by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 12, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Among the tidbits of wisdom that I attempt to impart to my students is the fact that it doesn’t really matter if they understand a particular rule/concept/strategy after I’ve explained it to them once. The real test is whether they can apply at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning, when they’re still not 100% awake, and, oh yeah, are in the middle of taking an exam that will play a very significant role in determining where they spend the next four years of their lives.
In general, I do my best not to pile on the pressure for my students (they’re certainly under enough already, and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for anyone having a nervous breakdown!), but every now and then, when someone needs a reality check about what’s involved in really and truly mastering a concept, I give them that little speech. Usually it’s met with a small giggle and a look of minor incredulousness. Until they actually go through the process of taking the SAT and end up sitting in front of question 9 in section 10, desperately trying to wade through four-and-a-half hours of test-taking fatigue and figure out just what is wrong with the stupid sentence already, most people don’t fully appreciate what it means to understand comma splices.
So let me spell it out. If you haven’t taken the SAT yet, you might not quite believe, but trust me, it’s something to keep in mind as you prepare. True mastery of a particular concept, whether it be comma splices, dangling modifiers, or right triangles, means that you can always recognize when it’s being tested. Always. No matter how tired you are, no matter what you were doing beforehand, no matter how much room the people in the next room are making, no matter what angle it’s being tested from — the knowledge is just there.
If you can usually recognize comma splices on the SAT but use them rampantly in your own writing, that means you don’t fully understand them — which means that you still have the potential to get fooled on the exam.
Likewise, if formulating a clear thesis statement and composing an argument that adheres consistently to it something that’s just beginning to sink in for you, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to pull it off on the real test. This is not just a question of “getting familiar” with how the SAT works. Until you get to the point where it’s an extension of a real-life skill, one that you consistently apply in your actual schoolwork, there will always be an element of chance. (If you don’t believe me, ask a kid who got a 12 on the essay without doing a single practice run: I can virtually guarantee that coming up with a clear thesis and keeping their argument directly focused on it is something they can do in their sleep.)
I think, by the way, that this is part of why so many people perceive the SAT to be so “tricky.” If you’ve just brushed up on a couple of things for the test but haven’t fully assimilated them, of course you’re going to miss things; it’s inevitable, especially since the test is written to exploit those misunderstandings.
What does this mean in terms of studying? Well… I’ll put it this way. For most people, the inclination is to study until they’ve gotten more or less where they want to be. And then stop. But that doesn’t really work: just because you did incredibly well on one practice test doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily do as well on the next test (unless, of course, you really do know what you’re doing). So take another one. And another one. Do it until there’s absolutely no way you can possibly score below a certain level, even on your worst possible day. And when you go back and review the questions you’ve missed, make sure that you’re not just looking at the questions themselves but rather at the underlying concepts they’re testing. If you have trouble with subject-verb agreement, take a book and try to identify the subject and verb in every single sentence; if your ability to identify dangling modifiers is hit or miss, try writing some of your own. If you can produce it correctly, you’ll be a lot less likely to overlook someone else’s error.
You might not be able to master everything, but you can pick a handful of concepts that seem well within your control and focus on them. Even three or four more questions per section could boost your score well over 100 points.
The bottom line is that you never know just what’s going to happen when you go in and take the test. If you perceive your score as the result of chance, whether particular the test is “easy” or “hard”… well, chances are you’re not going to do nearly as well as you could have. Or, at the very least, you’re going to feel as if the whole experience is somehow beyond your control. But if you’ve trained yourself past the point of mastery, the whole experience might actually border on. . .maybe not quite pleasant, but at least not so bad.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 7, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Update: Somehow or other, I neglected to notice that PSAT scores were coming out just as I posted this (usually my students flip out about them, but this year everyone seems remarkably laid back about the whole thing, so I apparently I’m the last to know;) Anyway, I wanted to add a couple of things in light of that fact. First, if you’re less than thrilled with your score, don’t panic — a lot of people are in exactly the same situation. A weaker-than-expected PSAT score is in no way a harbinger of doom — it’s simply an indication of the approximate score you would get if you were to take the SAT tomorrow, without any additional studying.
