by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 29, 2012 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
When it comes to SAT question types, tone and attitude questions are routinely among the most predictable in terms of which answers are likely to be both correct and incorrect. When you take them apart, the vast majority of tone questions boil down to “positive vs. negative,” and then to what degree.
Furthermore, incorrect answer choices are highly patterned. Certain words almost invariably signal wrong answers. Many of these fall into the infamous “extreme” category (e.g. “furious” and “awed”), but others are at odds with the framework of the test in other ways. And answer choices that indicate a lack of interest on the author’s part fall squarely into this category.
Think of it this way: pretty much on principle, professional authors choose to write about their subjects because they care about them. By definition, they are engaged with what they are writing about. Otherwise, they wouldn’t write about it! So while an author may have a clearly negative attitude toward a subject, or write in a neutral (analytical, detached) tone, almost never will they simply not care. As a result, answers such as “apathetic” and “indifferent,” which suggest a complete lack of interest, are almost always incorrect.
This also goes for P1/P2 relationship questions. Paired passages are selected for the test specifically because they have some sort of relationship — most often a conflicting relationship — to one another. If the authors were indifferent to one another’s subject matter, the passages never would have shown up on the test in the first place.
The primary exception to this rule comes in fiction passages. Fictional characters, unlike authors, can very well demonstrate a lack of interest in something during the course of a passage. If the text clearly indicates that is the case, you can and should pick an answer reflecting that fact.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 1, 2012 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Vocabulary
One of the cardinal rules of SAT sentence completions is that the closer you get to the end of the section, the less you can take for granted. On number one or two, or even three, you can be pretty sure that if a word doesn’t initially appear to fit the sentence, it’s not going to be the answer. The same does not hold true at the end of the section, however. Mindlessly eliminating words that seem obviously — perhaps too obviously — wrong can get you in a whole lot of trouble.
Sometimes the word that you want to show up just won’t be among the answer choices, and sometimes the right answer is something that never would have occurred to you, even if you’d spent ten minutes staring at the question. That’s why #8 is #8 and not #2. And that’s also why, as you get close to the end of a section, you need to be particularly on the lookout for words that are being used in their second or third meaning. Why? Because the people at ETS know that those are exactly the last words that it would occur to most test-takers to pick. Which is precisely why they’re likely to be correct.
The following question is a classic example of this kind of question. It’s also a question that lots of my students tend to get wrong.
The judges for the chili competition were ——-, noting subtle differences between dishes that most people would not detect.
(A) obscure
(B) deferential
(C) discriminating
(D) sanctimonious
(E) unrelenting
Most of my students don’t have much of a problem figuring out that the word that goes in the blank has to go along with the idea of “noting subtle differences” and that it has to be relatively positive. As a result, they’re usually pretty quick to cross out C because everyone knows that discrimination is a bad thing, especially on the political correctness-obsessed SAT. In other words, it doesn’t occur to them that they’re being played by the test, and it never even crosses their mind that “discriminating” might have another meaning. (As a side note, I feel obligated to mention here that people who read on a regular basis and are familiar with phrases like “a discriminating palette” don’t have any problem with this kind of question. It doesn’t even occur to them that it could be a “trick.”)
So there we have a problem: it’s not much help to know that second meanings are usually right if you can’t recognize them! Admittedly, there’s no surefire way around it. As a general rule of thumb, though, you need to pay particular attention to “easy” words on hard questions: if you’re on question #8 and see a simple, everyday word that you’ve known forever and that seems to obviously wrong, you need to think again. There’s a pretty good chance it’s being used in some other way. And if it’s being used some other way, there’s a very good chance it’s correct. That’s not to say that you should automatically pick it, but you shouldn’t be too quick to get rid of it either.
So remember: if you’re on sentence completion #8 and you think that a word sounds funny, it’s probably because someone at ETS wants you to think just that.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 31, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Because of the nature of my job, I tend to get a lot of students with very significant imbalances between their math and verbal scores. Most people scoring a 760 in Math without much prep just don’t bother with math tutors, although the same people sometimes find themselves stuck in the 600s or even the 500s in Reading and Writing. What I look at the (full) tests of students like these, however, what often strikes me the most is the difference between the sheer amount of stuff they’ve written in the Math sections vs. the CR sections.
