by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 17, 2015 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog
Much as I’ve tried to cut back on tutoring to work on my seemingly endless SAT book revisions, I somehow haven’t been able to escape entirely. In fact, I somehow ended up with no fewer than five (!) students taking the ACT this Saturday. It’s therefore entirely unsurprising that I’ve had the same set of conversations repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. (It’s also entirely unsurprising that I can no longer remember which conversation I’ve had with whom and am therefore reduced to constantly asking the student in front of me whether we’ve already discussed a particular rule, or whether I actually gave the explanation to someone. Although actually I’ve been doing that for a while now.)
Perhaps not unexpectedly at this point in the year, almost all of my students were “second rounders” — people who had worked with other tutors, for months in some cases, before finding their way to me. And that meant that there was the inevitable psychological baggage that accumulates when someone has already taken the test a couple of times without reaching their goals. As a result, I’ve been paying just as much attention to how people work through the test. When I work with a student who actually does have most of the skills they need but can’t quite seem to apply them when it counts, that’s basically a given.
It’s interesting — I’ve never really bought into a lot of the whole “test anxiety” thing, but more and more, I find myself dealing with the psychological aspects of test taking. (But rest assured, I don’t talk about scented candles or relaxation exercises).
Anyway, over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself paying an awful lot of attention to just what people who are scoring in the mid-20s on ACT English and trying to get to 30+ do when they sit down with a test. I’m pretty good at managing the psychological games that people play with themselves, particularly when they involve second-guessing, but I’ve never spent so much time thinking about those games specifically in terms of ACT English before.
Well, there’s a first time for everything.
If there’s one salient feature that characterizes the ACT English test, it’s probably the straightforward, almost folksy Midwestern style. There’s an occasional question that really makes you think, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. A lot of wrong answers are really wrong, almost to the point of absurdity.
As I worked with my ACT students, I noticed something interesting: when the original version of a sentence (that is, the version in the passage) didn’t make sense, the student would get confused and reread the sentence or section of the passage again. And when they still didn’t understand, they’d reread it again. And sometimes a third time.
The issue wasn’t so much that they were running out of time, but rather that they were wasting huge amounts of energy trying to make sense of things that couldn’t be made sense out of because they thought they were missing something. Then they were getting confused and panicking and second-guessing themselves.
So although it might sound obvious, I think this bears saying: if you are working through an ACT English section and find that you just cannot make sense out of a phrase or sentence in the passage, that version of the phrase or sentence is wrong. Do not try to wrap your head around it by reading it again and again. You can’t make sense out of it because it doesn’t make sense. In other words, it’s not you — it’s the test.
Even if you don’t know what the right answer is, you do know what the answer is not: NO CHANGE. Pick up your pencil, put a line through A or F, and start plugging in the other options.
You might not know quite what you’re looking for, but at least that way you’re doing something constructive, not just freaking yourself out.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 20, 2015 | Blog
Over the last few weeks, I’ve started to get inquiries about when I’ll be releasing my new books for the redesigned (P)SAT. Most likely, the final versions will not be ready until sometime this summer; however, I will do my best to make beta versions available in the late spring, probably May.
The books that will be revised are as follows:
- The Ultimate Guide to SAT® Grammar
- The Ultimate Guide to SAT® Grammar Workbook, most likely with eight complete Writing tests
- The Critical Reader
Unfortunately, the College Board has been extremely slow to release materials for the new exam. While I have begun revisions based on the limited sample questions they have made available thus far, my primary concern — as always — is accuracy rather than speed or quantity, and there is simply no way for me to obtain a solid understanding of the new test’s nuances without having a number of exams to study closely.
Because the new Official Guide is not scheduled for release until the end of June, and I have no means of obtaining multiple full exams sooner — there is no way for me to create publishable materials before that time. In the meantime, however, I am using the information I do have to rewrite as much as I can, hopefully leaving me with only a handful of gaps to plug with then the Official Guide is released. There is of course a chance that I will need to obtain reprint rights for new passages, in which case the final version of the Reading book may be delayed.
