by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 5, 2011 | Blog, Issues in Education, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
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…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 1, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
I find that it can sometimes help to think of the SAT as the standardized-testing equivalent of a parlor trick, a sleight of hand if you will. Questions that appear at first glance to be exceedingly complicated can often be solved quickly and simply, and answers that would initially seem to be located in a particular place may be located somewhere else entirely. One of the places where this gap is most striking involves the line references that accompany most Critical Reading questions.
On one hand, it’s rather generous of ETS to at least be willing to tell you where to look — unlike, for example, the writers of the ACT, who basically leave you to fend for yourself in terms of figuring out where information is located. On the other hand, however, line references are not always quite the gift that they appear to be. As a matter of fact, in some cases they can be downright misleading. In order to understand why, it helps to understand just what the SAT is and is not doing when a specific line reference appears.
Take, for example, the following question:
The author’s attitude toward the “subfield” (line 65) is best characterized as one of:
(A) approval
(B) curiosity
(C) uncertainty
(D) surprise
(E) dismay
A question that is phrased this way is giving us exactly one piece of information: that the word “subfield” appears in line 65. The question is not, however, telling us that the information necessary to answer the question — information that will reveal the author’s attitude about the subfield — is in line 65. Now, the answer will most likely be in the general vicinity of line 65, but we don’t know where. It might come before, but it also might come after. In other words, it may be in line 63. Or 61. Or 68. It might even be in line 59 or line 70.
This is because the question is not asking us about the subfield itself. It is only concerned with the subfield insofar as it relates to the author’s opinion of it. Establishing the author’s tone is what counts; without it, there is no effective way to answer the question.
What this means, practically speaking, is that if you’ve spent your time carefully marking line 65 and the answer comes five lines earlier, you’re out of luck. Especially if you start at a particular line and keep on reading without considering that the answer might precede the line in question.
I’m not suggesting that marking line references is completely worthless, just that it shouldn’t be overestimated as a strategy. Yes, it can very effective in terms of making you focus on the text, but used alone, it does have its limits. When people get 800s using it, they pull in other skills subconsciously as well. It’s fine to tell yourself to read carefully around a particular area, but if you’re just reading carefully without really knowing what you’re reading carefully for, you might end up wasting a huge amount of time.
Yes, many questions can be answered by looking only at the lines cited in the questions, but many others cannot. On the SAT, it’s the big picture — the relationship between detail and context — that generally counts. And assiduously marking line references just for the sake of marking line references will not give you that relationship; you still have to take the time to figure it out on your own.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 24, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
One of the most telling exchanges I can have with a student typically goes something like this:
Me: So what’s the author saying in lines 34-37?
Student: Umm…. So I feel like the author is trying to say…
Me: Ok, but the question isn’t asking about what you feel like the author is saying. Look back at the passage and tell me exactly what the author is saying. As in word for word.
At which point the student typically glances back at the lines, pulls out a random phrase or two, and then gives me a look that clearly says “So what?” (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 11, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
I’m writing this in response to the SAT Reading vs. Math post over at Kitchen Table Math. In case you don’t want to read the entire post, the gist of it was essentially that college tend to be more impressed by high Critical Reading scores than they are by high Math scores because SAT Reading scores essentially can’t be raised through tutored (although Catherine was nice enough to cite me as the exception to that rule!). So, as someone who spends a good deal of time on this purportedly impossible task, my response to the assertion that CR is somehow un-tutorable would be no and yes. Or rather, it depends.
Before I launch into my reasons, however, I’d like to say that tutoring CR is one of the hardest parts of my job. For starters, it’s completely exhausting — I spent about three-and-a-half hours one day this past weekend just doing CR (one of those hours was devoted *just* to working on how to determine a main point), and I had to go home and sleep afterward. Teaching CR ruins me for the day; it wears me out mentally so much that I often just have to wander around the city aimlessly for a few hours to recover.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy teaching it, and when I finally have a breakthrough with someone, it’s hugely rewarding. But it is hard. I think that this is because teaching CR– at least the way I do it — is not just about the SAT; it’s actually about teaching people to read closely (“Don’t tell me approximately what the author says. Look at the passage — no, look at the passage — and tell me exactly what the author is saying. Exactly as in word for word.”) and to draw relationships between specific words and their functions or the more abstract categories they represent (“Yes, the passage talks specifically about women artists, but the fact that they’re referred to as a group of individuals in the answer choice doesn’t mean you should eliminate it. Think about whom that phrase is referring to”). A few of my students see these relationships naturally. Most do not. Some lack the decoding skills to even begin to draw these relationships, but the majority fall some somewhere in between.