That said, however, PSAT can be a major wake-up call for a lot of people who thought they were going to skate through standardized testing. (I always cringe internally whenever a junior that I know really needs to work on things tells me that the PSAT was “easy;” it’s usually an indicator that they fell into every trap in the book, and seeing scores 100+ points lower than what they expected can be a major blow.) It can be exciting to hit junior year and actually start the whole college process you’ve been hearing everyone go on about forever, but getting a less than stellar PSAT score can suddenly make the whole process get old really fast.
Here’s the thing: your improvement from here on largely depends on your attitude: if you get disgusted with the whole process now and decide that it’s futile to even try to raise your score, you probably won’t. If, on the other hand, you can accept it as what it is — a diagnostic — and use the information it gives you to motivate you and focus your study process, you have the potential to make truly massive gains.
I’m not going to lie: it can be a lot of work, but provided you have the basics in place, it is totally doable. I’ve had students who improved literally hundreds of points from the PSAT to the SAT — and yes, that includes major (150+ point) increases in Critical Reading. Yes, I did help them, but they also put in huge amounts of work independently.
Despite claims to the contrary, what’s tested on the (P)SAT is not some sort of undefinable “aptitude” but rather a set of concrete skills. They may not be tested in quite the same way that you’re accustomed to being tested in school, but that doesn’t make them any less real. And as a result, there are specific steps that you can take to improve them. For that reason, it can be helpful to view your scores not as some sort of ultimate, immutable indicator of your ability, but rather as a general indicator of where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and of what sorts of things you need to focus on improving.
Looking at your score as feedback makes the process more neutral. Yes, of course SAT scores do ultimately count for a lot in the admissions process; I’m not about to deny that. But they’re also a relatively accurate, unbiased measure of where you stand in some key areas — how to recognize the point that an author is trying to make; how to distinguish between what they think and what they think about what other people think (!); and how to read objectively without allowing your own opinion to cloud your understanding of what’s literally being said. It could be that you simply need to practice taking the test or work more carefully, but chances are that there’s a skill or two you need to brush up on — even if it doesn’t seem to obviously correlate with the questions you missed.
Look at it this way: you missed the questions you missed for a reason. Even if you really did know how to do them, there wasn’t some mysterious force that forced your hand to pick up that #2 pencil and bubble in B rather than C. Something in your process went awry, and that resulted in your getting the question wrong. The way to improve your score is to try to identify the problem at its core and deal with it from there.
If, for example, you misread a Math question and solved for x instead of 2x, that’s a sign that you need to read more carefully; it doesn’t matter how good you are at math in school. The Math portion of the SAT is a math-basedreasoning test, not a math test per se, and it asks you to integrate English and math skills simultaneously in the same way that Critical Reading asks you to use logic skills similar to those used in Math. Blaming the test for asking a question in a way that you weren’t expecting won’t help. What will help is putting your finger on the page as you read the question, taking a moment to reiterate for yourself exactly what it’s asking, and, if necessary, scribbling yourself a note so that you don’t forget. Those are important skills too. But that said, pretty much every math tutor I’ve ever talked to has told me that plenty of kids in AP Calc are missing some of the fundamentals, either because they forgot them or because they never really mastered them in the first place. If you’re so convinced that you’re above going back and reviewing the math on the test, you probably won’t get your score up anywhere near as much as you hoped.
Likewise, if you’re a straight-A student in AP English but can’t get past 650 on Critical Reading, it won’t do you any good to get indignant. You need to look honestly and objectively at why you’re making so many mistakes. If your score reflects the fact that you consistently get down to two answers but tend to pick the wrong one, you need to look at why you always pick the wrong one. It could be because you’re not going back to the passage and really checking things out (or are reading too quickly or not extensively enough when you do), but it could also be because you have a tendency to insert your own knowledge and not look closely at what’s actually being said. It could also be that you have trouble recognizing how specific words contribute to the creation of a particular tone, or in decoding particularly unfamiliar types of syntax or phrasing — things that have absolutely nothing to do with your test-taking ability. In that case, you need to spend some serious time reading SAT-level material. One of my students who got himself up 100 points in CR did so in part by devouring Oliver Sacks’ books, passages from which frequently show up on the SAT (it helped that he absolutely loved the books, though); the level of his comprehension skyrocketed.
I recognize that it can be hard to identify just what you’re missing, especially if you’re trying to do it all on your own, and it can be even harder to be brutally honest with yourself about just what you need to work on. But the key is not to take it personally. If you can leave your ego at the door and focus on solidifying some of the fundamentals that got lost along the way, you might even learn something in the process.
