by Erica L. Meltzer | May 28, 2012 | Blog, The Mental Game
Occasionally I’ll be working through a section — usually a Reading section — with a student, and I’ll come across a question that just makes my head spin. Usually it’s an “all of the following EXCEPT” or a “which of the following would most undermine the author’s assertion that…” or a “which of the following is most analogous to the situation in lines 35-47?”
At that point, I generally turn to my student and declare that I just can’t deal with it right then. We’re moving on. I don’t care if my student wants to try it. I don’t want to end up with smoke pouring metaphorically out of my ears, which is frankly what will happen if I try to muddle through. Either that, or I’ll sit and stare at it uncomprehendingly for about five minutes, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be seeing and not quite managing to make logical sense out of the letters on the page.
In other words, exactly the same thing that happens to most of my students when they look at a question like that. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2012 | ACT English/SAT Writing, Blog
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/the-most-comma-mistakes/?hp
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
I realize that this post might seem like a bit of a contradiction, given my railing against the dumbing down of AP exams (or at least AP Comp) in my previous post, but even assuming that some of the exams are easier than they were, say, ten or fifteen years ago, they’re still not all that easy.
The more time I spend tutoring AP exams — or, should I say, the more time I spend tutoring people who are seriously underprepared for AP exams — the more I wonder why everyone (read: the College Board) is so obsessed with promoting AP exams, and worse, why schools are being ranked according to a formula that weights the number of AP exams taken by students more heavily than the students’ actual grades on those exams.
Part of the answer is of course economic: at $87 a pop, those exams are a virtual gold-mine. Sure there a fee-waivers, but most of the kids taking those tests in the first place are middle- to upper-middle class. The number of kids who get granted waivers is minuscule in proportion. Furthermore, the College Board does not pay outside proctors to administer the exams. Teachers themselves are responsible for administering them during school hours (and for dealing with all the ensuing hassles). The College Board sits back, does nothing, and collects the cash. It’s a pretty good deal.
On a less cynical note, I understand the argument that students achieve at a higher level just by being exposed to AP-level material, even if they don’t achieve passing grades, but unfortunately, that’s not what I observe. What I do observe is kids who don’t yet possess the necessary intellectual maturity being forced to cram huge amounts of information down their throats and regurgitate it back without any true understanding or ability to analyze it, then forgetting it the instant the exam is over.
I would go so far as to argue that sometimes they actually learn less in some AP classes than they would in a regular class. Just sticking the “AP” level on a class does not mean that it’s anything of the sort, and simply taking an AP class does not indicate that someone is even remotely ready to do college-level work. When a student who’s taken a year of “AP English” at a top-ranked public school tells you that she’s not really sure what rhetoric is, that’s not a good sign. One sophomore who told me she was praying for a 2 (!) on the AP World History exam told me that more than anything, she was sorry that she hadn’t learned anything the entire year. Her review sheets consisted of pages and pages of terms and definitions, grouped by very general era but otherwise entirely unrelated — not exactly an ideal way to achieve a coherent understanding of anything.
Yes, I understand that presenting a couple of personal anecdotes does not a comprehensive critique make, but at this point I’ve spent enough time with drilling basics that should be a given for an AP student, not to mention encountering students (over and over again) who just don’t have enough academic experience or cultural context to really understand what they’re being asked, to wonder how beneficial the push for everyone to take AP classes is.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not trying to suggest that the program doesn’t have a good deal of merit when students are genuinely prepared to tackle the work, and when their teachers are not pressured by their administrations too spend all their time on test-prep. But fifteen year-olds are, well, fifteen, not eighteen or nineteen, and that in the long run, they’ll be better served by mastering the fundamentals of English and History and everything else before they try to tackle more advanced work. Presumably, that’s the whole point of high school.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 5, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
I tutored an awful lot of AP comp this year… Somehow, I didn’t quite realize that the exam had been tweaked since I took it in 1999. Although I’ve tutored it before, I think I blocked out the actual experience of taking the exam as soon as it was over, and so I was mildly taken aback when one of my students mentioned how incredibly glad he was that it no longer included anything like the Susan Sontag prompt from 2001 (third question). Granted the 2001 question is very difficult, even by AP standards, but it’s still closer to what I remember (click here to see the 1999 questions from the test I took).
