume; but environmental factors are known to play an important role
(C) consume, an important role is known to be played by environmental factors
(D) consume; however, environmental factors are known to play an important role
(E) consume, with environmental factors being known to play an important role
If you can recognize the original version of the sentence as a comma splice (two sentences separated by a comma), you’re already ahead of the game. What you may not realize, however, is that you don’t actually have to reach each answer through word by word, trying to find the best way to fix the sentence.
Since semicolons are one of the most common ways to fix comma splices, any answer that contains one has a pretty good chance of being right. Furthermore, any answer that contains “semicolon + however,” is usually going to be correct. So if you scan through the answers and spot that choice D contains just that, you already know that you’ve probably found that right answer without even having to read through the other options.
To be on the safe side, you do need to plug the answer back into the sentence and check that it makes sense (it does), but working like this can save you an awful lot of time and worry.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 30, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Very often, test-takers get stumped on “tone” or “attitude” questions because they look at each answer choice individually and ponder whether it could fit the passage. In other words, they try to fit the answer to the reading — always a bad idea.
Very often, test-takers get stumped on “tone” or “attitude” questions because they look at each answer choice individually and ponder whether it could fit the passage. In other words, they try to fit the answer to the reading — always a bad idea.
The process for breaking down tone questions is actually pretty simple: the first thing you always want to determine is whether the author’s attitude is positive or negative.
Say, for example, you’re dealing with a passage about the California gold rush, and you see the following question:
In lines 47-51, the author’s attitude toward the process of “staking claims” could best be characterized as:
(A) skeptical
(B) vitriolic
(C) approving
(D) elated
(E) ambivalent
The first thing you need to do is to figure out whether the author considers “staking claims” a good thing or a bad thing.
If it’s a good thing, you can automatically eliminate anything that is either negative or neutral, in this case A, B, and E. If it’s a bad thing, you can get rid of C and D.
Notice that we don’t care about the actual words at this point, only whether they’re good or bad.
Let’s say that the author considers “staking claims” a good thing, so we’re left with C and D.
In general, extreme answers tend to be wrong (if the tone of the passage were too obvious, you wouldn’t have to read closely, and the test would be too easy!), so right away, you know that there’s about a 90% chance the answer is C.
But unless you’re absolutely certain, go back to the passage and check!
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 29, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Transition questions tend to be one of the trickier kinds of questions that show up on both the SAT Writing and the ACT English sections. Unlike straight-up grammar questions, they don’t present obvious errors that can be easily caught by ear. Instead, they require you to (gasp!) think.
Transitions can be divided into three major categories.
Continuers include and, furthermore, moreover, and in fact, which tell us that an idea is continuing on in the same direction it began
Contradictors include but, yet, although, despite, nevertheless and however, which tell us that the an idea is being contradicted or moved in a different direction
Cause and Effect include so, therefore, and consequently tell us that something is happening as a result of something else.
On the SAT, you will be dealing primarily — but not exclusively — with and, but, however, and therefore; on the ACT, you will encounter a much wider variety of transitions, and such questions will appear far more frequently. The essential technique for making sure you get these questions right is the same on both tests, however: whenever you see a transition underlined, you need to take your pencil and cross it out. It is important that you physically cross it out, not just imagine you’re crossing it out. Then, examine the relationship between the two clauses (same idea or different ideas) before you look at the answers.
Original sentence: People who are happy to be alone are often viewed as as odd or threatening, and research suggests that spending time by oneself is necessary to interacting well with others.
Cross out transition and consider clauses separately
1) People who are happy to be alone are often viewed as odd or threatening
2) Research suggests that spending time by oneself is necessary to interacting well with others.
Determine relationship: Contradiction
Plug in correct transition: People who are happy to be alone are often viewed as as odd or threatening, but/yet research suggests that spending time by oneself is necessary to interacting well with others.
Or: People who are happy to be alone are often viewed as odd or threatening; however, research suggests that spending time by oneself is necessary to interacting well with others.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 27, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog, The New SAT
This is one of the most important shortcuts you can know for the ACT® English Test and the SAT® Writing Test, and it can save you a huge amount of time. You can expect to encounter several punctuation questions testing it in one form or another on any given exam.
Comma + and/but = Period = Semicolon
These three constructions are grammatically identical, so if more than one of them appear in answer choices, you can automatically eliminate all of those options. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 26, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Many test-takers find Passage 1/Passage 2 comparison questions to be among the most difficult on the SAT. Keeping track of multiple arguments and points of view can be challenging, and for this reason it is very much to your advantage to break the process into manageable chunks.
