The shortcut *is* the test

by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 4, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

Among critics of the SAT, “shortcut” is often viewed as a bad word. Doing well on the SAT, they claim dismissively, is only a matter of learning the right shortcuts (like reading the questions before the passage), which of course have nothing to do with any sort of understanding beyond the SAT.

While I disagree with part two of that statement (the skills tested on the SAT extend far beyond the test itself), I actually agree completely with part one — I’ll even take it a step further. Not only is doing well on the SAT a matter of learning the right tricks, but the right tricks — the real ones, the ones that allow you get the answer to what appear to be incredibly complex questions at warp speed — *are* the test.

But unlike the SAT’s critics, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Here’s why: there’s almost no way to answer those types of questions efficiently and with certainty unless you have an absolutely, totally, crystal clear understanding of what they are in fact asking you to do and of what skills or concepts are required to solve them. The ability to apply a shortcut is thus a reflection of the ability to instantaneously pinpoint the requisite knowledge and to apply it in ways that might not seem immediately obvious to the majority of test takers, who will plod obligingly through each answer, weighing its pros and cons and pondering whether it’s some kind of trick.

In other words, your ability to answer questions is actually a reflection of your knowledge (shocking, I know). And if test-prep teaches you something about the ways in which arguments are put together, so be it.

Let me give an example from Critical Reading. Consider the following question:

The author does which of the following in lines 25-27?

Lines 25-27 read as follows: “They were saying that pulling on the rope need not make the bell ring. The bell itself — the mind — could stop it.”

(A) Employs a previously used comparison to explain a newly introduced idea
(B) Cites an aforementioned study to disprove a recently published claim
(C) Signals a digression from the main line of the argument
(D) Invokes figurative language to note the drawbacks of an approach
(E) Uses personification to explain the intricacies of a theory

Seems like you have absolutely nothing to go on, right? No context, no information, zip, zilch, nada.

Think again.

This is actually a rhetorical strategy question, which means that you don’t actually need any context to answer it — you don’t even really have to understand precisely what it’s saying. You just need to get a sense of where it might fit into a larger argument, and what role it might play in either developing or refuting that argument.

The key phrase here is, “They were saying.” Pretty much the only time someone would use the phrase “they were saying” would be if they wanted to clarify or to explain another idea — that is by definition the function of that phrase, the only reason it would be used in the first place.

So it is necessary to look for an answer that contains one of those words. The only option that suggest that function is (A) because it includes the word “explain.”

Now, is it necessary to go back and double check that the comparison in question has already been used? Yes, of course, but that one word, “explain,” is almost enough to nail it. You might think that one phrase is just too little to go on to get the right answer, that you couldn’t really be sure unless you read everything else in those lines plus all the answer choices carefully, but in fact that would be unnecessary. The question is testing whether you recognize the function of the information presented, and that phrase is the only thing that gives away its function. If you can recognize that, you can answer the question in a couple of seconds. A shortcut? Yes. But easy… well, if you can do that without too much trouble, that’s a pretty good sign that you can ace the test.

Just look, don’t read

by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 1, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

Making things look more complicated than they are is one of the SAT’s specialties, and nowhere is this more apparent than on questions that look like the following:

Unlike the author of Passage 1, the author of Passage 2

(A) criticizes a practice
(B) offers an example
(C) proposes a solution
(D) states an opinion
(E) quotes an expert

When confronted with something like this, most people react in one of two highly inefficient ways:

1) They stare at the answers, convinced that if they just think about it long enough, they’ll remember just what Passage 2 contained that Passage 1 didn’t.

Needless to say (I hope), this is not the most effective way of working. Most people’s memories are not nearly as reliable as they’d like to think, and furthermore, most people’s memories are considerably less reliable than normal when they’ve been up since 6 a.m. and are taking a test that has the potential to impact the rest of their lives.

2) They start checking out all of the answers in order, reading first through one passage and then the other for each option and trying to decide just what constitutes, say, “offering an example”

While this a considerably more reliable strategy than #1 — given enough time, a good number of people will actually come up with the correct answer this way — it’s also very time consuming and tends to leave open the possibility of reading too much into the answer choices. And just to reiterate: the SAT is not asking whether maybe possibly you might be able to understand a particular line as “offering an example.” It is asking you to identify a straightforward, concrete, indisputable distinction between the two texts. (As a side note, it’s actually an important skill: how an author chooses to argue his or her point is often crucial to the validity of his or her argument. But unfortunately, you don’t get to care about that on the SAT.) The keyword here is straightforward.

Typically, the College Board will include answer choices that range from the highly concrete (quotes an expert) to the relatively abstract (criticizes a practice). The more abstract the option, the more it is open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, and the more crucial it is that you be capable of making precise distinctions between ideas (e.g. example vs. criticism vs. solution).

