by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 16, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that when they first start working with me, a lot of my students aren’t quite clear on the difference between describing the content of a passage and summarizing the argument it contains. Since the ability to summarize arguments quickly, lucidly, and effectively is perhaps the the skill that is most crucial for success on the Critical Reading portion of the SAT, this is a serious problem. Regardless, once a student has finished reading their first passage, the initial conversation usually goes something like this:
Me: So now I want you to sum up the author’s argument in your own words. What’s the basic point that he or she is trying to make here?
Student: Well, the author talks about x… and then he sort of mentions y…oh yeah, and then there was this thing that he said about z that I didn’t really get.
At which point I explain that I’m not interested in hearing a play-by-play recount of what the author says, but rather a condensed version of the main argument he or she is making. I’ve now gotten so many puzzled looks at that statement that I think I’m just going to nix the question completely and start by explaining the difference.
Most of my students pick it up pretty quickly after I give them some examples and walk them through the steps a couple of times; however, the fact that I seem to be having this conversation repeatedly suggests a couple of thing to me. First, it suggests that schools (at least the ones my students come from) do not ever explicitly teach students the difference between summarizing and arguing. It also suggests that even if the distinction has been covered at some point, they’ve never been asked to apply it in any meaningful way.
Incidentally, this weakness is not limited to high school students; I’ve also encountered it with GRE and GMAT students. Perhaps it’s one of those skills that teachers assume students will pick up along the way. Or perhaps that’s the sort of test prepp-y trick they pride themselves on avoiding (which is shame because it’s really not about test prep). More likely, though, it simply doesn’t ever occur to them that it needs to be taught. After all, they understand the difference. (To any teachers who may be reading this, please don’t take offense; I’m just describing what I experience.) Unfortunately, however, there is a very important distinction between giving a description of content and giving a summary of an argument, and on the SAT, not knowing the difference can cost you literally hundreds of points.
Describing Content = recounting the information presented in the text without necessarily distinguishing between main points and supporting evidence and/or counter-arguments. The goal is simply to relate what is being said, often in a very concrete “first x, then y, and finally z” form.
Summarizing an Argument = identifying the essential point that the author wants to convey and eliminating any superfluous detail. The goal is not to cover all of the information presented or to relate it in the sequence it appears in the passage, but rather to pinpoint the overarching idea that determines the content (supporting details, potential counter-arguments, etc.) of the passage. Summarizing an argument requires you to make a leap from concrete to abstract because you must move beyond simply recounting the information presented to recognizing which parts of it are of primary vs. secondary importance. Let’s look at an example. I’m going to use the passage from yesterday’s post about transitions — the version with the transitions, of course! My apologies for making you read it again, but hey, no one ever said that SAT passages were chosen for their entertainment value. Besides, there are many, many ways to read any given piece of text. But that’s something I’m not going to get into now. Passage
The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises because they 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. Despite improvements 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.
Content Description (more or less what I hear when I ask someone to summarize): So, um, the author talks about this guy Albert O. Hirschman’s “hiding hand” idea, which I think, like, basically says that people don’t know how difficult things are when they start but then they find out and overcome them. And then he talks about this documentary called Panama Canal, which showed like about how technology was important in the early 20th century, and how workers were exploited and how awful conditions were for them while they were working. He mentions a guy whose grandfather worked on the Panama Canal, and he says that his grandfather said that it was really bad and stuff… Oh yeah, and then there was something about, uh, decolonization I think, but I don’t know if I really got that.
Notice the how vague this version is. It doesn’t really distinguish between primary and secondary information; everything gets mushed in together. If this were an SAT passage, the summary would give us zero help in terms of figuring out the main point.
Argument Summary (as I would put it): Workers faced immense obstacles and terrible conditions while working on the Panama Canal but persevered and were inspired to begin decolonization process.
Notice how this version doesn’t try to pack in a lot of information — it just hits the big theme.
Argument Summary in condensed SAT terms: PC workers survived awful conditions — > decolonization
Now notice how this version cuts out absolutely everything except the absolute total utter bare essentials. It doesn’t even attempt to incorporate any sort of detail or anything beyond the main focus of the passage and (awful conditions during the building of the Panama Canal) and its result (the “so what?”, the part that tells us why the main focus of the passage is important). If we were to treat this as a short SAT passage, that effect (it set off the decolonization process) would be our focus. It is mentioned in the last sentence, and the last sentence is where the main point usually is. So in six words and an arrow, we’ve managed to capture the essential information — information that we will almost certainly need to answer at least one of the questions.