The single most important thing you can with Passage 1/Passage 2 comparisons is to treat them like single passages for as long as possible. That means:
1) Read Passage 1
2) Write the tone and main point
3) Answer Passage 1 questions
Then, when you’re done:
1) Read Passage 2
2) Write the tone, main point, and the relationship to Passage 1
3) Answer Passage 2 questions
And finally, when you’re done with Passage 2, answer the questions that ask about both passages (if they appear before questions asking about only one of the passages, skip them and come back later). Make sure you reiterate the relationship between the two passages before you begin the comparison questions.
While long Passage 1/Passage will always have questions asking about the two passages individually, short Passage 1/Passage 2 may not.
The first thing you should do when you encounter short Passage 1/Passage 2 is therefore to skim through the questions and see whether there are any that deal with only one passage. If there are, read that passage first.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 25, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
When you take a standardized test, you are your own worst enemy. From what I have observed, many test-takers score lower than they should simply because they second-guess themselves and change right answers to wrong ones. Believing that the answer they chose was too obvious and thus a trap, they talk themselves out of a perfect logical selection and go for something less obvious — and wrong — instead. Almost never do I see students change incorrect answers to correct ones when they go back over a section, only the other way around. So I’m going to propose something a little radical: don’t check your work.
I know this probably flies in the face of what you’ve always been been told: make sure you leave some time at the end of every section to go back and check….right? But for many students, working this way can do more harm than good. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not at all suggesting that you just whip through the questions without thinking twice about them and then stride blithely off, confidently assuming you’ve gotten everything right. This only works if you are willing to work very, very carefully the first time through; to go just a little bit slower than you think is necessary (assuming that time isn’t a problem); and to break down the questions piece by piece and reason your way through them meticulously.
True story: One of my students never scored as well as he should have on ACT English because every time he checked his work, he changed wrong answers to right ones. So finally I just told him to stop checking his work.
When he came home from the ACT, his mother asked him if he’d checked his work on the English section. He said he had. “Don’t lie to me,” his mother responded. “Ok, fine, I didn’t,” he admitted, “but only because Erica told me not to.”
When his mother called and told me that, my first thought was, “Oh s–t, if he blows it, his mother is going to be furious.” I won’t deny that it crossed my mind that perhaps I should have made him check his work after all.
But then got his score back.
And the English was a 35.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 25, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Very often, test-takers miss “NOT” and “EXCEPT” questions (e.g. “Which of the following is NOT mentioned in by the author as a technique used by Da Vinci when he painted the “Mona Lisa”?) simply because they don’t read them carefully enough. Instead of finding the information missing from the passage, they do exactly the opposite and thereby answer the question incorrectly. Even though these all-important words are capitalized, they’re astonishingly easy to overlook.
So always circle them, underline them, star them, or do something to draw attention to them so that you won’t forget what you’re looking for. It’s worth spending an extra second or two to make sure you don’t unnecessarily lose the points.
A couple of years ago, I had an ACT student — let’s call him J. — who literally got every single one of this type of question wrong on the first few practice tests he did. After I told J. perhaps 50 or 60 times that his score would probably shoot up a good 5 points if he just started circling those words, it finally occurred to him to listen to me. Sure enough, he scored above a 30 the first time he tried that strategy. He was incredulous. “Gee,” I said. “Who ever would have guessed that would happen?”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 23, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Dangling modifiers are guaranteed to show up on both the SAT and ACT. You can reasonably expect to encounter one on every test. So what is a dangling modifier, and how do you fix it? Dangling modifiers are best explained through examples, so let’s take a look at an example.
Correct: The dog jumped over the fence after escaping from its leash.
In this sentence, the subject (the dog) appears immediately and the modification follows. We can, however, also rewrite the sentence so that the modification comes before the subject:
Correct: After escaping from its leash, the dog jumped over the fence.
Even though the dog no longer appears at the beginning of the sentence, it is still the subject. And at the beginning of the sentence, we now have a clause that describes the subject but that does not name it. If the subject does not immediately follow that description, however, the result is a dangling modifier. When taken literally, sentences that contain dangling modifiers are often completely absurd.
Dangling Modifier: After escaping from its leash, the fence was jumped over by the dog. (Implies that the fence escaped from its leash.)
Dangling Modifier: After escaping from its leash, jumping over the fence was what the dog did. (Implies that jumping escaped from its leash.)
While some of the dangling modifiers that appear on the SAT and ACT clearly sound wrong, like the sentences above, others can be much harder to catch — especially if you’re not looking out for them.
