by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 6, 2013 | ACT Reading, Blog
This is a nifty little strategy I learned about five years ago, when I first started tutoring the ACT. It requires a tiny bit of time upfront, but it can pay off quite a bit. It’s also fairly easy to adapt to your interests and strengths.
Here it is:
As soon as you start Reading Comprehension section, quickly leaf through all four passages, and start with the one that seems easiest/most interesting. Then do the next most interesting, then the next, and save the least interesting/most difficult for last.
Yes, you will have to spend maybe 30 or 45 seconds initially figuring this out, but you don’t have to read a lot — you can usually tell from a sentence or two whether the passage is going to be reasonably ok or utterly impossible.
Working this way has a couple of major advantages:
1) Time
Easier passages tend to go more quickly, meaning that you’re less likely get behind on time from the start. You also don’t waste time on questions you might not get right, then get easier questions wrong toward the end because you’re running out of time and panicking.
2) Confidence
If you start out with something interesting, your level of engagement will be higher. You don’t start thinking “this sections sucks, I hate this, I’m never going to finish on time, I wish it were just over already” two minutes into the test, then miss easier things later because you’re discouraged. You’ll be more focused and more likely to know you’re answering things correctly, which will boost your confidence and make the rest of the section seem more manageable. If you get stuck in the last passage, well… it’s the last passage. You’ve already answered lots of questions correctly, so it won’t ruin you. You might get a 28 rather than a 30, but you probably won’t get a 23.
Know your strengths and weaknesses:
I find that most people taking the ACT tend to have pronounced strengths and weaknesses on the reading passages — those who are more math/science-oriented tend to find the Science and Social Science passages easier and more enjoyable, whereas people who are more humanities-oriented tend to prefer Prose Fiction and Humanities. And when people have a least favorite passage, it’s almost always either Prose Fiction or Science.
If this applies to you, you’re in luck because your decision is basically made for you. If you know that one type of passage always gives you trouble, don’t even it look at it initially; just save it for last. If you always find one passage relatively easy, just start with it. When you’re done, just look at the two remaining passages, and do whichever one you like better first.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 18, 2011 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
As I’ve said before, I’m generally suspicious when people claim to have timing issues on Critical Reading. While I certainly appreciate that some people read much faster than others and do work on timing when necessary, the time itself is almost never the real root of the problem. Upon doing a bit of probing, I typically discover one of two things:
1) The student has genuine comprehension issues, weak vocabulary skills, and rereads portions of a passage three or four times just trying to understand what’s literally being said. Ditto for the answer choices.
2) The student has solid comprehension skills but an incomplete understanding of what they’re looking for when they read the passages. Like the students in the first category, they tend to waste a lot of time staring at answer choices and trying to distinguish between them without really understanding how to relate them back to the passage. Equipped with some tools for understanding just what to look out for, however, they tend to get rid of their timing issues very quickly.
If you fall into category #2, this post is for you.
Part of the problem for people in this category often comes from not fully understanding what line references mean: if a question refers to “the historians in line 18,” that only means that the word “historians” appears in line 18 — not that the answer to the question is in line 18. The answer could be anywhere.
Usually, this type of misunderstanding plays out in the following way:
You encounter a question that says something like, “In lines 25-37, the author’s description of photo albums serves primarily to,” and so of course you go and read lines 25-37 because those are the lines that the question gave you.
But when you read lines 25-37 and then look at the answers, nothing seems to work. At that point, you start to wonder whether you were missing something.
There are a couple of answers that just totally don’t make sense, so you cross those off, but out of the two or three answers you have left, it seems any of them could work. So you go back and read lines 25-37 again, trying to match them to one of the answers. But it still seems terribly ambiguous.
At that point, you go back and start to read the lines again, only now you realize that you’re wasting an awful lot of time on the question and start to skim through without really knowing what you’re looking for.
Then you start to think, “well maybe if I interpret it this way, it could be (B).” The author must be trying to suggest it without really saying so directly. Yeah, that must be it. So you pick B and move on but still really aren’t sure. Your mind keeps going back to it as you work through the rest of the questions in for that passage, so your concentration is compromised, and you end up missing other things that you could have gotten right.
When this happens, there’s a really good chance that the answer was actually spelled out for you somewhere around line 23. Why? Because the question was asking you what purpose the lines served (i.e. what point did they support?), not what the lines themselves said, and usually the information necessary to determine that purpose is found before the lines themselves. In these cases, the lines are only important insofar as they relate to that point — for the purposes of answering the question, they’re virtually irrelevant.
Plenty of times, of course, it doesn’t work that way, and the answer can in fact be found in the given lines. The problems is that just as often they can’t, and you really have no way of knowing in advance which category a particular question will fall into before you actually look at the passage.
