I think David Mulroy is my new hero
https://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2012/07/david-mulroy-on-critical-thinking-in.html
I swear, the man absolutely NAILS what I observe when I teach Critical Reading.
Should high schools do more to prepare students for the SAT?
Well, it all depends on what you mean by “prepare.”
Let me back up for a moment and explain how this post came about: a couple of months ago, I was talking with a friend who was applying to dental school, of all things, and we somehow got into a conversation about the role of standardized testing in the American college admissions process. Having grown up in Korea, where the test-prep culture is actually a good deal more intense than it is in the US, my friend knew a thing or two about how crazy the whole standardized testing process can be, and I started telling her about some of the more common misconceptions that international students have about the SAT (particularly international students coming from countries where admission to top schools is determined solely by test scores). One thing led to another, and before I knew it, she told me that I should write up everything I’d just told her and post it on my site as an overview for international applicants. She even offered to translate it into Korean.
Critical Reading tutoring as remediation: the limits of test prep
A couple of years ago, I tutored a pair of best friends for the SAT. Although one of them was considerably more motivated than the other, both were smart, intellectually curious, and lots of fun to work with. Neither, however, was what you would call a natural standardized test-taker when it came to Critical Reading: both had junior PSAT Reading scores around 500. I worked with them regularly starting in the fall of junior year, and fortunately they both managed to pull up their scores quite a bit: by the spring of their junior year, they were both reliably scoring more than 100 points higher, and both ultimately attained scores in the high 600s.
I wish that I could say that their experiences were typical, but unfortunately they were the exception rather than the rule. Critical Reading scores, unlike Writing and Math scores, are notoriously difficult to raise. While I’ve had many students who did manage to raise their CR scores by 100+ points, I’ve had others whose scores I simply could not get to budge, no matter how many different approaches I tried. (As I explained to their parents, I may be very good at what I do, but I do not actually possess magical powers when it comes to the SAT.) (more…)
Some thoughts about the drop in SAT Verbal scores
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…?
Why good grades in English do not always correlate with high SAT Verbal scores
For many people, the tendency to interpret what they read is one of the biggest stumbling blocks they encounter on the SAT. After all, their English teachers have told them for years that reading is about interpreting; it therefore seems natural that the College Board would want them to do the same. It doesn’t.
Among the myriad things that never get explained to most people when they first start studying for the SAT is the fact that Critical Reading is not an English test in the sense they’ve come to understand English in school. As a result, many strong students who have always received high grades in English class are surprised when their Critical Reading scores are barely above average. So if this describes your (or your child’s) situation, please consider the following. (more…)
Note: the “right” nursery school will not get your child into Harvard
By now, the story of Nicole Imprescia, the mother currently suing York Avenue preschool for $19,000 has made its way around most of the major news outlets. It’s the sort of story about an over-the-top New York City parent hell-bent on getting her offspring into an “elite” kindergarten that the media love to play up, primarily because Imprescia is such a perfect caricature of an uber-neurotic Manhattan parent. Imprescia’s conviction that her daughter’s presumable failure to ace the ERB will ultimately bar her from the Ivy League is both utterly hilarious and profoundly sad; unfortunately, it’s also shared to some degree by quite a few other parents trying to navigate the city’s private school admissions maze.
So in case you’re currently trying to get your child into a Manhattan pre-school, kindergarten, etc., you may want to consider the following from someone who deals with students on the other end of the process, after they’ve spent ten or twelve years in the New York City private school system.
First, there is no such thing as an automatic ticket. Plenty of children admitted to so-called “top-tier” schools as kindergartners are counseled out before high school, and many of the students who enter in ninth grade are the ones ultimately admitted to top universities. Furthermore, the ones who do stay are often burnt out by the time they get to tenth or eleventh grade and display little interest in learning for its own sake. They also, on occasion, display alarming deficits in basic skills (such as writing logical, grammatically correct sentences). $40,000 a year may buy some connections, but it doesn’t guarantee an education.
Furthermore, a student’s individual accomplishments are ultimately far, far more important than the name of the high school itself. While a solid student with borderline SATs at a top private school will undoubtedly benefit from a guidance counselor willing to lobby for him or her, it probably won’t do much good at the very top schools. It might help at Colgate or Trinity or GW, but Yale won’t blink before rejecting that application (at least if your last name isn’t Bush). Given that top universities rarely accept all of the students who apply from a particular school, especially if there are twenty-five applicants, the ones who do get in tend to be the ones who are hooked in some way. On the other hand, a straight-A student at a less prestigious school who takes the most rigorous classes, pursues what he or she loves, has truly competitive (2300+) test scores, and clearly has something special to offer stands a much higher chance of admission.
Please don’t get me wrong: I’ve worked with some students from “top tier” school who were absolutely delightful — curious, enthusiastic, and thoroughly un-neurotic. But I’ve also seen some sixteen year-olds driven half insane by parental pressure and both dazed by and resentful of the fact that their “elite” education did not automatically translate into top standardized test scores.
So please, think long and hard about what’s best for your child right now. There’s no way to predict what a four year-old will be like thirteen years down the line. If anything good comes out of Nicole Imprescia’s whole laughable mess of a lawsuit, I hope that it is Imprescia’s realization, even to a tiny degree, that children are not so easily programmed to become what their parents want them to be. For her daughter’s sake, I hope that understanding comes sooner rather than later. And if not, I wish her the best of luck in finding an SAT tutor.