The trick, however, is to save yourself the trouble of worrying about the more abstract options by focusing on the more concrete ones first. More often than not, the correct answer will actually among them. And the beauty (?) of it is that checking them out requires you to neither read nor think! Usually, the more concrete options include quotes (quoting an expert), question marks (asking rhetorical questions), and the word “I” (personal anecdote). To check them out, all you have to have to do is scan — not read! — the passage or passages for these visual cues. You don’t need to read anything, just look. If you see quotes in one passage but not the other, that’s almost certainly the answer. The whole thing takes about ten seconds. No going back and forth, no deliberating, no angst, just right to the answer.

By the way, your ability to use this kind of logical shortcut is a big part of what the SAT tests. Yes, there are other ways to get the right answer, but working this way leaves you clearheaded to deal with the questions that require a lot more thinking. You don’t get tired and distracted, and consequently you’re less likely to to make silly mistakes or overlook obvious things on other parts of the test. Because that’s what gets most people: lots of small errors that accumulate just enough to really hurt. The real trick is to prevent yourself from being in a position to make them.

How to concentrate on boring Critical Reading passages

by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 6, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

As pretty much anyone with more than five minutes of SAT prep experience knows, Critical Reading passages are not exactly chosen for their phenomenal entertainment value. Ecotourism? Snooze. Whale play? Who cares. Copepods? Even I had to force myself to stay awake for that one. (Incidentally, when I was writing lots of reading material, I used a couple of passages that were so boring I actually had trouble mustering sufficient focus to write questions about them! Having to answer the questions may be bad, but I can assure you that writing them can be far, far more excruciating.)

So yes, while occasionally you’ll stumble across a passage on a topic that holds your interest for more than, say, a second-and-a-half, the majority of the time that just won’t be the case. Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the questions, regardless of how much of the passage you’ve tuned out, and if you spend too much time reading and re-reading, desperately trying to absorb everything that’s going on, you’ll already be behind time-wise when you start the questions. Besides, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend reading if you’re not really absorbing anything.

So what’s the solution? Stop trying to understand everything (at least for the first read-through) and just focus on something else: finding the main idea, the tone, and the stuff that the author indicates is important (explanations, italics, anything with the words “important” or the “the goal,” “the point,” etc.). If you actively look for something as you read, it’s a whole lot harder to tune out as you go through the process.

As I’ve written about before, the content of most Critical Reading passages is in some ways deeply irrelevant — that is, provided that you can grasp the basics, it doesn’t really matter what the author happens to be saying, only how s/he structures the argument. If you start reading for function, content becomes secondary.

So say you’re trying to slog through that awful passage about copepods (or something equally hideous), stop reading carefully as soon as you figure out what the basic idea is, and just start worrying about the role that each new paragraph plays — and that’s information you can get in the first couple of sentences. If you see “for example” or “for instance,” that means that the paragraph is pretty much going to support an idea; if you see “however,” or “despite,” that’s a pretty good indicator that the rest of the paragraph is going to refute an idea. Then you can just skim through the rest of it to make sure nothing new and important gets introduced.

If it helps you to do so, you can also write something like “support” or “refute” or “explain” next to the paragraph, just to keep yourself paying attention and give you an outline of the argument. Furthermore, when you get a question about why the author included a particular piece of information in that paragraph, all you’ll have to do is look at your note: if the point of the paragraph is to support, chances are the right answer will start with a positive word; if the point of the paragraph is to disagree, chances are it’ll start with a negative word. It won’t matter if you haven’t gotten every last detail — you’ll have the bit picture, which you can use to make a reasonable guess, and on the SAT that’s what really counts.

Will this give you the answer to every question? Of course not. I’m simplifying a bit here. But you might be surprised at how often working this way 1) keeps you focused, and 2) gets you close to the right answer, even if you’re not really certain you understood everything you read.

Don’t guess, figure it out

by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 22, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

I’m not opposed to guessing on the SAT. Really I’m not. If you’re actually taking the test, find yourself stuck between two answers, and have a really strong sense that it might be one of them, I generally say to go for it. In my experience, most people have pretty decent instincts, and even if they can’t always put their finger on just why the answer is the answer, their gut instincts usually turns out to be right. In those cases, not guessing is more of a problem.

What I’m opposed to is the notion that the SAT should be treated like some sort of guessing game; that just because there are multiple answers, it shouldn’t be necessary to actually learn how to answer the questions; and that SAT prep should primarily consist of learning how to eliminate answers and play the odds, hoping that if you can get rid of a couple of answers, you’ll get lucky enough to hit the right one often enough to get you a decent score.