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 18, 2011 | Blog, General Tips, Tutoring
When proclaiming that the SAT and the ACT are not tests that can be effectively coached, the College Board and the ACT like to trot out the following statistic, courtesy of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling
Existing academic research suggests average gains as a result of commercial test preparation are in the neighborhood of 30 points on the SAT and less than one point on the ACT, substantially lower than gains marketed by test preparation companies.
Let’s take a moment and unpack this assertion. First, one of the key words here is “commercial test prep” (e.g. Kaplan and Princeton Review); nowhere is tutoring through “boutique” companies or private tutoring mentioned. As someone who has helped more than one student increase their verbal scores alone by 350+ points on the SAT and 10+ points on the ACT, I have some grounds for disputing the idea that the shortcomings of commercial test-prep should not be extended to test-prep in general.
That’s not, however, what I really want to focus on here. What interests me, rather, is the idea of average gains and the way in which that average was determined. I’ve been thinking about this thanks to Debbie Stier, who put up a very interesting blog link to the following article by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia.
Willingham makes the point that:
When a teacher presents a reading strategy to students, we can assume that there are three types of students in the class: students who have already discovered the strategy (or something similar) on their own, students who are not fluent enough decoders to use the strategy, and students who are good decoders but don’t know the strategy. Only the last group of students will benefit from reading strategy instruction. When a researcher finds an average effect size of d=0.33 for teaching students the strategy, that effect is probably actually composed of many students who showed no benefit and a smaller number of students who showed a large benefit.
I think that something very similar is going on in many strategy-based prep classes. My guess is that only around half of the people who take those tests (those scoring 500+) actually have solid enough literal comprehension skills to even make any sort of strategy-based prep worthwhile.
What this means is that if someone’s comprehension skills are truly up to par (meaning, more or less, that they can pick up a College Board Critical Reading passage at random, understand the gist of it, and summarize the main point and tone), they actually stand to benefit immensely from strategy-based prep. It probably won’t help for the ones scoring 750+ from the start because they’re already using many of the standard strategies, even unconsciously, but for many of the still-small percentage scoring in the 600 to low 700 range, the increase can be very substantial. Many of the ones who persistently score in the 500s, however, won’t succeed in raising their scores at all because they lack the core skills on which to base the strategies they learn.
This points to a disturbing conclusion: the real problem isn’t that people can game the test by learning strategies (aka “tricks”) but rather that many test-takers don’t even even have strong enough comprehension skills to be helped by those strategies in the first place.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 13, 2011 | Blog, College Admissions, General Tips
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who actually looked forward to retaking the SAT or the ACT their senior year of high school. You’re sick of studying, sick of standardized testing, want to actually enjoy your vacation, and never want to hear anyone utter the words “College Board” or “ACT” again. Burnout is real, I’m not going to argue. Junior year can be unbelievably hard, and it’s normal to need some time to recover.??That said, however, you may be doing yourself a major disservice by not retaking your senior year.
First, unless you’ve truly aced it the first time around (say 2300+ SAT or 34+ ACT), colleges do want to see what you’re capable of doing around the time you apply. Many people’s scores go up naturally between the spring of their junior year and the fall of their senior year, even without huge amounts of studying, and you don’t want to sell yourself short.
Second, regardless of how sick you are of studying, you need to be realistic about your chances at the colleges you’re seriously considering applying to. If your scores don’t already fall at or above the 50th percentile for those schools, your chances of getting in are significantly reduced; if you’re looking at very competitive schools and are not a recruited athlete, an under-represented minority, or national Intel winner, you should ideally be closer to the 75th percentile.
Admissions officers won’t cut you any slack if they have eight applicants that look very similar to you, and you have the lowest scores of the group.??That doesn’t mean you should drop everything over the summer and spend your entire life trying to pull up your test scores. If you’ve got great scores but nothing else, you won’t get very far at most top schools either.
What it does mean, though, is that even if the thought of even looking at another prep book is enough to push you close to a nervous breakdown, you should take a few weeks or a month off and then reassess. If you do decide to retake, focus on the sections that are most manageable. If you’ve done everything you can with Reading, focus on Writing; if you just need to work on Math, forget everything else (colleges will only take your top scores, even ones that require you to submit everything). Just don’t assume that there’s nothing else you can do.