Even just glancing at the math, I can see that they’ve really worked those problems out. In fact, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to do otherwise. There are equations scribbled all over the place. Maybe not for every question, but often enough for it to be clear that they haven’t been approaching the SAT like some kind of glorified guessing game but rather solving the problems. They might use their knowledge of a particular rule to eliminate answers quickly, but at no point have they simply decided to abandon working things out in favor of making a guess they hope will be right.
The same, alas, cannot be said for the Reading. Sure, they’ve probably underlined and circled some things in the passages, maybe written the main point and perhaps the tone, but the spaces next to the questions are totally and completely blank. Even if they’ve made an attempt to reason their way through the problem, they haven’t bothered to write down all the steps. More likely, though, it hasn’t really occurred to them that they *can* approach CR in more or less the same way they would approach Math What seems like an obvious way to work through a math problem seems far less obvious when applied to reading — especially since they’ve never been asked to think about reading in quite that way before.
What really gets me, though, is that even after I demonstrate — in some cases, multiple times — how to work through a CR question step by step like a math problem, writing down each part of the process and moving systematically through the choices when the answer isn’t initially obvious, they still refuse to even attempt to replicate the process on their own. (Actually, after I demonstrate the first time, they usually give me a look that says approximately, “Oh s–t! That looks like a lot of work. No way, there has to be an easier way to do it.” Um, no, there isn’t.) It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that this was how I got an 800, and that if they’re really serious about wanting one as well, they need to make themselves go through the entire process. They still want the magical shortcut that’ll get them a perfect score without having to work quite so hard. Guess what, folks: it doesn’t exist. The closest thing to a fail-safe technique I have for getting an 800 on CR is this, take or leave it.
So having said that, I want to work through what is quite possibly the hardest CR question I know of — one that absolutely demands to be worked out like an equation and that pretty much every student I’ve ever had, no matter how high they ultimately scored, screwed up on. (True confession: I actually had to look at the answer the first time I saw it. It was only when I went back that I was able to work out the reasoning behind it). It’s from the College Board Test 4, section 6, question 20, p. 592.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I would actually write all of my reasoning down. Note that I constantly, quasi-obsessively reiterate both what the question is asking and the point of the paragraph. It may seem excessive, but it’s necessary. It’s the only way to leave no room for error.
Paragraph 2
Things that live by night live outside the realm of “normal” time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good, people who have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms. Also night is when we dream, and so reality is warped. After all, we do not see very well at night, we do not need to. But that makes us nearly defenseless after dark. Although we are accustomed to mastering our world by day , in the night we become vulnerable as prey. Thinking of bats as masters of the night threatens the safety we daily take for granted. Though we are at the top of our food chain, if we had to live alone in the rain forest, say, and protect ourselves against roaming predators, we would live partly in terror, as our ancestors did. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw – a ghoul.
Which of the following assertions detracts LEAST from the author’s argument in the second paragraph (lines 25-42)?
(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer’s personal life
Solution:
1. Since the question is phrased in a somewhat convoluted manner, we need to make sure that we are absolutely clear about what is actually being asked before we do anything else. The question is asking us which option detracts LEAST.
That means that the four incorrect answers will detract from (go against) the argument and the correct answer will not detract from the argument.
It does not, however, mean that the correct option will SUPPORT the argument. Just because an idea does not explicitly go against an argument does not mean that it supports it; there might just be no relationship.
So we are simply looking for something that does not contradict the argument.
2. The next step is to determine what the argument actually is. While the question gives us a lot of lines to read, they can be pretty much summed up AND WRITTEN DOWN as follows:
-Humans sleep @ night and think it’s normal, get scared by stuff that’s awake @ night b/c = abnormal.
-Bats don’t sleep @ night, THUS: B/c bats assoc. w/dark = scary.
Notice that I’ve crammed down the paragraph into just the essential, disregarding the details entirely.
3. Before we look at the answers, we need to consider very clearly what we are looking for. The question asks us to find the answer that does NOT explicitly contradict the idea that bats & stuff @ night = scary. It might not support that idea, but it won’t go against it either. So now we consider the answers.
(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
If many people work at night and sleep during the day, they go against typical patterns. But that happens all the time and people don’t get scared. So that DOES detract from the idea that night is only for scary stuff, and we can eliminate the answer.
