by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 4, 2013 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
I spend a lot of time teaching people to stop looking so hard at the details. Not that details are so bad in and of themselves — it’s just that they’re not always terribly relevant. There’s a somewhat infamous SAT Critical Reading passage that deals with the qualities that make for a good physicist, and since the majority of high school students don’t have particularly positive associations with that subject, most of them by extension tend to dislike the passage.
The remarkable thing is, though, that the point of the passage is essentially the point of the SAT: the mark of a good physicist is the ability to abstract out all irrelevant information.
Likewise, the mark of a good SAT-taker is the ability to abstract out all unimportant information and focus on what’s actually being asked.
One of the things that people tend to forget is that the SAT is an exam about the big picture — for Writing as well as Reading.
I say this because very often smart, detail-oriented students have a tendency to worry about every single thing that sounds even remotely odd or incomprehensible, all the while missing something major that’s staring them in the face. Frequently, they blame this on the fact that they’ve been taught in school to read closely and pay attention to all the details (and because they can’t imagine that their teachers could be wrong, they conclude that the SAT is a “stupid” test).
Well, I have some news: not all books are the kind you read in English class, and different kinds of texts and situations call for different kinds of reading. When find yourself in college social sciences class with a 300 page reading assignment that you have two days to get through, you won’t have time to annotate every last detail — nor will your professors expect you to do so. Your job will be to get the big picture and perhaps focus on one or two areas that you find particularly interesting so that you can show up with something intelligent to say.
But back to the SAT.
On CR, it’s fairly common for people to simply grind to a halt in passage when they encounter an unfamiliar turn of phrase. For example, most people aren’t quite accustomed to hearing the word “abstract” used as a verb: the ones who ignore that fact and draw a logical conclusion about its meaning from the context are generally fine. The other ones, the ones who can’t get past the fact that “abstract” is being used in a way they haven’t seen before, tend to run into trouble. They read it and realize they haven’t quite understood it. So they go back and read it again. They still don’t quite get it, so they reread it yet again. And before they know it, they’ve wasted two or three minutes just reading the same five lines over and over again.
Then they run out of time and can’t answer all of the questions.
The problem is that ETS will always deliberately choose passages containing bits that aren’t completely clear — that’s part of the test. The goal is to see whether you can figure out their meaning from the general context of the passage; you’re not really expected to get every word, especially not the first time around. The trick is to train yourself to ignore things that are initially confusing and move on to parts that you do understand. If you get a question about something you’re not sure of, you can always skip over it, but you should never get hung up on something you don’t know at the expense of something you can understand easily. If you really get the gist, you can figure a lot of other things out, whereas if you focus on one little detail, you’ll get . . . one little detail.
The question of relevant vs. irrelevant plays out a lot more subtly in the Writing section, where people often aren’t quite sure just what it is they’re supposed to be looking for, especially when it comes to Error-IDs. As a result, they want to understand the rule behind every underlined word and phrase, regardless of whether it’s something that’s really relevant. And because about 95% of the rules tested are predictable and fixed from one test to the next, a lot of the time the correct answers aren’t terribly relevant. Worrying about every little rule makes the grammar being tested appear much more complex than it actually is.
The reality is that if you only look for errors involving subject verb agreement, pronoun agreement, verb tense/form, parallel structure, logical relationships and comparisons, prepositions, and adjectives and adverbs, you’re going to get most of the questions right. And if an error involving one of those concepts doesn’t appear, there’s a very good chance that there’s no error at all. Thinking like that is a lot more effective than worrying about why it’s just as correct to say “though interesting, the lecture was also very long” as it is to say, “though it was interesting, the lecture was also very long.”
I’m not denying that understanding why both forms are correct is interesting or ultimately useful. I’m simply saying that if you have a limited amount of time and energy, you’re better served by zeroing in on what you really need to know.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 4, 2013 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The distance between a high CR score and a truly outstanding one rarely runs along a linear path. Unlike Math and Writing, which are essentially based on a number of fixed rules and formulas and which can therefore be improved by the mastery of discrete concepts, Critical Reading cannot necessarily be improved by memorizing a few more rhetorical terms or vocabulary words. On the contrary, for someone stuck in the high 600s/low 700s on CR, raising that score into the 750+ range frequently involves completely rethinking their approach.