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 | Jul 10, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
I will freely admit that the use of pens during tutoring sessions is one of my biggest pet peeves. In everyday life, I have nothing against them (I actually like them quite a bit), but when it comes to the SAT, I loathe them. I’ve been known to rummage in my purse for up to five minutes in a desperate attempt to circumvent the necessity of working in ink.
Here why: When you use a pen, you can’t erase things (let’s assume we’re not talking about erasable pens), and when you can’t erase things, you tend to get very cautious about crossing them out. And that can be a major problem. In order to work most effectively, you need to be free to eliminate answers conclusively, to draw lines all the way through them and totally remove them from consideration. If you work in pen, you probably won’t do this. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 4, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Try explaining it to someone else. Friend, sibling, parent…anyone. It doesn’t even matter whether or not that person is actually going to take the test. The only thing that counts is that they’re willing to humor you and sit with a Blue Book for an hour or two.
There’s a reason I always ask my students to explain to me why they’re doing what they’re doing: in about two seconds, it usually becomes exceedingly obvious whether or not they really get it. If someone says that they know but can’t really explain it, chances are they actually don’t. (For a great explanation of that phenomenon, see this article by Daniel Willingham). It’s one thing to shrug and say, “Yeah, that makes sense” when someone explains the answer to you; it’s something very different to work out all of the steps necessary on your own and explain them to someone else.
If you’re already scoring very well (high 600s+), I would argue that this is actually one of the most productive ways to study. Having to explain something to another person forces you to clarify your own thought process. Things you formerly took for granted suddenly seem bizarrely murky, and you start to wonder just how you know to do x instead of y. You have no choice but to break the process into smaller, more precise steps in order to explain why the answer must be B rather than E. The result is that you learn exactly what you do and don’t know. Furthermore, you gain an awareness of your own thought processes — an awareness that leads to a much stronger sense of confidence and control when you actually take the test.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 27, 2011 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
One of the top reasons the Error-ID section can be tricky is that there are so many underlined words and phrases that seem strange, as if they could potentially contain an error. I truly cannot count the number of times I’ve had a student look at sentence, screw up his or her face, and promptly announce, “That sounds funny!”
Well guess what. Error-ID sentences are chosen precisely because they contain phrasings that most test-takers will be unfamiliar with and will therefore find strange.
That does not, however, mean that they are wrong.
Error-ID answer choices are wrong only if they are always wrong; they are never wrong if they represent one of several possible correct ways to write phrase or if “you would say it differently.” Your personal preference, dear test-taker, does not enter into the equation.
Furthermore, Error-ID options can be wrong in three ways and three ways only:
1) Grammatically
2) Logically
3) Idiomatically
If a suspicious word or phrase does not fall into one of those categories, it cannot be wrong. I’m going to illustrate with a question that a number of my students have found tricky:
(A) At the reception (B) were the (C) chattering guests, the
three-tiered cake, and the lively music that have become
(D) characteristic of many wedding receptions. (E) No error
Many of my students have chosen (D) for this question because they thought there was a noun agreement problem (that is, the chattering guests, three-tiered cake, and lively music are three things and thus must be characteristics of).
The problem with this interpretation of the question is that it does not take into account the fact that “characteristic of” is a fixed phrase that is unaffected by the number of the things it is modifying. In fact, “characteristic of” is the option more in accordance with standard usage in this case, although the other would be acceptable.
The sentence would only be wrong if it read: “At the reception were the chattering guests, the three-tiered cake, and the lively music that have become a characteristic of many wedding receptions.”
The point, however, is that if there are in fact two right answers, the answer given on the test will never be wrong. So the answer to the above question is in fact “No error.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 23, 2011 | Blog, Time Management
I think that far too much gets made of the fact that the SAT is a timed test. Yes, you do need to practice finishing sections within the allotted time and take a full-length test or two before the real thing in order to learn how to pace yourself, but in your actual studying, your goal needs to be mastering the actual material, not just doing timed section after timed section and seeing how fast you can get.
I’ve had a couple of students come to me seriously concerned about time issues and wanting to focus on improving their speed. They were all a bit surprised to learn that I don’t usually deal directly with speed in the sense that I rarely time people or, with the exception of ACT Reading, talk about how much time they *should* be spending on any given section of a test. Why? Because speed is what results when you strengthen the actual (logical, mathematical, grammatical, etc.) skills that you’re being tested on rather than a technique in and of itself. If you just focus on the speed at the expense of the actual skills, you end up short-circuiting the entire process. You might get faster, but your score probably won’t go up all that much. On the other hand, if you improve your skills sufficiently, you won’t waste time pondering answer choices rather than actively solving problems, and the time issue usually takes care of itself.