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
Again, owls go against normal human patterns but NOT scary. So that also detracts from the idea that night = scary stuff. It can be eliminated.
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
But scary stuff is supposed to happen @ night, not during the day. So that detracts from the idea that scary stuff just comes out @ night. It can be eliminated.
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
This is dealing with the other main point in the paragraph: bats = scary. But if bats are really so scary for everyone, then they shouldn’t be associated w/positive qualities. So this DOES detract from the idea that bats = scary. It can be eliminated as well.
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer’s personal life
Since we’ve reasoned through the other options and have determined that they cannot be correct, this must be right. But before we pick it, we’re going to double check it against the original question to make sure that it works. This is part of the whole “not leaving yourself any room for error” thing, and if you want to certain, you can’t leave this step out.
We know that the right answer will not detract from the idea that bats/night = scary, and this option has nothing whatsoever to do with that idea. And if it has nothing to do with that idea, it can detract from it. It does, however, support the idea that bats/night = scary; it just does NOT detract from it. So it’s right.
Most of my students groan when I explain the logic to them; it seems so ridiculously convoluted. And such an outrageous amount of work. But there is no other way to figure it out. Even if some people can get the answer very fast, they’re still going through the entire process — they’re just doing it at warp speed.
Now to be fair, this question is very extreme. Most don’t have anywhere near this level of complexity. The problem is that there are always a couple of outliers that have something close to it, and those are the questions that separate the 800s from the mid-700s. I’ll admit that working like this does not initially feel natural. It can be time consuming (although in reality no more time consuming than staring blankly at the answers), but it’s also the sort of thing that gets faster the more you practice it. You have to be able to do it before you can do do it fast. Even if you screw it up the first few (or twenty) times you try to do it, practicing the approach is what counts. You’re dealing with the SAT in terms of what it’s actually testing — your ability to reason your way logically through complex material — and that’ll get you a lot further than looking at it just about any other way.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Dec 18, 2011 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
As I’ve said before, I’m generally suspicious when people claim to have timing issues on Critical Reading. While I certainly appreciate that some people read much faster than others and do work on timing when necessary, the time itself is almost never the real root of the problem. Upon doing a bit of probing, I typically discover one of two things:
1) The student has genuine comprehension issues, weak vocabulary skills, and rereads portions of a passage three or four times just trying to understand what’s literally being said. Ditto for the answer choices.
2) The student has solid comprehension skills but an incomplete understanding of what they’re looking for when they read the passages. Like the students in the first category, they tend to waste a lot of time staring at answer choices and trying to distinguish between them without really understanding how to relate them back to the passage. Equipped with some tools for understanding just what to look out for, however, they tend to get rid of their timing issues very quickly.
If you fall into category #2, this post is for you.
Part of the problem for people in this category often comes from not fully understanding what line references mean: if a question refers to “the historians in line 18,” that only means that the word “historians” appears in line 18 — not that the answer to the question is in line 18. The answer could be anywhere.
Usually, this type of misunderstanding plays out in the following way:
You encounter a question that says something like, “In lines 25-37, the author’s description of photo albums serves primarily to,” and so of course you go and read lines 25-37 because those are the lines that the question gave you.
But when you read lines 25-37 and then look at the answers, nothing seems to work. At that point, you start to wonder whether you were missing something.
There are a couple of answers that just totally don’t make sense, so you cross those off, but out of the two or three answers you have left, it seems any of them could work. So you go back and read lines 25-37 again, trying to match them to one of the answers. But it still seems terribly ambiguous.
At that point, you go back and start to read the lines again, only now you realize that you’re wasting an awful lot of time on the question and start to skim through without really knowing what you’re looking for.
Then you start to think, “well maybe if I interpret it this way, it could be (B).” The author must be trying to suggest it without really saying so directly. Yeah, that must be it. So you pick B and move on but still really aren’t sure. Your mind keeps going back to it as you work through the rest of the questions in for that passage, so your concentration is compromised, and you end up missing other things that you could have gotten right.
When this happens, there’s a really good chance that the answer was actually spelled out for you somewhere around line 23. Why? Because the question was asking you what purpose the lines served (i.e. what point did they support?), not what the lines themselves said, and usually the information necessary to determine that purpose is found before the lines themselves. In these cases, the lines are only important insofar as they relate to that point — for the purposes of answering the question, they’re virtually irrelevant.