But back to the original question: when it tutoring effective for raising a CR score, and when is it not?
My first response would be, “define raise.” Are we talking 50 points? 100 points? 200 points? Most people will get something out of high-quality tutoring, but it’s probably unrealistic to expect someone with a 550 to try for an 800 — at least in the short term. And the higher scores go, the harder it is to raise them — the margin of error is so tiny, sometimes even a question or two out of 67, that it almost comes down to chance. (For the record, I have gotten people from the mid-600s to 800, but they had virtually no comprehension problems and were willing to work very, very carefully and do everything I said).
The second thing I would say is that the crucial factor isn’t the person’s baseline score but rather their actual skill at understanding relationships between words (for sentence completions) and comprehending the meaning of relatively sophisticated texts. Kids who have no trouble understanding what the passages are literally saying but who work too quickly and fall for wrong answers because they don’t read carefully or think through the questions probably have at least the potential to score in the high 600s or 700s. I’ve had students in this category who started around 500 (junior PSAT) and ended up close to 700 (senior SAT).
On the other hand, someone with a poor vocabulary and trouble perceiving relationships between words, plus weak comprehension skills is probably not going to make it past 600 with strategy-based tutoring alone. If the person is willing to spend very significant amounts of time reading and working on vocabulary independently, that’s a different story, but that is not realistically the case for most high school juniors. I’ve helped students in that situation move from the low to the high 500s, but they all got stuck below the 600 line. In that case, the SAT does precisely what it was designed to do: it reveals persistent weaknesses in comprehension, and there’s really no way to “beat” it past a certain point.
So in general, I think that high-quality CR tutoring can be effective insofar as it allows people to take the fullest advantage of the reading skills they do have. But the “600” and “700 walls” are there for a reason — students who don’t read much on their own and who don’t really understand how texts work (how authors play with language to convey a point, how very common words can be used in unexpected ways to mean different things, and how specific phrasings relate to broader concepts), and no amount of test-prep alone will typically get them past it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The infamous marshmallow test popped up again today in the New York Times. For those of you unfamiliar with the experiment, a group of four year-olds were given the choice between receiving one marshmallow that they could eat immediately and waiting 30 seconds for a second marshmallow. More than a decade later, their standardized-test performance was tracked, with some rather remarkable results:
The difference between a 4-year-old who can wait 30 seconds for a marshmallow, and one who can wait 15 minutes was 210 points on the SAT,” (neuroscientist Jonah) Lehrer reported. He stressed that the key to success – in test-taking, in college and beyond – is discipline, and the key to discipline is, rather ironically, learning to distract oneself. As evidence, he mentioned the children who had been successful in resisting temptation: those who turned their backs on treats or closed their eyes.
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that you’re doomed on the SAT if you were in fact the sort of four year-old who just couldn’t bear to wait an extra 30 seconds for a marshmallow. Even if you’ve never had a problem with delayed gratification, it still wouldn’t hurt to take Lehrer’s words to heart, particularly when it comes to Critical Reading.
You see, vocabulary weaknesses aside, the single biggest stumbling block for relatively high scorers (650-700) who want to make it into the stratosphere (750-800) is the unwillingness to delay gratification — that is, to avoid looking at the answer choices until after they’ve worked out the entire problem for themselves, and to avoid jumping to a particular answer just so that they can get the question over with and move on. They simply assume — repeatedly and incorrectly — that they’ll always be able to identify the correct answer when they read through the options. They therefore see no reason to cross things out or mark them or sum them up and right them down… Frankly, that’s unpleasant. It takes, well, work. Besides they’re getting pretty much everything right already. And they want that marshmallow now. That’s why their scores have a nasty tendency to plateau, leading to frustration and an even stronger desire to just get it over with. Cue the vicious cycle.