Given two students with identical solid comprehension skills and 650-ish scores at the beginning of junior year, the one who is willing to try to understand exactly how the SAT is asking them to think and adapt to that requirement will see rapid and dramatic improvement (often 100+ points). The other one will flounder, maybe raising their score 30 of 50 points, but probably not much higher. Occasionally, their score won’t budge at all or will even drop. They’ll get stuck and get frustrated because they just know that they deserve that 750+ score, but the one thing they will absolutely not do is change their approach. And by change their approach I mean assume that their ability to recognize correct answers without thoroughly working through the questions is considerably weaker than they imagine it to be. In other words, they have to take a step back and assume that they know a lot less than they actually do.
Let me explain: one of the things I continually find fascinating is that people can spout on for extended periods of time about the supposed “trickiness” of the SAT, yet when it comes down to it, they won’t actually take concrete steps to prevent themselves from falling for “trick” answers (i.e. answers that contain mistakes someone who is rushing or can’t bothered to fully read the question would likely make).
The best way I know of to reduce the possibility of getting “tricked” is to actually attempt to answer the question before looking at the answers — or at least to determine the general idea that is probably contained in the right answer. Working this way, however, requires you to abandon the assumption that you’ll be able to spot the right answer when you see it, even if you’ve made no attempt to figure it out beforehand.
Now, in case you haven’t noticed, answers to SAT CR questions are deliberately worded in a confusing manner. Unless you really know what you’re looking for, things that aren’t necessarily the case may suddenly sound entirely plausible, and things that are true may sound utterly implausible. You need to approach the answers with that knowledge and consciously be on your guard before you even start to read them. But in order to do that, you need to be willing to admit a few things:
1) Your memory probably isn’t as good as you think it is
Just because you think you remember what the passage said doesn’t mean you actually remember what the passage said — at least not all the time. Even if you remember well enough almost all of the time, it only takes a handful of slips to get you down from 800 to 720. Throw in a missed vocab question or two on each section and bang, you’re back at 680. If you want to get around the memory issue, you need to write down every single step of your process. It doesn’t have to be neat or even legible to someone other than you, but it needs to be there for the times you don’t actually remember.
2) Your thought process probably isn’t as unique as you imagine it to be
The test-writers at ETS are not stupid, and they know exactly how the average eleventh grader thinks — questions and answers are tested out extensively before they show up on the real test, and the wrong answers are there because enough high-scoring students have chosen them enough times. Don’t assume you won’t do the same. I also say this because many of my students are astonished when I trace the precise reasoning that led them to the wrong answer — before they’ve told me anything about why they chose it. They were laboring under the illusion that their thought process was somehow distinct to them. It wasn’t.
3) Sometimes, there is no shortcut
That’s a little secret that most people in the test-prep industry would rather not admit. A lot of students who are accustomed to using common answer patterns (e.g. get rid of anything that’s too extreme) to get to around 650-700 are shocked to discover that this technique won’t get them any further and that they actually just have to understand pretty much everything. Sometimes spotting the “shortcut” also requires very advanced skills that even relatively high-scorers don’t possess. On CR, the ability to determine the function of a paragraph from a single transition in its first sentence is a highly effective shortcut, but it involves a level of sensitivity to phrasing that most sixteen year-olds — especially ones who don’t read non-stop — haven’t yet developed.
4) Getting a very top score is hard
There’s a reason that only about 300 people – out of 1.5 million – get perfect scores each year. If acing the test were just about learning the right “tricks,” there would be a lot more 2400s.
If you really want to get your score up to 750-800 range, you need to respect that the SAT is in fact difficult and that it is your job to conform to it, not the other way around. If you don’t understand why a particular answer is correct, stop before you jump to blame the test for not making it what you think it should be. It doesn’t matter that you take hard classes. It doesn’t matter that your AP English teacher thinks your essays are brilliant. There’s something in your process that went awry, and it’s your job to identify and fix it.
