by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 16, 2011 | Blog, Vocabulary
Let me make it clear that this post is in no way a suggestion that you should *not* study vocabulary for the SAT. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the more vocabulary you learn, the better off you’ll be — especially if your vocabulary isn’t all that strong to begin with.
That said, however, I also feel obligated to point out that the sentence-completion portion of the SAT isn’t just a straightforward vocabulary test. Yes some of the words are a bit on the esoteric side, but the more time I’ve spent tutoring, the more I’ve become aware that the test is deliberately set up so that someone with a fairly strong vocabulary and a reasonable knowledge of roots and prefixes can figure the answers out through a carefully reasoned process of elimination — even if that person doesn’t know what one or more of the words mean. In some ways, just knowing lots of definitions is less helpful than knowing how to figure things out.
I seriously don’t think that the College Board intends for people to spend huge amounts of time trying to memorize 5,000 words; that’s just not what the test is about. (If you’re not a native English speaker or come from a home where the primary language spoken is not English, that’s a little different, however.)
One of the things the SAT tests is the ability to make reasonable conjectures — that is, the ability to use the information you do have in order to figure out the information you don’t have, and to determine the correct answer through a careful process of elimination.
For example, one of the questions that my students routinely have trouble with is the following:
Orangutans are ——- apes: they typically conduct
most of their lives up in the trees of tropical rain forests.
(A) indigenous (B) transitory (C) recessive
(D) pliant (E) arboreal
The question is #5/8, and it’s usually a pretty safe bet that the average test-taker might not be 100% certain what (B), (D), and (E) mean. A lot of people tend to pick indigenous because they have a decent idea of what it means and have heard it used in the context of animals. The answer, though, is actually E, arboreal, a word that makes a lot of people screw up their faces and say, “How was I supposed to know what that meant?”
But here’s the thing: the College Board doesn’t really expect you to have memorized the word. It does, however, assume that you may have some basic knowledge of French or Spanish or Latin (given that most high school students take Spanish, this isn’t a terribly unfair assumption), all of which have words for tree (arbre, arbol, arbor) that are awfully similar to arboreal — and the sentence practically shouts at you that it’s talking about an animal that lives in trees. If you can make that connection, you’ll get the question no problem, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen the word arboreal before in your life. The ability to make that type of connection what the SAT is really testing.
Precisely the same logic applies to a word like “membranous,” often of late cited as the sort of “obscure” word the new SAT will no longer test. It’s true that it’s not a word that regularly gets thrown around in everyday conversation, but if you know what a membrane is (which should be the case for anyone who’s taken a halfway decent Biology class) and that adding “-ous” onto a noun turns it into an adjective, you’re pretty much set.
The SAT is also testing your knowledge of connotations. Another question that my students tend to have a terrible time with is this one:
Lewis Latimer’s inexpensive method of producing
carbon filaments ——- the nascent electric industry by
making electric lamps commercially ——-.
(A) cheapened…affordable
(B) transformed…viable
(C) revolutionized…prohibitive
(D) provoked…improbable
(E) stimulated…inaccessible
Most people can get it down to (A) and (B) pretty quickly by looking at the second side: prohibitive, improbable, and inaccessible are all negative, and the phrase inexpensive method suggests that Latimer did something positive.
The problem generally hinges on the word cheapened: most people assume that it simply means “made cheaper” and that it goes along with the idea that Latimer lamps were less expensive. The problem, though, is that to cheapen means not to make cheaper but rather to debase or to reduce the quality of. It is a decidedly negative word, but the sentence is suggesting that Latimer did something positive to the electric industry. The answer is therefore (B).
While this may look like a “trick” question, the reality is that it’s simply testing whether you understand that a word can have a connotation apart from the one it literally appears to denote. Using cheapen in a more neutral way in your own writing wouldn’t make that usage of it any more correct.
Now, words like cheapen are unlikely to show up on any “hard words” list; it simply wouldn’t occur to anyone that they could be made hard. And unfortunately, there really aren’t any surefire ways to study for them — other than reading a whole lot.