I will continue to post updates as I get a better idea of when my new books will become available.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 25, 2015 | Blog, Tutoring
A couple of weeks ago, MarketWatch reporter Charles Passy contacted me about the process of doing SAT/ACT prep on a budget, and we had an impromptu and delightful conversation about the test-prep process and the changes it’s undergone over the last couple of decades. While I’m thrilled to see this site mentioned in his article as a source of free test prep, I also realize there wasn’t room for him to include much of what we discussed.
Hence this post.
(For the record, I know I’ve been away for a while, but I finally got started on trying to revise my SAT grammar book for the new test in 2016, and, well, let’s just say it’s been eating up a lot of my time…)
Anyway, my conversation with Mr. Passy certainly wasn’t the first one I’ve had about low-budge test prep, but during and after our conversation, a couple of things occurred to me. An awful lot of fuss gets made about the correlation between test scores and socio-economic status, and while I am in absolutely no way denying the very real and stark macro-level educational disparities that correlation reflects, I also think there are some nuances that often get missed. (I know, nuances get missed in the sound-bite/twitter-ized popular media — how difficult to imagine!)
The usual media story goes something like this: you hire a high-priced tutor, pay them some ungodly sum, the tutor teaches the kid some “tricks,” and wham! the kid’s score goes up a couple of hundred points.
That makes for a convenient narrative, but the truth is a little more complicated.
Now, to be fair, tutoring does occasionally work like that, but usually only for kids who were scoring pretty well in the first place. They just needed to hear someone say one or two things that would make it all click into place. They didn’t need help learning to identify prepositional phrases or main ideas, and they certainly didn’t stumble over the pronunciation of common words. Some of them could have ultimately have figured things out even without a tutor.
For all those kids who improve by huge amounts, there are others who dutifully go to tutoring week in and week out, sometimes for months on end, and come out barely better (or worse) than they were at the start — even with a very competent tutor, a category that I would like to think includes moi.
“More tutoring is always better, right?” a parent wrote to me in an email recently, nervous about what she could afford. Well, no actually. Sometimes more is not better. Sometimes more is worse. Sometimes more backfires, and the kid just wants to be left alone. Sometimes the kid doesn’t really make that much of an effort. Sometimes the kid has so many holes in their foundational knowledge that they can’t get to a point where they can integrate and apply new knowledge under pressure, on the fly. It all depends on where the student is starting from, where they want to get to, and how much they’re willing to put in. And so on.
When it comes to standardized test scores and income, people tend to assume that the correlation is invariably linear, up to the highest levels: that is, a student from a family earning $250,000/year will automatically score better than a student from a family scoring $100,000/year, who will in turn always score better than a student from a family earning $75,000/year, and so on. Reasonably, they therefore assume that a student from a family earning, say $5 million/year is pretty much guaranteed to reach the highest echelons of SAT or ACT score-dom, and one from a family at the tip-top of the 1% is pretty much guaranteed a perfect score.
Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of my personal experience.
Almost all of my weakest students have come from the most well-off families. And by “well off,” I mean Upper East Side townhouse/penthouse/house in the Hamptons wealthy. Some of them had been tutored in every subject, for years. Not coincidentally, they tended to have a lot of gadgets but not many books. Often their vocabularies were staggeringly weak. Staggeringly. As in, you would probably not believe me if I told you the words they didn’t know. They were so used to being spoon-fed that they simply did not know how to figure things out on their own, and there were no real stakes for them. They’d continue to be equally privileged whether they attended Muhlenberg or NYU.
My relatively strong students have tended to be from well-off but not extraordinarily wealthy families. They had houses and nice things and vacations, but they also had some exposure to the world of ideas. Often they were willing to put in a moderate amount of work, but they lacked a realistic conception of effort relative to payoff.
My strongest students have been from from families that truly valued learning. Regardless of how much money they had, they were willing to spend on education (though granted none of them could be called poor). A number of them were from immigrant families, and some did not learn English until relatively late. But they were willing to accept that they didn’t know everything already, and they worked hard.