Reading this over, I realize that a lot of what I’ve written in this post may sound fairly harsh. But I also know from experience that overconfidence is one of the biggest problems that can hold you back from attaining the scores you’re capable of achieving. It’s hard — I’m not denying it — but if you can take a step back and start to admit that you might not know everything you think you do, you might just have a fighting chance at an 800.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 3, 2013 | Blog, Time Management
I recently posted about the necessity of learning to think quickly on the SAT, but lest you think I’m advocating rushing through the test at warp speed, I’d like to qualify that advice a bit. Learning to manage time on is not fundamentally about learning to do everything quickly but rather about learning which things can be done quickly and which must be done slowly.
When I go over Critical Reading material with my students and they ask me to explain a question they had difficulty with, one of the things I always point out to them as I read the question out loud is how slowly I move through it. I actually take a fraction of a second to absorb each word and make sure that I’m processing it fully. Sometimes I rephrase it for myself two or three times out loud, in progressively simpler versions. If necessary, I write down the simplified version. The end result, while not excessively time-consuming, involves considerably more effort than what my students are likely to have put into understanding the question.
Usually by the second time I rephrase the question, however, my students start to get that oh-so-exquisite look of teenage boredom on their faces; I can almost see the little thought bubble reading “ok, fine, whatever, can she just get on with it already?” pop out from their heads. As I do my best to impress upon them, however, I’m not simply reading the question that slowly to torture them; I have to read it that way because if I don’t, I’m likely to miss something important. Sure, if I just breezed through it, I might get it right anyway, but I might also not — and I’m not taking any chances. The fact that I recognize my own potential for weakness and take steps to address it is, I also stress, one of the reasons I almost never get anything wrong. (Usually they just say “yeah” and roll their eyes.)
The other thing I stress, however, is that reading questions slowly will not create a timing problem for them if they’ve used their time to maximum efficiency elsewhere. If they haven’t lingered over words or answer choices whose meanings they’re really not sure of; if they haven’t stared off into space instead of taking active steps to distinguish between those last two answers, then they can afford to spend fifteen or twenty seconds making sure they’ve read every word of a question carefully. The whole point is that they have to adjust their approach to the particular task at hand. Flexibility is, I would argue, a key part of what the SAT tests, and building that flexibility is a key part of the preparation process. You can’t predict every guise that a particular concept will appear in — that’s part of what makes the SAT the SAT — but if you know how to resist getting sucked into things that confuse you, you’ll at least have some measure of control.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 27, 2013 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
If you look in the Official College Board Guide, 2nd edition (aka the Blue Book), you’ll see that the sample essays in the front of the book are written in response to a prompt that asks whether there is always a “however” (i.e. are there always two sides to every argument?)
It recently occurred to me that the College Board’s choice of that particular prompt for inclusion in the Official Guide was not an accident; on the contrary, it’s a sort of “clue” to the test, an inside joke if you will. And in classic College Board style, it’s laid bare, in plain sight, for everyone to see, thereby virtually guaranteeing that almost everyone will overlook it completely.
Let me back up a bit. When I took the SAT in high school, one of the Critical Reading strategies I devised for myself was, whenever necessary, to write a quick summary of the argument of that the author of a passage was both for and against. So if, for example, a question asked how a particular author would be likely to view the “advocates” of a particular idea (let’s say string theory, just for grins), I would write something like this:
Author: ST = AMAZING! (string theory is amazing)
Advocates: ST = WRONG! (string theory is wrong)
Therefore, author disagrees w/advocates, answer = smthg bad
It never struck as anything but utterly logical to keep track of the various arguments that way. As a matter of fact, I took the process of identifying and summarizing various points of view so much for granted that it never really occurred to me that keeping track of all those different points of view was actually was more of less the point of the test. Of course I knew it at some level, but not in a way that led me to address it quite so explicitly as a tutor. I assumed that it was sufficient to tell my students that they needed to keep track of the various points of view; not until about a year ago did it truly dawn on me that my students couldn’t keep track of those points of view. They were having trouble with things like main point because they couldn’t distinguish between authors’ opinion and “other people’s” opinions, and therefore I needed to explain some very basic things upfront:
1) Many SAT passages contain more than one point of view.
2) The fact that an author discusses an idea does not necessarily mean that the author agrees with that idea.