So if you’re a slow-ish reader and don’t want to waste time by always backing up and reading a sentence or two before, try this: read the lines you’re given, and see whether you can definitely answer the question from what you’ve read. Not, “well if I interpret it this way, (C) might kind of work,” but “the answer must be A because this passage says xyz.” If you can’t answer the question from those lines you’ve been given, there’s a good chance the answer isn’t there. And if it isn’t there, it has has to be located someplace else. Your job is to locate that someplace else: if it isn’t right before, it’s probably right after. It doesn’t matter if it takes a little more time to go back and read that extra bit; there’s essentially no other way to determine the answer, and you’ll be far worse served if you just keep looking at the lines given in the question. Just keep in mind that if your comprehension skills really are good, the problem is most likely not that you’ve overlooked something or didn’t interpret the lines in the way the SAT wanted you to. It’s just that the answer was probably never there in the first place.
by Erica L. Meltzer | 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 | 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.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 14, 2011 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the reasons that inference questions tend to be so difficult is that most people who take the SAT or ACT have never been exposed to basic formal logic (at least in a non-mathematical context) and consequently have no idea of the rules that the tests are playing by.
While reading is by nature considerably more subjective than math, the basic kinds of reasoning that govern the two sections are far more similar than what most people realize, and nowhere is this more apparent than on inference questions.
It is first of all necessary to distinguish between inference and speculation.
According that all-encompassing source of knowledge, Wikipedia, inference can be defined as “the act of drawing a conclusion by deductive reasoning from given facts.”
Speculation, on the other hand, can be defined as “a conjecture (guess), expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence.”
Most incorrect answers to inference questions fall into the realm of speculation; that is, they could be true based on the information in the passage, but usually we simply don’t have enough information to judge whether they are actually true. The correct answer is the one that can actually be deduced from the facts presented.
Now, for a given assertion, “If x, then y,” there are two valid inferences: one is the statement itself, and the other is the contrapositive: if not y, then not x.” So, for example, from the statement: “if a creature is a dog, then it is an animal,” we can make the valid inferences that:
1) A creature that is a dog is an animal (rephrasing of the statement)
2) All creatures that are dogs are animals (rephrasing of the statement)
3) if a creature is not an animal, then it is not a dog (contrapositive)
This is the essential basis for inference questions. The tests do not go so far as to deal directly with contrapositives, although using them can help on occasion. Most often, the correct answer to an inference question will quite simply be a rewriting of the of the original statement from a different angle.
For example, if a passage states that the mass of a red dwarf star is smaller than the mass of the sun, the correct answer to an inference question about that fact might be that the mass of a red dwarf star is not larger thanthe mass of the sun. Incorrect answers will simply be outside the bounds of that statement and involve speculation.
They might say things like, “Red dwarves have the smallest mass of any object in the solar system” or “It is more difficult to determine the mass of a red dwarf than it is to determine the mass of the sun.”
The key to dealing with these statements is to make sure that you are absolutely clear about what the statement in question actually says. Take a couple of seconds, make sure you understand it, and write it down in your own words, then look for the answer closest to that statement. It should be correct.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 10, 2011 | ACT Reading
Here’s a cautionary tale for those of you who don’t have trouble finishing ACT Reading on time.
One of my students who had been doing quite well (around a 30) on ACT Reading suddenly started to see his score drop down into the low 20s. I wasn’t hugely concerned; it was finals week, he was stressed and exhausted, and it was normal for him to be less focused.
Nevertheless, I asked him to do a passage while I watched, just so I could see how he was working through things. I didn’t time him, but after maybe four or five minutes, he got convinced that he was running so far behind that it would be impossible for him to recover.
When I looked at the wrong answers he was choosing, they all seemed to be of the “half-right half-wrong” variety. It occurred to me that he was freaking himself about time, then rushing and missing questions he would have gotten right had he just spent a little bit more time on them.
So I asked him to try an experiment: I would time him on a passage, but I also wanted him to completely forget about time — even go a bit more slowly than normal — and just work carefully. Not only did he did he finish with 45 seconds to spare, but he also got every single question right. He was shocked.
So the moral of the story is: don’t rush. Even if you feel like you’re running out of time, you might not actually be doing so. Perception is not necessarily reality. It’s more important to work carefully and not get through all the questions than to get through all of the questions and get a lot of them wrong.
The ACT Reading curve is huge. Huge. Even if you don’t get to finish the last couple of questions, you can still get a score well above 30. You’re better off leaving a few questions blank and ending up with a 32 than you are trying to answer everything in pursuit of a 36 and ending up with a 28.