Here, by way of comparison, is the 2012 test (see the third question): the open-ended quote has now been replaced by the presumably more “relevant” synthesis essay.
I was under the mistaken impression that AP exams are intended to test college-level skills. I think it’s fair to say that 2001 fulfills that requirement; 2012 I’m not so sure about.
Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the incoming president of the College Board and champion of the AP program, is concerned about why so many students are unable to achieve passing grades on AP exams.
The obvious solution? Make the exams easier, of course!
That way everyone wins: the College Board can extol the virtues of the Common Core and its curriculum reforms program, and no one ever has to confront the fact that kids aren’t actually learning anything of substance because they’re spending all their time prepping for standardized tests. And since the kids will be totally lacking in critical thinking skills, it won’t occur to them to protest the watered-down excuse for an education they’re being served.
After all, who really cares about Sophocles and the dangers of pride when there’s the United States Post Office to worry about?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 29, 2012 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Pretty much everyone agrees that SAT passages can be boring. Really boring. They’re like the literary equivalent of your physics teacher droning on…and on…and on while you try your hardest not to turn fifth period into an inadvertent nap time.
I don’t draw this science analogy by accident: of all the types of passages on the SAT, science passages tend to score the lowest in terms of their engagement factor. They also tend to be written in a tone that’s considerably more neutral (or “objective” or “analytical”) than that found in other types of passages.
But just because the author writes in an objective tone does not mean that he/she is entirely neutral. That is, an author can use language that does not contain any strong wording and still clearly indicate that they believe that one idea or theory is right and that another one is wrong.The fact that they do not say I think or I believe and avoid using words like absolutely or conclusively in no way detracts from the fact that they are still expressing a point of view rather than simply rattling off an objective set of facts — and it’s your job to figure out, based on the passage alone, what that point of view or opinion is and why the author holds it.
The ability to distinguish between tone and point of view is crucial on the SAT; sometimes it’s even tested directly. (As a matter of fact, this post was inspired by an exchange that involved me convincing a student that the correct answer to a tone question could still be “impartial” even though the author of the passage had a distinct opinion).
Incidentally, this is a point that most of the major commercial test-prep books stumble over: though sometimes dense, their passages tend to be overly straightforward and factual. SAT passages are, for all intents and purposes, not just straightforward and factual, even if they do sometimes contain lots of facts.
Think of it this way: most English teachers forbid their students from using “I” in their papers. They typically justify this prohibition by arguing that everything you write is by definition your opinion (at least under normal circumstances), and besides, having to read a two dozen sentences that start with “I think” or “I believe” or “In my opinion” in the space of three pages would drive anyone crazy. SAT passages are based on the same principle.
So the next time you’re faced with a passage about, say, string theory (actually one of the SAT’s preferred topics), forget the details of the theory itself and focus on what the author thinks is important — or not important — about it. If you get a question that asks about a detail about it, you can always go back and reread, but the details shouldn’t be your main focus. Because guess what: if you know what the author thinks, you can probably figure out a lot of the questions just based on that knowledge. But if you’ve gotten caught up in trying to understand the details, you’ll probably get, well…not very far.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 8, 2012 | Blog, The Mental Game
If you read that title and thought, “well how could I possibly know what I don’t know — the whole point is that I don’t know it?” then let me explain that contradiction a little more fully.
People often don’t quite realize that the SAT is a reasoning test in more ways than one. The questions themselves are of course designed to test reasoning ability, but so is the construction of the entire test. That quarter-point penalty for wrong answers isn’t there by accident: it basically exists to make sure that people who like to guess but have no idea what they’re doing aren’t unduly rewarded for their audacity (that’s the non-mathy version — for those of you who want the statistics, look it up;) Various sources of course have various responses to this arrangement: guess if you can get rid of one answer. No, guess if you can get rid of two answers! And so on. (more…)