The problem with that approach is that it fails to recognize the relationship between question and answer. And as I’ve said before, the presence of multiple answer choices doesn’t make the right answer any less right, or the process of actually learning how to answer the questions any less necessary.

The highest scorers, the ones who score 750 and above, aren’t the best guessers — they’re the ones who know how to figure out the answers for real. In order to accept that idea in regard to Critical Reading, however, you must first accept that the answers aren’t simply a matter of opinion and that there is actually a concrete, logical process that one can employ in order to arrive at the correct one. Once you’ve done that, you’re on your way.

So what this boils down to is one very simple piece of advice: when you’re studying for the SAT and come across a question you’re unsure of how to answer, don’t guess! Stop timing yourself, forget about finishing the section, and try to work through the question.

Experiment — if one approach doesn’t work, try something else. If you’re doing reading, keep going back and forth between the passage and the question. Someone recently sent me one of the hardest CR questions I’ve ever seen, and I must have gone back and forth about twenty times, no exaggeration. No matter how frustrated I got, I kept reminding myself to stick to the process, and eventually I arrived at the answer.

One thing I have to occasionally remind my students of is that I’m not some sort of magician when it comes to the SAT. Even though I can often answer questions almost instantaneously, I’m still going through the entire process of figuring out exactly what the question is asking, going back to the text, summing up the answer in my own words, and writing it down — I’m just doing it really fast. But I almost never skip steps, and when I do, I sometimes get questions wrong (at which point I hold myself up as an example of why you should never skip steps). Occasionally, I also start from faulty premises and work through an entire question, only to discover that the answer I’ve come up with isn’t there. At that point, I start all over by reevaluating my initial assumption, and I usually make my students watch me rework the question from scratch, just to show them that sometimes there actually isn’t a shortcut.

But regardless, chances are, any form of logic you apply to the question will get you somewhere. The SAT is in part designed to test whether you can use the knowledge you do have to deduce the answers to material that is in all likelihood unfamiliar. The College Board doesn’t necessary expect you to have memorized the definition of “multifarious,” but they do expect you to be able to figure out that “multi” means “many” and make an educated guess based on that knowledge. The bottom line is that you need to practice developing the idea that the SAT isn’t about guessing. When you don’t see the answer immediately, you’re far better served by stopping and thinking the question through carefully and methodically than by leaping to guess. If you have to spend half an hour on a single question, fine. You’ll get faster eventually. All that counts is that you learn something process-related that you can apply to working through other questions in the future. Otherwise, to invoke the old cliché, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Be as literal as you possibly can

by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 20, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

Occasionally, ETS comes out with a question that is so utterly diabolical in its simplicity that I have to give them major kudos for it. Debbie Stier sent me this question, and when I first looked at it, I was puzzled for a moment, but when the answer hit me, I felt obliged to write about it. It’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of just how absolutely and completely literal it is necessary to be when doing SAT Critical Reading questions.

I really cannot emphasize this point enough: in order to understand anything about the role a detail or piece of information plays within the context of a passage, you must first try to understand what is says as precisely as possible. If you go even a centimeter beyond what the author says, you can easily fall into the realm of speculation and miss things that are right under your nose.

Here goes:

When we came home, Aunt Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was part of her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think (5) she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a world full of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.

9. The reference to Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in line 4 serves to

(A) capture a distinctive regional dialect
(B) highlight a double meaning of a word
(C) provide an ominous foreshadowing
(D) underscore a particular misconception
(E) give evidence of a contrary personality

First, let’s examine some traps that someone could easily fall into: (A) can be eliminated pretty easily because it’s completely outside the scope of the passage, but (C) seems like it might be able to work. After all, darkness is usually a bad thing in books, and the passage is about darkness, so maybe the author is suggesting that something bad is going to happen.

(D) also seems vaguely plausible. It seems kind of weird that someone would want to sit in the dark, and so that’s sort of like a misconception.

(E) seems like it could work for the same reason. Most people don’t want to sit in the dark, and so someone who wants to do so must be contrary, right?

But here’s how you actually solve it:

Remember the whole reading word-by-by word thing? This is how it works, and I hope the answer to this question illustrates just how absolutely necessary it is.

What does the author say about Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in line 4? That she gave the word “evening” three syllables: e-ven-ing. That’s it, the only information we have to go on, so that’s the only information we can use to answer the question.

Now, literally, “evening” of course means “the time when it gets dark out,” but when used as a verb, it means “to make even,” literally “to smooth” (as the author states in line 5) or to remove inconsistencies from a surface. In other words, the word “evening” has two meanings, and the author calls attention to Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in order to call attention to (=highlight) that fact.

The answer must therefore be (B).