So what to do? Well, you do need to know the top few hundred “hard” words, ones like trite and laconic, equivocate, and ineffable, which show up a whole lot. But beyond that, it’s probably not worth it to sit and try to memorize the dictionary. You’re better off reading Dickens (admittedly, I’m not much of a fan of his, but he uses a ton of SAT-level vocabulary) or Jane Austen or Oliver Sacks or Foreign Policy, for that matter. And when you look at sentence completions, take a minute and really think about just what it is they’re asking for. Provided you have some basic tools, there’s a chance you can figure it out.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 13, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
When, in the course of going over a Writing section with a student, I mention the term “comma splice, I am almost inevitably met with something between a groan and an eye-roll. I can almost see a bubble with the words, “ok, enough already, will she please stop going on about the stupid comma-thingies already?” floating above their heads.
Unfortunately, though, it’s a point I feel compelled to belabor. Of all the grammatical concepts tested on the SAT, this is by far one of the most important.
I’m the first to admit that there are plenty of grammar rules tested on the SAT that you can get away with fudging in real life: if you use most rather than more when comparing only two things, there’s a pretty good chance no one’s going to call you on it.
Likewise, if you use a collective noun (team, jury, agency, university, organization, etc.) with a plural verb or pronoun, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will care — or probably even notice, for that matter. The College Board’s insistence that collective nouns be considered immutably singular is one of its quirks.
Not so for comma splices. In my experience, people who can’t always recognize when a comma is being used to separate two complete sentences tend to demonstrate the same problem in their own writing. And usually that indicates a larger problem: they don’t really know how to recognize a sentence.
Now, call me stodgy and old fashioned, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that high school students know what does and does not constitute a sentence by the time they graduate. Not be able to define it in grammatical terms or discourse about it at length, but simply to recognize when something is a complete, stand-alone statement.
Why? Well, in practical terms, let’s just say that you’ve probably been taking it more or less for granted that you don’t have to work terribly hard to follow my argument here. It’s pretty clear where the divisions between thoughts are.
But what if I were to write like this?
I dislike being the bearer of bad news but when people out there in the real world (employers) see writing (resumes and cover letters) that contains flagrant grammatical errors they won’t be particularly eager to hire you, as a matter of fact they probably won’t even be terribly eager to give you an interview. Surveys have shown that the number one skill employers think is missing from their new hires is: the ability to write well, this is particularly true for people with degrees in fields like business. If you’re lucky enough to get hired by company and can’t even write memos clearly you’re not going to win yourself any points, you’re also definitely not going to be first in line for a promotion.
Ok, so I threw in a few extra mistakes, but I think I’ve made my point. Reading writing that contains a lot of comma splices requires effort — it’s certainly comprehensible, but it’s also tiring and annoying to have to constantly figure out where one thought stops and the next starts. In the end, it has nothing to do with having to write about The Great Gatsby or The Declaration of Independence, and everything to do with making yourself understood.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 11, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
I’m writing this in response to the SAT Reading vs. Math post over at Kitchen Table Math. In case you don’t want to read the entire post, the gist of it was essentially that college tend to be more impressed by high Critical Reading scores than they are by high Math scores because SAT Reading scores essentially can’t be raised through tutored (although Catherine was nice enough to cite me as the exception to that rule!). So, as someone who spends a good deal of time on this purportedly impossible task, my response to the assertion that CR is somehow un-tutorable would be no and yes. Or rather, it depends.
Before I launch into my reasons, however, I’d like to say that tutoring CR is one of the hardest parts of my job. For starters, it’s completely exhausting — I spent about three-and-a-half hours one day this past weekend just doing CR (one of those hours was devoted *just* to working on how to determine a main point), and I had to go home and sleep afterward. Teaching CR ruins me for the day; it wears me out mentally so much that I often just have to wander around the city aimlessly for a few hours to recover.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy teaching it, and when I finally have a breakthrough with someone, it’s hugely rewarding. But it is hard. I think that this is because teaching CR– at least the way I do it — is not just about the SAT; it’s actually about teaching people to read closely (“Don’t tell me approximately what the author says. Look at the passage — no, look at the passage — and tell me exactly what the author is saying. Exactly as in word for word.”) and to draw relationships between specific words and their functions or the more abstract categories they represent (“Yes, the passage talks specifically about women artists, but the fact that they’re referred to as a group of individuals in the answer choice doesn’t mean you should eliminate it. Think about whom that phrase is referring to”). A few of my students see these relationships naturally. Most do not. Some lack the decoding skills to even begin to draw these relationships, but the majority fall some somewhere in between.
