by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
The short answer:
The summer before junior year. In the meantime, take the hardest classes you can reasonably handle, read lots of challenging material, and work on expanding your vocabulary. Then worry about the test. If you’ve got the skills covered, the actual test won’t be that overwhelming. If you’re weak on the fundamentals, strategy won’t get you very far.
The long answer:
I think that most people recognize that the SAT and the ACT are not tests you can really cram for. Sure, you can memorize a couple of last-minute strategies and rules, but how far they’ll actually get you is debatable. Unless your underlying comprehension of the concepts that these tests actually cover is truly rock-solid and you just need to know about some quirks of the test (e.g. that the College Board considers collective nouns such as “city” or “organization” to be singular), it can be very hard to apply rules you’ve just learned to unfamiliar questions.
On the other hand, it can be just as harmful to start studying for the SAT or the ACT too early. I always hesitate when someone asks me to do serious SAT prep with a student before the second semester of their sophomore year, and I get really concerned whenever I hear about someone who started (strategy-based prep) as soon as they entered high school.
Let me be clear: studying vocabulary and math, and reading SAT-level material are always good, and those are skills that should be built early and consistently. But there’s a big difference between reading a the New York Times op-ed page every night and sitting down with a Princeton Review book; the former will build the sort of vocabulary and cultural knowledge necessary to do well on the test in the long-run; the latter will teach you strategies that will only get you so far if you don’t have the actual knowledge.
I’ve worked with a couple of SAT students who fell into the latter category, and inevitably they were stuck somewhere in the mid-600’s. They had taken dozens of practice exams and knew the test inside and out, but they couldn’t seem to connect the material to anything outside the test itself. They thought that everything was about strategy and memorization, and they lacked (and resisted developing) the flexibility to change their approach based on the particularities of a given question — deadly if you’re trying to crack 700 because this ability is a big part of what the SAT tests.
People who start prepping intensively too early also burn out early; by the time they hit junior year, they’ve had it with test-prep and simply don’t care anymore. Even if they do have the skills to get their score higher, they’re too exhausted to make use of them.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t make the SAT out to be more than it’s worth. It’s a test — a very important test to be sure — but you shouldn’t let it dictate your life. If you hit 2250, it’s probably not worth it to spend the next six months obsessing over how to get to 2400. Sure you can take it again and try for a higher score, but colleges admit people, not test scores, and all other factors being equal, they will pretty much always take the more interesting applicant with marginally lower (but still perfectly acceptable) test scores over the applicant with super-high test scores and absolutely nothing else.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 18, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
If you are not, under any circumstances, willing to jump around within sections, then please skip this article. If you are willing to do so, however, this is a strategy you might want to try. It’s based on the principle that since (1) you have a limited amount of time, and that (2) every question, easy or hard, is worth exactly the same number of points, your goal should be to obtain as many points as quickly as possible.
However: since reading questions are presented in no particular order of difficulty, you need to do a little bit of work upfront to identify questions likely to take you a while to answer before you get caught up in them and waste a couple of minutes better spent answering two or three other questions quickly.
While I do understand that different questions are hard for different people, the following types of questions generally tend to be more time-consuming than others because it is very difficult to answer them based on a general knowledge of the passage; you must almost always go back and read carefully.
-Which of the following? I, II, and III
These tend to take the most time, so they should be the last questions you do. Especially on the ACT, where you can go crazy trying to locate the necessary information.
-Paired passage relationship questions
Usually these require multiple steps of logic. The good news is that they come after individual-passage questions, so you don’t have to hunt for them.
-ACT questions that ask about dates or years.
Although these questions may seem straightforward, the exact information rarely appears directly in the passage, and it is often necessary to perform some basic calculations in order to determine the answer.
-All of the following EXCEPT
While you can often eliminate a couple of answers based on your memory of the passage, there’s often no way to be certain unless you go back and hunt for the others.
-Graphic/passage questions on the SAT
Particularly if you’re not ask comfortable with graph-based questions as you are with text-based questions, it’s a good idea to leave these questions until after you’ve answered all of the other questions in a set.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 15, 2011 | ACT Essay, Blog
If you’re planning to take the ACT and aren’t a big fan of writing timed essays, you’re probably tempted to sign up for the ACT without writing.
Please don’t.
An increasing number of colleges, including many large state universities (e.g. the University of Illinois), do require the ACT with Writing, and you risk seriously limiting your options if you take it without.
Furthermore, most colleges will not let you mix and match scores: if you take the ACT twice, once with writing and once without, you cannot simply tack your writing score onto the non-Writing test; that entire test will be considered, not just the essay portion.
The good news is that the essay score does not get factored into your overall score; a 32 composite with an 8 essay stays a 32 composite.??But without that essay score, your ACT won’t count at all.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 11, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
I’m the first person to admit that studying for the SAT is exhausting. After even an hour-and-a-half of tutoring, I often find that I need to take a long walk to clear my head. Sometimes spending 90 minutes explaining why choice (A) wrong because it contains a single incorrect word while choice (C) is actually right because it restates the main idea of lines 25-42, only in more abstract terms, is just so intense that it really does take me a while to recover. Given that, I find it amazing anyone could study for a standardized test for a long stretches of time.