So if this happens to apply to you, remember: the answer choices are there to distract you. They’re written to sound entirely plausible, even if they’re completely preposterous. The best way to distract yourself from falling for those distractions (!) is to work systematically through every step of the problem and determine as much as you can about the correct answer so that you can’t be fooled when you look at the answer choices. Take the extra five or ten or even thirty seconds. You’ll probably get more questions right. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get yourself a marshmallow either. I’m sure you could use the sugar rush;)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 14, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
The more time I spend tutoring, the more I become aware of the need for flexibility in my approach. The truth is that no one technique will work for everyone, and rigidly insisting on a strategy that simply doesn’t make sense to a student is likely a recipe for a disaster. I once got fired from a tutoring company because I refused to stick to its “script,” and although I was initially upset about losing the work, I realized that the job never would have worked out anyway. People think too differently, (mis)interpret things in too many ways, and have too many quirks for a one-size-fits-all approach to be effective — and if I’ve learned one thing from all this tutoring, it’s that you can basically *never* assume that someone will automatically understand a passage or sentence or turn of phrase in the way the SAT requires them to understand it.
I think that a lot of Critical Reading prep is ineffective because it’s based on the assumption that people will of course be able to understand the literal meaning of the passage with relatively little effort. While I’ve certainly worked with plenty of students who do fall into this category (and for whom test prep essentially consists of being reminded endlessly to slow down, work methodically through the questions, and go back to the passage to check out the answers), I think that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most people who are capable of understanding exactly — not just approximately — what the passages are saying and of nailing the main point on their own will typically score in the 650+ range with little to no prep, but needless to say, the average CR score is nowhere near 650 (it’s actually about 150 points lower).
Anyway, I digress. The point I’m attempting to make is that if you 1) are a slow reader who just can’t seem to finish CR sections in time, and 2) don’t always fully understand what the passages are saying, then reading the passage, trying the main point, and only then looking at the questions might not be the best strategy for you sometimes. It might work on the shorter passages, but on the longer ones — and especially on Passage 1/Passage 2 — it’s just going to be way too time consuming. You’ll get confused an bogged down and start to panic, then slow down even more.
Now, I am *not* going to suggest you read the questions first — if you do that, you’re almost certainly going to miss important contextual pieces of information when you go back to the passage, and because you’ll only have a partial view of things, you’ll overlook answers that would otherwise be much more straightforward.
What I am going to suggest, however, is a compromise, namely that you answer the questions while you read the passage . So you read, say, the first paragraph and answer perhaps the first question, maybe the second. The you read another short chunk, answer the next question or two, and so on. If it helps you to look ahead at the line numbers in the next couple of questions before you read, just to give yourself a sense of how far you need to go in order to be able to answer, by all means do so, but try not to avoid reading the question itself — you won’t approach the passage with a clear mind, and you risk being so focused on the question that you can’t actually absorb what the author is saying.
If you need to focus on the detail questions first and skip over the “big picture” ones until you’ve finished the passage, that’s fine. In fact, you’ll probably have to work this way. But doing the detail questions first will allow you to get to more questions than you might be able to otherwise — you also won’t be sacrificing questions you could answer in order to spend time pondering questions you’re really not sure about. And the more you see that you can actually finish sections in time, the calmer you’ll be approaching the test.
Note, however, that this is simply a strategy for getting yourself to answer more questions more quickly — it doesn’t mean that you can just coast. The answers to many questions are still unlikely to be in the actual lines given, and you may still have to go back and read above and below in order to determine the answer. Transitions, “interesting” punctuation, and strong language are still of utmost importance. So is trying to get a general sense of what the answer might be before you look at the choices (or, at the very least, immediately eliminating all answers that don’t make sense in context). But if you keep these things in mind and break the passage/questions into small, manageable bits, you might find that things get a lot easier.