But back to the original question: when it tutoring effective for raising a CR score, and when is it not?
My first response would be, “define raise.” Are we talking 50 points? 100 points? 200 points? Most people will get something out of high-quality tutoring, but it’s probably unrealistic to expect someone with a 550 to try for an 800 — at least in the short term. And the higher scores go, the harder it is to raise them — the margin of error is so tiny, sometimes even a question or two out of 67, that it almost comes down to chance. (For the record, I have gotten people from the mid-600s to 800, but they had virtually no comprehension problems and were willing to work very, very carefully and do everything I said).
The second thing I would say is that the crucial factor isn’t the person’s baseline score but rather their actual skill at understanding relationships between words (for sentence completions) and comprehending the meaning of relatively sophisticated texts. Kids who have no trouble understanding what the passages are literally saying but who work too quickly and fall for wrong answers because they don’t read carefully or think through the questions probably have at least the potential to score in the high 600s or 700s. I’ve had students in this category who started around 500 (junior PSAT) and ended up close to 700 (senior SAT).
On the other hand, someone with a poor vocabulary and trouble perceiving relationships between words, plus weak comprehension skills is probably not going to make it past 600 with strategy-based tutoring alone. If the person is willing to spend very significant amounts of time reading and working on vocabulary independently, that’s a different story, but that is not realistically the case for most high school juniors. I’ve helped students in that situation move from the low to the high 500s, but they all got stuck below the 600 line. In that case, the SAT does precisely what it was designed to do: it reveals persistent weaknesses in comprehension, and there’s really no way to “beat” it past a certain point.
So in general, I think that high-quality CR tutoring can be effective insofar as it allows people to take the fullest advantage of the reading skills they do have. But the “600” and “700 walls” are there for a reason — students who don’t read much on their own and who don’t really understand how texts work (how authors play with language to convey a point, how very common words can be used in unexpected ways to mean different things, and how specific phrasings relate to broader concepts), and no amount of test-prep alone will typically get them past it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The infamous marshmallow test popped up again today in the New York Times. For those of you unfamiliar with the experiment, a group of four year-olds were given the choice between receiving one marshmallow that they could eat immediately and waiting 30 seconds for a second marshmallow. More than a decade later, their standardized-test performance was tracked, with some rather remarkable results:
The difference between a 4-year-old who can wait 30 seconds for a marshmallow, and one who can wait 15 minutes was 210 points on the SAT,” (neuroscientist Jonah) Lehrer reported. He stressed that the key to success – in test-taking, in college and beyond – is discipline, and the key to discipline is, rather ironically, learning to distract oneself. As evidence, he mentioned the children who had been successful in resisting temptation: those who turned their backs on treats or closed their eyes.
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that you’re doomed on the SAT if you were in fact the sort of four year-old who just couldn’t bear to wait an extra 30 seconds for a marshmallow. Even if you’ve never had a problem with delayed gratification, it still wouldn’t hurt to take Lehrer’s words to heart, particularly when it comes to Critical Reading.
You see, vocabulary weaknesses aside, the single biggest stumbling block for relatively high scorers (650-700) who want to make it into the stratosphere (750-800) is the unwillingness to delay gratification — that is, to avoid looking at the answer choices until after they’ve worked out the entire problem for themselves, and to avoid jumping to a particular answer just so that they can get the question over with and move on. They simply assume — repeatedly and incorrectly — that they’ll always be able to identify the correct answer when they read through the options. They therefore see no reason to cross things out or mark them or sum them up and right them down… Frankly, that’s unpleasant. It takes, well, work. Besides they’re getting pretty much everything right already. And they want that marshmallow now. That’s why their scores have a nasty tendency to plateau, leading to frustration and an even stronger desire to just get it over with. Cue the vicious cycle.
So if this happens to apply to you, remember: the answer choices are there to distract you. They’re written to sound entirely plausible, even if they’re completely preposterous. The best way to distract yourself from falling for those distractions (!) is to work systematically through every step of the problem and determine as much as you can about the correct answer so that you can’t be fooled when you look at the answer choices. Take the extra five or ten or even thirty seconds. You’ll probably get more questions right. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get yourself a marshmallow either. I’m sure you could use the sugar rush;)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 21, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
In discussions about skimming, one question that often arises is how to know when various sections of passages should be read slowly vs. skimmed through.