My advice is, quite simply, don’t. Studying for the SAT or the ACT can be exhausting. If you treat them like a sort of mind game or logic puzzle, these tests can also be fun, but let’s face it, a lot of the time, they’re not. Especially if you’re sitting down to the Official Guide after doing two hours of AP Calc homework and trying to write that essay on Ulysses.
The most important thing for SAT/ACT prep is that you study consistently, not that you study a lot at a time. If you try to swallow the whole thing at once, you’ll get burned out and frustrated, and the test will start to seem totally overwhelming. Instead, spend maybe 15 minutes a day prepping, and only focus on the things you don’t know how to do. You won’t forget the other stuff.
Studies have shown that the people at the top of their fields spend most of the practice time strengthening their weakest skills rather than simply rushing through everything they’re already good at. The same applies to the SAT and the ACT. Quantity of studying does not equal quality of studying. You will need to spend some time figuring out which kinds of questions give you the most trouble, but once you’ve determined that, make a list of the rules/concepts you don’t know, and work through them one at a time. Fifteen minutes a day every day is better than doing nothing for two months and then trying to cram in two or three hours a day. You’ll be be calmer, retain more information, and your score will most likely improve more than it would have otherwise.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 11, 2011 | Blog, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Diction (aka usage or “wrong-word”) issues are frequently cited as one of the top errors that the SAT Writing section tests, but the reality is that they only show up occasionally. In all the College Board tests I’ve ever looked at — and that’s quite a few — I’ve seen no more than a handful. It doesn’t matter if the other prep books include it all over the place; the College Board doesn’t.
So yes, while you should learn the difference between “affect” and “effect” so that you can use the words properly in your own writing, in terms of the SAT, I would not suggest that you spend your time memorizing long lists of commonly confused words. When usage errors do appear, they tend to be highly unexpected and often involve switching two words (e.g. “collaborate” and “corroborate”) that you’d never necessarily expect to be switched from looking at a “commonly switched words” list. You’ll either spot the error or you won’t. Besides reading a lot and developing a good ear for usage, there’s no real way to prepare.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my philosophy is that you should spend your time worrying about the things that are pretty much guaranteed to be on the test (subject- verb agreement, pronoun agreement, tense consistency, dangling modifiers, semicolons, etc.) and that are well within your control. As for the rest, it’s not worth your time to worry about. You can hit 750+ just focusing on the other, and once you’re in that range, it’s no longer about your scores.
P.S. In case you were wondering about the whole affect vs. effect thing, the former is a typically used as a verb and the latter as a noun: “I was strongly affected by the movie,” BUT “the movie had a strong effect on me.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 10, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
If you’ve read some of my other posts, you probably know that I’m not a big fan of the big-name test-prep guides (e.g. Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barron’s, etc.). But while I admit that they might have some merit for Math, the one section that you should absolutely and incontrovertibly not compromise on, at least in terms of taking practice tests, is Reading.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) The answer choices are problematic
The answers are either 1) improperly reasoned, 2) go outside the bounds of the passage — that is, they actually require you to have some outside knowledge of a subject in order to infer the answer to a question — or 3) force you to make irrelevant distinctions. What ultimately happens is that people walk away with the impression that the answers to questions are arbitrary, that they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the readings themselves. It also makes it impossible to apply any sort of rigorous reasoning process to the test, when in fact it is precisely the refinement of that reasoning process that often leads to higher scores. SAT and ACT questions may feel tricky at times, but the right answer is still the only right answer, not something completely arbitrary cooked up by the test-makers.
2) The passages are wrong
This usually comes down to one issue: copyright. Most of the passages that show up on the SAT and ACT are taken from books published in the last couple of decades — that is, books still under copyright. In order to accurately mimic the test, therefore, it is necessary to use texts from recent works. The College Board and the ACT are able to gain permission for the works from the publishers; for whatever reason (money?), the major test-prep companies usually are not. As a result, those companies are forced to use either texts no longer under copyright (from books more than 70 years old) or have passages written specifically for them. Both of these have major issues.
First, texts more than 70 years old, while difficult, are not difficult in the precise way that real SAT/ACT texts are difficult. Their language, style, and subject matter are often old-fashioned, and they give the impression that the reading portions of both tests loftier and more overtly literary than they are.
On the other hand, passages written specifically for test-prep guides tend to be overly straightforward and factual, whereas real test passages are usually somewhat more complex both in terms of topic and organization.
So please, do yourself a favor: if you haven’t been using the College Board book or the ACT Official Guide for Reading, go out and get it. And if you’ve finished all the tests in it and want to study some more, sign up for the online program. And if you’re done with that, well, go on the Scientific American or Smithsonian magazine website and, and start reading.
