by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 10, 2014 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
When I first started tutoring reading for the SAT and the ACT, I took a lot of things for granted. I assumed, for example, that my students would be able to identify things like the main point and tone of a passage; that they would be able to absorb the meaning of what they read while looking out for important textual elements like colons and italicized words; and that they, at bare minimum, would be able to read the words that appeared on the page and sound out unfamiliar ones.
Over the last few years, however, I’ve progressively shed all those assumptions. When I start to work with someone, I now take absolutely nothing for granted. Until a student clearly demonstrates that they’ve mastered a particular skill, I make no assumptions about whether they have it. And that includes reading the words as they appear on the page. (more…)
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 | Jun 18, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
This post was inspired by Akil Bello’s Best SAT Prep Tip Ever on the Bellcurves blog. While I agree 100% that reading the full question (along with reading full answers) is indeed one of the most important things you can do on the SAT, I also think that advice takes a bit too much for granted because it assumes that most test-takers will understand what a question is asking, provided that they read it carefully enough. In my experience, however, that’s simply not the case.
I think there’s a tendency to forget that vocabulary issues can crop in passage-based questions themselves as well as in passages and answer choices. If you don’t understand precisely what a question is requiring you to do when it asks you which of the following would most undermine a given theory, it’s very hard to answer that question correctly!
Take inference questions. When a question asks you make an inference about what a particular person mentioned in a passage would believe, it is generally asking you to make a reasonable assumption about that person’s beliefs based on specific information that the author says about that person. It is not simply asking you to summarize what that person says or believes. It is asking you to form a general, often more abstract idea that will not be found word-for-word in the text. But if you don’t make that distinction, if you just try to summarize what the person says or thinks, you’ll be lost when you look at the answer choices.
Or, to give a slightly more concrete example, it will be very hard for you to answer a question that uses the word “analogous” if you don’t really know what that means.
So I’m going to suggest two things.
First, treat any unfamiliar vocabulary you find in the actual questions the exact same way you would treat any other SAT vocabulary — write it down and learn it.
Second, try rephrasing the questions in your own words to make sure you actually understand what you need to do. For example, if a question asks you what “transition is marked” in a particular line, you can rephrase it as “what change happens in the passage here?” Define, sum up, simplify. Whatever you have to do to make sure you understand.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 24, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
Thanks to Mike from PWN the SAT for pointing this out to me after my post about why prep books aren’t enough if you want to kick butt on Reading. While it does come in handy to have a context for what you’re reading, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Even if you’ve heard this before, you can stand to hear it again: when it comes to Reading, the correct answer can always be determined based on the information in the passage and the passage alone.
Do not ever pick an answer unless it is directly supported by the passage itself; it doesn’t matter how much it appeals to you otherwise. If it’s not in the passage, it’s wrong, end of story.
That said, I’m also going to suggest something mildly heretical in the land of test-prep: if you do have prior knowledge of a topic and an answer happens to fit both with that knowledge and with the general point of the passage itself (that second one is really key), I’d suggest you check that answer first. In my experience, it often will be correct. The SAT and the ACT reward smart guessing, and making a logical conjecture often pays off. But I emphasize that this is just a strategy for potentially getting to the correct answer faster. You should never pick an answer based strictly on your knowledge of a subject.
The only time I would ever even maybe suggest you try this without going back to the passage would be if you had five seconds left to finish the section, thought the answer could work based on your knowledge of the passage, and felt like taking a walk on the wild side (relatively speaking). But even then, you might want to play it safe.
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 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.