What makes this question so important is that it cuts to the heart of what a lot of standardized-test reading targets — namely, the ability to sort essential information (main ideas) from information of secondary importance (supporting details), and to use the “clues” that an author provides within a text to identify just what that important information is.
What that means, practically speaking, is that while you do need to read slowly enough to get the gist of a passage, you don’t have to read everything slowly — at least not the first time through. Very often, what looks like a time problem is really a problem of recognizing when it’s ok to skim through things and, consequently, of getting overly caught up in irrelevant details. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 19, 2011 | Blog, Issues in Education
The New York Times reported several days ago that SAT Verbal scores are down.
Granted the drop isn’t immense — three points in Reading (to 497), two in Writing (to 489) — but it’s still generating a fair amount of hand-wringing. Given that the Writing section is the most straightforward section to prep for, I find it perversely impressive that 1) Writing scores have been consistently lower than scores in the other two sections; and that 2) average Writing scores have actually dropped every year since the section was introduced in 2005 (although the number of 700-800 scores spiked by about 5,000 this year).
Among the proposed reasons for the drop are shifting demographics, including an increasing number of students who speak more than one language at home (27 percent up from 19 percent a decade ago) and an increasingly narrow focus on preparation for state-mandated standardized tests.
Based on what I’ve observed, I think that there’s also something else going on here. As a disclaimer, let me say that most of the students I work with are decidedly not disadvantaged (some of them attend schools that are more selective than most of the Ivy League — for kindergarten), but nevertheless, I have noticed some disturbing trends in their schoolwork, trends that I suspect are probably echoed at schools both private and public.
First, the total, utter absence of vocabulary tests. Some of my students tell me that the last vocabulary test they had was in fifth grade. Some of them tell me that they’ve just plain never had a vocabulary test. It’s no wonder that they have spend their time cramming hundreds or even thousands of words before the SAT — they’re trying to stuff into a period of months the kind of knowledge that is better acquired over a period of years. And because they’re memorizing words from lists or flash cards rather than encountering them in the more organic context of actual reading, they often miss the kinds of nuances and/or second meanings that the SAT is fond of testing (e.g. “to embroider” can mean “to invent,” not just “to sew.”)
Which brings me to my second point: more and more, I’m encountering students who, with the exception of a Shakespeare play or two, rarely have to read works written before the twentieth century.
Occasionally I’ll be called on to help someone with a paper on Dickens or Twain, but very, very rarely anything before that. Far more frequently, my students are required to read novels written over the past few decades. While there’s nothing wrong with contemporary fiction per se, I’m going to pull out my uber (literary) conservative Harold Bloom-esque claws and say that a lot of it just shouldn’t have a place in the high school classroom. By focusing on works that students can relate to, schools deprive them of the chance to grapple with unfamiliar vocabulary, characters, and situations, as well as the opportunity to decode challenging literal meanings. If these skills aren’t built up steadily over a long period of time, they can be almost impossible to develop in a flash when the SAT rolls around. It’s no surprise that most students are utterly flummoxed by the “Miss Keeldar” and “Trabb’s boy” passages in the Blue Book — the language and diction are so foreign to them that they simply have no idea how to make sense of what’s being said.
As for the Writing section… well, let’s just say that I’m overjoyed, not to mention shocked, when a student can actually identify a preposition, never mind a prepositional phrase. I’ve had maybe five students who could absolutely nail comma splices off the bat (indicating they knew what a sentence was), and many have continued to struggle with the distinction between the simple past (“went”) and the past perfect (“had gone”) for months. Even when they’ve covered the same grammar in French or Spanish, they’ve learned it so poorly that they can’t establish any relationship between it and the English grammar on the SAT.
While I don’t doubt that there are a handful of very rigorous high schools that are still doing an exceptional job of inculcating the skills necessary to ace the SAT, the vast majority — at least from what I can tell — are simply not.
So what to do?
Dump the test (as Fair Test would have it)? Or, perhaps, take a good, hard look at what’s actually being taught in American schools…?