Plenty of times, of course, it doesn’t work that way, and the answer can in fact be found in the given lines. The problems is that just as often they can’t, and you really have no way of knowing in advance which category a particular question will fall into before you actually look at the passage.
So if you’re a slow-ish reader and don’t want to waste time by always backing up and reading a sentence or two before, try this: read the lines you’re given, and see whether you can definitely answer the question from what you’ve read. Not, “well if I interpret it this way, (C) might kind of work,” but “the answer must be A because this passage says xyz.” If you can’t answer the question from those lines you’ve been given, there’s a good chance the answer isn’t there. And if it isn’t there, it has has to be located someplace else. Your job is to locate that someplace else: if it isn’t right before, it’s probably right after. It doesn’t matter if it takes a little more time to go back and read that extra bit; there’s essentially no other way to determine the answer, and you’ll be far worse served if you just keep looking at the lines given in the question. Just keep in mind that if your comprehension skills really are good, the problem is most likely not that you’ve overlooked something or didn’t interpret the lines in the way the SAT wanted you to. It’s just that the answer was probably never there in the first place.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 24, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The SAT makes people do some strange things. I think it’s safe to say that in everyday life, most people don’t pick up a book, open to a random page, start reading in the middle of a sentence, and then wonder why they don’t fully understand what’s going on. Barring some sort of bizarre circumstances, it just doesn’t happen. But it happens constantly on the SAT.
Now, I fully admit there are some aspects of SAT Reading that are different from the types of reading most test-takers have been asked to thus far, but contrary to conventional test-prep wisdom, SAT Reading is not completely detached from the normal act of reading. That means that you need to read words and phrases within the larger context of the sentences where they appear. Always.
I realize that this is one of those pieces of advice that might sound pretty obvious, but please just hear me out. One of the biggest mistakes that I see my students consistently make when they answer Critical Reading questions is to focus only on the word/phrase/line references given and ignore the surrounding information — which is what they actually need to read in order to answer the question correctly. Not backing up and starting from a sentence or two above is bad enough, but actually starting in the middle of the sentence has the potential to cause a lot of problems.
For example (passage excerpt):
…Now that I am passionately involved with thinking critically about Black people and representation, I can confess that those walls of photographs empowered me, and that I feel their absence in my life. Right now I long for those walls, those curatorial spaces in the home that express our will to make and display images.
Question:
In line 26, “absence” refers metaphorically to a lack of a
(A) constraining force
(B) cluttered space
(C) negative influence
(D) sustaining tradition
(E) joyful occasion
By SAT standards, the question is right in the middle of the road difficulty-wise. In fact, it’s a level 3. The reason that people tend to get into trouble with questions like it, however, is as follows: the question refers specifically to the word “absence,” then tells us that the word appears in line 26 — a piece of information that leads most people to begin reading at the word “absence” in line 26, then continue down to the rest of the paragraph (and often, when they can’t find the answer, to the paragraph below it).
In other words, they start reading halfway through the sentence, but they’re so focused on the word “absence” that it never even occurs to them that they might be missing something important. And once they hit the phrase “curatorial spaces,” they so hung up on the fact that they don’t quite understand what it means that it never occurs to them that they might be missing something a lot more straightforward.
The problem is that the answer is found in the first part of the sentence: the photographs were absent, and they empowered the narrator. Empowered = sustaining (more or less), hence (D). (The beginning of the passage also makes quite clear that those photographs were an important tradition in her family.) But if you don’t read the beginning of the sentence, you miss the context and end up going in the completely wrong direction. In addition, the word “absence” usually has negative connotations, which means that in the absence of context, you’re a lot more likely to pick (A), (B), or (C). If you go back and see that the photographs were “empowering,” however,” you won’t fall into that trap.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 9, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
Granted I’m no math expert, but from following some of the debates over just why SAT Math is so difficult, it seems to me that there’s a very fundamental difference between that section and Critical Reading — a difference that accounts for a lot of the trouble many people have in raising their CR score as compared to raising their Math score.