For example: (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 22, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things that continually amazes me is the following situation: a student is working carefully through a reading question and begins to cross off answers. First one, then another, then a third. And then…nothing. The student continues to stare at the two answer choices. “Is there anything in the passage that clearly points to one of the answers?” I ask. The student scrunches up his or her face in concentration, staring off into space, trying, trying to remember….
At which point I oh-so-politely suggest that perhaps the student might want to consult the passage…because, you know, there’s an off chance the answer might be in there. As opposed to somewhere on the wall across the room. To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a standardized testing strategy universally acknowledged that if you are down to two answer choices, you should guess. (One answer is just as likely to be right as the other, right?)
Except that you really shouldn’t.
As a matter of fact, there are a couple of very specific things you should do instead. First, you should reiterate your main point (which, ideally, you should have written down as soon as you finished reading the passage), or at least the point of the lines in question. Is there an answer that rephrases it? If there is, chances are it’s right. If that doesn’t work, you should go back to the passage and read it very, very carefully, making sure to start a couple of lines above and read to a couple of lines below.
With the exception of questions that ask about the passage as whole, the information you need to answer the question will always be located in the immediate vicinity of the lines you’ve been given. It might not be in the lines themselves, but it’ll almost always be very close by.
In addition, when you do go back and read (instead of, say, waiting for the heavens to open and an angel to descend and inform you of the correct answer), you need to pay particular attention to any important transitions or explanations that appear in the text. Chances are they’ll give you the information you need. Usually when students go back to the passage, they’re astonished to discover that the answer was right there all along.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Bonus question (scroll down for the answer):
Throughout this article, my tone could best be characterized as
(A) perplexed
(B) hostile
(C) appreciative
(D) facetious
(E) ambivalent
Answer: (D)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 20, 2011 | Issues in Education
By now, the story of Nicole Imprescia, the mother currently suing York Avenue preschool for $19,000 has made its way around most of the major news outlets. It’s the sort of story about an over-the-top New York City parent hell-bent on getting her offspring into an “elite” kindergarten that the media love to play up, primarily because Imprescia is such a perfect caricature of an uber-neurotic Manhattan parent. Imprescia’s conviction that her daughter’s presumable failure to ace the ERB will ultimately bar her from the Ivy League is both utterly hilarious and profoundly sad; unfortunately, it’s also shared to some degree by quite a few other parents trying to navigate the city’s private school admissions maze.
So in case you’re currently trying to get your child into a Manhattan pre-school, kindergarten, etc., you may want to consider the following from someone who deals with students on the other end of the process, after they’ve spent ten or twelve years in the New York City private school system.
First, there is no such thing as an automatic ticket. Plenty of children admitted to so-called “top-tier” schools as kindergartners are counseled out before high school, and many of the students who enter in ninth grade are the ones ultimately admitted to top universities. Furthermore, the ones who do stay are often burnt out by the time they get to tenth or eleventh grade and display little interest in learning for its own sake. They also, on occasion, display alarming deficits in basic skills (such as writing logical, grammatically correct sentences). $40,000 a year may buy some connections, but it doesn’t guarantee an education.
Furthermore, a student’s individual accomplishments are ultimately far, far more important than the name of the high school itself. While a solid student with borderline SATs at a top private school will undoubtedly benefit from a guidance counselor willing to lobby for him or her, it probably won’t do much good at the very top schools. It might help at Colgate or Trinity or GW, but Yale won’t blink before rejecting that application (at least if your last name isn’t Bush). Given that top universities rarely accept all of the students who apply from a particular school, especially if there are twenty-five applicants, the ones who do get in tend to be the ones who are hooked in some way. On the other hand, a straight-A student at a less prestigious school who takes the most rigorous classes, pursues what he or she loves, has truly competitive (2300+) test scores, and clearly has something special to offer stands a much higher chance of admission.
Please don’t get me wrong: I’ve worked with some students from “top tier” school who were absolutely delightful — curious, enthusiastic, and thoroughly un-neurotic. But I’ve also seen some sixteen year-olds driven half insane by parental pressure and both dazed by and resentful of the fact that their “elite” education did not automatically translate into top standardized test scores.
So please, think long and hard about what’s best for your child right now. There’s no way to predict what a four year-old will be like thirteen years down the line. If anything good comes out of Nicole Imprescia’s whole laughable mess of a lawsuit, I hope that it is Imprescia’s realization, even to a tiny degree, that children are not so easily programmed to become what their parents want them to be. For her daughter’s sake, I hope that understanding comes sooner rather than later. And if not, I wish her the best of luck in finding an SAT tutor.