Then there are the kids who can’t afford tutoring at all — or who don’t want their parents to shell out for tutors — who simply buy my books, sit down with them diligently for a couple of months, and get perfect or near-perfect scores. I know they exist because they sometimes send me emails thanking me. Those emails make my day.
These kids are the ones that gets overlooked in all the discussions about scores and socio-economic status. Some of them do spend hours combing this site and PWN the SAT and Erik the Red and College Confidential tracking down the answer to every last Blue Book question and pull their scores into the stratosphere. Yes, they are comparatively few, but they exist, and sometimes they actually learn a lot in the process.
Don’t their accomplishments deserve some recognition too?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 8, 2014 | Blog, General Tips
Here are some things to consider:
- Are you going back to the passage after you get down to those two answers? If so, are you looking for key transitions/punctuation marks/ explanations, etc. or are you just aimlessly rereading without a clear idea of what you’re looking for?
- Do you ever start/stop reading halfway through a sentence? If so, make sure you back up to the beginning of the sentence or keep reading until the end; otherwise, you’re likely to miss important info.
- Do you confine yourself to the lines you’re given in the question, or do you read a little before/after as well? Or, conversely, do you read too far ahead and lose sight of the what the lines referenced actually say. Function questions often require information in the sentence or two before the line reference; other question types can usually be answered from the lines given.
- Do you consider whether the answer you’re choosing makes logical sense in the real world? (e.g. an answer stating that no scientific advances have recently been made is simply at odds with reality).
- Do you work from the more specific answer and check whether it is directly supported by the passage?
- Does one of the answer choices contain a synonym or synonyms for a key word in the passage? It’s probably right. Correct answer rephrase the passage. If an answer uses words verbatim from the passage, it’s probably wrong.
- Do you ever pick answers that are too extreme, or that are beyond the scope of what can be determined from the passage? (e.g. the passage talks about one painter and the passage refers to painters in general.)
- Pay careful attention to the topic of the passage — the correct answer will often refer to it, either by name or rephrased in a more general fashion (e.g. Frederick Douglass = an individual). Incorrect answers often refer to things that the passage mentions but that are not its main focus.
- Do you try to answer questions in your own words before you look at the answers, or do you rely only on the answer choices? This technique is not about trying to get ETS’s exact wording — it’s about anticipating what sort of information will be present in the correct answer so that you don’t get distracted by plausible-sounding wrong answers.
- If you are answering questions in your own words, keep in mind that you’re looking for the idea you’ve come up with. The actual phrasing might be very, very different from what you’re expecting, and may be written in a form you don’t immediately connect to what you’ve said. Part of what makes the SAT so challenging is the fact that you can’t always anticipate the angle that a correct answer will come from. Some questions can be answered correctly in multiple ways, but the correct answer that appears on the test will not always be the most obvious correct answer.
- Do you read too far into the questions and start to impose an interpretation or make assumptions that the passage does not directly suggest? You need to read literally, not speculate about what the author could be saying.
- Do you avoid choosing answers simply because they’re confusing? Whether an answer makes sense to you has no effect on whether it’s right or wrong.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 10, 2014 | Blog, General Tips
I usually try to avoid clichés. Really, I do. I honestly don’t recall whether I ever had a penchant for them, but any tendency toward employing them in my writing was thoroughly beaten out of my by my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Gutmann (who unfortunately, it must be said, failed to make much of an impression on me otherwise).
That said, there are times when nothing but a cliché sums up a particular idea just right, the title of this post being a prime example. (I also happen to like the alliteration). It’s a phrase I find myself uttering repeatedly when I tutor. It’s important for people working at pretty much any score level, but it’s especially relevant to those in the higher range — assuming that you know how to do all, or nearly all, of the problems you’ll encounter, the details might be the only thing standing between you and your dream score. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 12, 2014 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
A couple of days ago, I posted about how reading the blurb before the passage can in some cases allow you to quickly eliminate multiple answer choices to a question — even before you’ve read the passage(s). (If you haven’t read that post, you should consider doing so before you going any further).