3) Passages contain more than one point of view because authors who write for adults often spend a lot of time “conversing” with people — sometimes imaginary people — who hold opposing opinions. Authors are essentially writing in response to those “other people.”
4) There are specific words and phrases that a reader can use to identify when an author is talking about his or her own ideas vs. someone else’s ideas.
5) The fact that authors discuss other people’s ideas does not make them “ambivalent” or mean that they do not have ideas of their own.
6) It is also possible for authors to agree with part of someone else’s idea and disagree with other parts. Again, this does not mean that the author is ambivalent.
In other words, there’s always a “however,” and if the author of Passage 1 doesn’t give it to you, the author of Passage 2 almost certainly will.
Not surprisingly, I have Catherine Johnson to thank for this realization. A while back, she posted an excerpt from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s book, They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing on her blog, and reading it was a revelation for me. I’d already touched on “they say/I say” model in a very old post (SAT Passages and “Deep Structure”), but Graff and Birkenstein’s book explained the concept in a far more direct, detailed, and explicit manner. It also took absolutely nothing about students’ knowledge for granted.
I’d already written a first draft of The Critical Reader at that point, but when I read that excerpt, something clicked and I thought, “that’s it — that’s actually the point of Critical Reading. THAT’S what the College Board is trying to get at.” To be sure, Critical Reading tests a number of other things, but I think that this is one of the most — if not the most — important. If you understand the strategies that authors use to suggest agreement and disagreement with arguments, you can sometimes understand almost everything about a passage — it’s content, its structure, its themes — just from reading a few key lines. “They Say/I Say” provided me with the thread that bound the book together. It also provided the very important link between reading on the SAT and reading in the real world (or at least in college) — a link that some critics of the SAT (!) insist rather stridently does not exist.
Then, in a colossal “duh” moment a couple of days ago, it occurred to me that the point of the quote before the essay prompt is to provide students with the option of using the “they say/I say” format in their essays (if they so wish) — it’s just that the students have so little experience with that format (if they even know it exists) that it never even occurs to them to use it!
Just how little experience students have with it became clear, incidentally, when I was working with students on the synthesis essay for the AP French exam. As is the case for AP Comp, students are given three sources and expected to compose a thesis-driven essay, integrating the sources into their writing. There’s no way to earn a high score without using all of the sources, and since the sources cover all sides of the argument (pro, contra, neutral), at least one source will contradict the student’s position. So basically, the point of the exercise is to force them to integrate opposing viewpoints into their writing.
As I discussed the essay with my students, however, I made two intriguing discoveries:
1) They did not really understand that the essay was thesis-driven and that it was ok for them to express their own opinions.
They equated having to include multiple side of an argument with not having an opinion. They were stunned — and relieved — to discover that it was ok for them to actually write what they thought instead of simply summarizing what all the various sources said. Incidentally, their teacher had told them that more than once, but I think the concept was too foreign for them to fully grasp.
2) They did not know how to integrate other people’s words and ideas into their own arguments in anything resembling a fluid manner.
Instead of writing things like “As Sorbonne Professor Jean-Pierre Fourrier convincingly argued in a May 2009 article that appeared in Le Monde, the encroachment of English into the French language is nothing new,” they would write something like this: “Jean-Pierre Fourrier, a professor at the Sorbonne, says ‘the encroachment of English into the French language is nothing new’ (Source 1).”
When I showed one of students (a very smart girl and a strong writer) how to do the former, she was thrown off guard. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know that.” “Of course you didn’t know that,” I said matter-of-factly. “No one taught you how to do it. So I’m teaching you now.”
That was another lightbulb moment for me. The thought had drifted across my consciousness before, but it hadn’t quite pushed its way to the surface. Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Students who haven’t been taught how to make use of certain strategies explicitly in their own writing are therefore unlikely to recognize those strategies in other people’s writing. Ergo, when an author interweaves his or her opinions with someone else’s opinions in the same passage or paragraph, sometimes even in the same sentence, students have limited means of distinguishing between the two points of view.
I think that this is something that should be covered very explicitly and thoroughly in AP Comp class, but something tells me that it isn’t. I certainly didn’t learn it in high school; instead, I picked it up in college by reading lots of academic articles and simply copying what professional scholars did.