From what I gather (and please correct me if I’m wrong), many of the difficulties that people encounter on the Math section stem from the fact that the SAT requires them to deal with relatively familiar concepts in highly unfamiliar ways, and to combine and apply principles in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. The specifics of the test might be different from what they’ve seen in school and can often be very hard, but the general principles behind them aren’t fundamentally new for most people who’ve gone through a couple of years of algebra and geometry. So even they miss a question because they’re used to solving for x instead of (x-y), they’ve still seen plenty of problems in math class that involve variables and parentheses.
The Critical Reading section is different. For a lot of high school students, it’s the verbal equivalent of BC Calculus rather than algebra and geometry. In other words, it tests material of a level and content that they have never actually been exposed to, and it requires them to maneuver with it in ways that they’ve never encountered in school. Even in AP English.
Consider this: in sophomore and junior English class, the average American high school student probably reads a Shakespeare play or two and a handful of classics such as Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and maybe some Thoreau, Austen, Dickens, or in an advanced class, Joyce. The point is that pretty much all of it is fictional, and it’s usually set in an English-speaking country sometime in the past. SAT passages, on the other hand, are largely non-fiction and are drawn from contemporary sources — books that were published in the last couple of decades and that include subject matter only the most sophisticated independent high school readers will have even a passing familiarity with: art and media criticism, anthropology, cognitive science, and method acting to name a few. The novels that do appear are just as likely to be written by a nineteenth century Russian author as by a twentieth-century American one, and often the cultural milieux and scenarios are wildly unfamiliar.
The other piece of this is the level at which most of the texts are written — at the risk of sounding reductive, if SAT Math is essentially middle school competition math, as some people have asserted, then Critical Reading is essentially introductory-level college reading. Those texts those passages are taken from are not written specifically to test high school students’ reading ability (even though ETS will often edit them to make them somewhat more digestible) — they’re either written by professional academics for other professional academics, or by specialists in a subject for educated adult readers. And they sound like it.
It seems fair to say that most high school students have simply never been asked to deal with a text that reads like the following: “The question “Why have there been no great women artists?” is simply the top of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky ideas about the nature of art and the situation of its making, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this…Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art.” (from Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” featured on the October 2009 SAT.)
The syntax of last part in particular is so unfamiliar that it tends to stop a lot of kids cold: “Basic to question…?” Are you even allowed to start a sentence that way? (Yes, you are.) And that first sentence is really long — isn’t it a run-on? (No, it isn’t, it’s ok to have a sentence that long.) And why does it have to sound so confusing? (Because that’s just how academics write.) The only way you get comfortable dealing with sentences like that is to read lots of them. There’s no shortcut, no trick. If you haven’t been regularly exposed to people who talk and think and write like that, the reality is that you just can’t compensate in a few weeks or even a few months. Most of the major test-prep companies do not even acknowledge the presence of this level/type of passage when they write their own materials, which is part of why people often get shocked by the difficulty of the real test.
The other problem is that most English classes revolve primarily around discussions, which are easily tuned out, and papers, which can be pulled together with minimal effort via a combination of Sparknotes and Wikipedia. The teacher might give a couple of quizzes just to make sure people are doing their reading, but those are easily dealt with.
In terms of rhetoric, figures such as metaphors and personification might be covered, but that’s about it. Rarely if never are students asked to study how the text functions at its most basic level: how form and syntax and diction all work together to create meaning. Rather, the meaning itself is taken as the starting point for discussion (What do you think about that? Do you agree? Disagree? How does it relate to your own life?). The notion that a text is a rhetorical construction designed to elicit a particular reaction from the reader never enters into play. So it’s no wonder that Critical Reading, whose questions tend to revolve around the relationship between form and meaning, comes as a shock. Besides, if you’ve always been asked for your own personal interpretation in English class, the idea that your own personal interpretation is totally and utterly irrelevant on the SAT can be hard to stomach.
Finally, most high school students are never introduced to the notion that different kinds of texts require different kinds of reading. Because they are only exposed to literary fiction in English class, they develop the idea that “real” reading involves carefully underlining and annotating and note-taking and “analyzing” (although a lot of these supposedly careful readers display a remarkably weak grasp of what the passages as well as the questions are actually saying). As a matter of fact, it isn’t uncommon for students to take offense when I ask them to try reading for the main ideas and skimming over everything else; they consider it a betrayal of everything they’ve been taught and take it as further evidence of the stupidity of standardized testing.
And if the test is so stupid, why would you waste your time studying for it anyway?