To refresh you, this blurb establishes that the Cold War is the topic of this Passage 1/Passage 2 pair:
The term “Cold War” refers to a period of confrontation from about 1945 to 1990 between the two global superpowers of that era, the United States and the Soviet Union (a collection of republics led by Russia). These passages are adapted from a book published in 1998.
Because the topic must almost certainly appear in the correct answer choice to the question below, you can start by eliminating (C) – (E), even in the absence of any additional information.
Both passages are concerned chiefly with
(A) the causes of the Cold War
(B) the aftermath of the Cold War
(C) European political ideologies
(D) Soviet leaders and policies
(E) the devastation of World War II
Since (A) and (B) mention the Cold War, they can stay.
Now, however, I want to talk about how to go about choosing between those two answers by reading only the beginning of Passage 1.
The blurb states that the book was from 1998, which was 18 years after the end of the Cold War. So the book could talk about the aftermath of the Cold War (post 1990) as well as its origins (1940s), although it’s worth keeping in mind that the SAT usually doesn’t like to get into history that’s too recent — there’s just too much potential for controversy.
So now we need to develop a slightly more nuanced (more specific) understanding of the topic.
At this point, you might think, “I can’t possibly answer that question now. I need to read both passages. By the time I finish reading them, I should have a pretty good idea what they’re about. Then I can go back and answer it.”
You could of course save the question until the end, reading though both passages first, but that would leave you an awful lot of room for confusion. If you have a tendency to get caught up in the details, you could mistake “mentions” for “is about.”
This reasoning also overlooks one important fact. Critical Reading questions are listed in chronological order of the passages. If a question appears first, you can probably answer it by reading the beginning of the first passage. Yes, the first passage only, even though the question appears to ask about both passage.
Here’s why: the question is telling you that both passages have the same focus. By definition, then, the focus of the first passage must be the focus of the second passage. Therefore, all you need to determine is the focus of the first passage.
Here again, you might think, “Ok, now I have to read the whole first passage. By the time I’m done, I should have a pretty good idea of what it’s talking about.” In which case you might again be right, but you’re also likely to make things a lot harder than necessary.
Remember: the point of an introduction is to tell you what the passage is going to be about, i.e. the topic. In most cases, including this one, you can determine the topic of the first passage just by reading the first few sentences.
The traditionalist school of historians dominated the American scholarly discussion of the Cold War during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Traditionalist scholars generally supported the basic thrust of American policy toward Russia, which was known as containment. These scholars blamed the Cold War on Soviet expansionism in Europe, which they saw as motivated by either communist ideology, traditional Russian great-power foreign policy goals, or, most often, a combination of the two.
There are two major things to notice here: first, it talks about the 1940s and ’50s. This is when the Cold War began, not when it ended. Second, the statement that scholars blamed the Cold War on Soviet Expansion directly implies that he is talking about its causes. That in turn points to (A), which is in fact correct.
If you want to check it out, you can scan — not read — both passages for dates. It just so happens that the only dates that appear in the passage involve the 1940s and ’50s, effectively eliminating (B). The Cold War ended in 1990, and any discussion of its aftermath would include dates from 1990 and after.
This is, incidentally, where the knowledge component comes into play: much as contemporary educational theory might malign the importance of “mere facts,” they are really quite useful in a case like this. If you have no actual idea of when the Cold War began or ended, it probably won’t occur to you to use dates in this way. Sure they’re staring you in the face, but they won’t really mean anything to you. It’s the equivalent of staring at a math formula while simultaneously trying to figure out when and how to apply it. It’s profoundly irrelevant that the information is given to you if you don’t have the tools to use it. The same is true here: a person who knows the basic chronology of the Cold War can glance over the passages and instantaneously comprehend that they’re focusing on its origins.
It’s also not a bad idea to know when some of the most important events of the 20th century occurred — events whose repercussions continue to exert an enormous influence on events today.
It’s called, you know, like, being educated.