So what’s the solution? It is in part, I think, They Say/I Say — or something like it (note the very subtle plug for The Critical Reder here;). I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again: the only way to prepare for a college-level test is to read things meant for college students, which They Say/I Say certainly is. So if you’re taking the SAT next Saturday and are reading this in the hopes of picking up some last-minute miracle tips for Critical Reading, here’s my advice: read Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff’s introduction to They Say/I Say. It won’t give you any SAT-specific “tricks,” but it will explain to you clearly and bluntly, just what it is that most of the writing you’ll encounter on the SAT is trying to accomplish. Even if it doesn’t solve all your problems, but it might demystify the test a bit and make Critical Reading seem a little less weird.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 18, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Occasionally I inadvertently find myself in the crossfire between what teachers think students know and what students actually know. From this peculiar vantage point, I’m often struck by the way the assumptions on both sides fail to line up — high school teachers often take for granted that their students can “connect the dots” on their own, and high school students assume their teachers know that they need everything explained very explicitly. What looks from one side like teachers failing to teach important information, and from the other side like students being lazy or clueless, is actually a classic case of faulty assumptions.
Let me explain.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wrapped up in AP French prep. The AP exam was revised last year ago to include a “synthesis” essay that requires students to read an article, interpret a graph, and listen to an audio clip, then write a thesis-driven essay (all in French) about a given question (e.g. “Should the French language be protected from English?”).
One of the sources always takes the “pro” side, one the “con,” and one is neutral. The audio is usually the most intimidating source because it involves authentic French spoken quickly by a native speaker, and it’s almost impossible for someone who hasn’t lived in a francophone environment to pick up on the nuances. Most kids are just flipped out about whether they’ll be able to figure out what’s going on.
Here’s the thing, though: it’s pretty easy to figure out what sides the article and the graph are taking, and they’re always presented before the audio. So by default, the audio has to take the side that the other two haven’t. Logically, a person can determine the point of the audio before they even begin listening to it.
Incidentally, I didn’t realize this until I had to calm down a panicked junior who was terrified she wasn’t even going to be able to figure out which side the audio was taking. When I inquired about the order in which the sources were presented and she told me that the audio was always last, I realized that she could deduce the position the speaker would take before she even listened to it. When I told her that… let’s just say that it was a proverbial lightbulb moment.
Now this is where it gets interesting: her teacher is a good friend of mine, and I mentioned the exchange to her. Now, for the record, my friend is a fabulous teacher with a 100% pass rate on the French AP — a major feat in a huge NYC public school (albeit a very selective one). She’s nothing if not clear. But somehow it had never occurred to her that her students needed to be told explicitly that the audio was taking the position that the other two weren’t. It just seemed too obvious. But after I told her about the student’s realization, she made a point of mentioning it in class.
The next time I saw my student, she proudly announced that Madame had taught the class the “trick” she’d learned from me the previous week. “But,” she sniffed indignantly, “she really should have told us that before.”
That moment threw into sharp relief everything I’ve been thinking about recently. I’m increasingly aware of the disconnects between what teachers and teachers think teenagers know vs. what teenagers actually know, and of the fact that high school students, given 2 + 2, won’t necessarily think to put them together to make 4.
More recently, I was explaining to a friend (a Ph.D. in Classics with years of teaching experience) that my students often have trouble figuring out when an author is discussing their own ideas vs. someone else’s ideas, and she asked me to repeat the statement because she found it so astonishing. She couldn’t even conceive of that a person could have such a problem, never mind the fact that I could be so matter-of-fact about it.
I don’t have any grand solutions for any of this. I do know that I approach the SAT with fewer and fewer assumptions about what people actually know (although every now and then I still get thrown — how exactly can someone make it through life without knowing the meaning of “permanent”?).
I know, for example, that a kid scoring 700 might not consistently be able to identify the topics of SAT passages.
I know that even kids scoring above 700 often have significant trouble figuring out what an author believes when that author spends time considering opposing points of view.
I know that kids often have trouble with tone because they can’t draw a relationship between how the words appear on the page and how the sound. I also know that sometimes they can’t sound out words in the first place because they were never taught phonics.
In short, I’ve learned to start from zero. Better for me to be pleasantly surprised than the contrary.
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.
