by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 2, 2013 | Blog, General Tips, Vocabulary
Like familiarity and mastery, certainty and correctness are two concepts that people often have a tendency to get confused out there in standardized test-land.
So for the record, I would like to state unequivocally and without qualification that it is entirely possible to be both absolutely certain and absolutely wrong. I don’t think that that’s a particularly radical — or even disputable — concept, but something about standardized testing makes people go a little cuckoo and reject what would otherwise be relatively commonsense notions.
To reiterate: if you are taking the SAT and are absolutely, totally, utterly convinced that the answer to a particular Critical Reading question cannot possibly be (C), your strong sense of conviction has no bearing whatsoever on whether the answer actually is (C). (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 7, 2012 | Blog, Vocabulary
Whenever I spend any amount of time going over sentence completions with a student, sooner or later, I almost inevitably become embroiled in the following conversation:
Me: So what made you pick (C)?
Student: Well… I was going to pick (A), but it just sounded… I don’t know, like, weird…
Me: But you knew what the word in the blank had to mean, right?
Student: Right.
Me: And you knew that (A) had that meaning, right…?
Student: Right…
Me: So why did you pick (C) then?
Student: Well, I was going to pick (A), but then I just thought it sounded wrong… Darn it!
I won’t argue that certain words do clearly and indisputably sound wrong when they’re plugged back into a sentence, but relying on your ear to guide you on sentence completions is, to put it nicely, a recipe for disaster. That is because sentence completions are about one thing only — definitions in context.
It does not matter whether the word in question sounds funny to you.
It does not matter whether it’s a word you would ever use, or whether you’ve even heard it before.
If you work by (careful, thorough) process of elimination and the only thing left when you’re done is a word that you think sounds totally, utterly completely bizarre, you have to pick it anyway.
Consider this: you’re sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. Unless you’re a truly voracious reader who reads SAT-level material regularly and never misses a sentence completion (in which case you probably don’t need to be reading this post), you’re probably not well-read enough to know what sounds right and wrong to educated adult ears. No offense, but you’re probably not. You might think it utterly bizarre for someone to say, “Thomas has a predilection for science fiction,” but although it might come off as a tad pretentious (depending on who’s saying it, and under what circumstances), there’s nothing inherently odd or wrong about it. The fact that you might rubbing your head and grimacing and saying, “But that sounds so WEIRD,” is totally and completely irrelevant.
Right and wrong answers exist independently of what you might happen to think about them.
Sorry if this is sounding harsh, but lately I’ve heard the words, “I never would have guessed that could be the answer” a few too many times, when in fact both “I” and “guessing” have nothing to do with it. The second you start to think that way, as innocuous as it might seem, you’ve already started down the wrong path.
I think I’ve belabored the point enough. Bottom line: figure out what the word is supposed to mean. Look for the word with that meaning. If you don’t know which word has that meaning, get rid of the ones that don’t have that meaning. The way they sound is of no concern to you.
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 | Nov 21, 2011 | Blog, Vocabulary
I’ve been doing some thinking about the relationship between the Critical Reading and Math sections of the SAT, particularly in relation to the the idea of associative interference — the notion that unrelated concepts have a tendency to get tied up with one another and interfere with understanding. Catherine Johnson at Kitchen Table Math has written about it in relation to the Math section, but I would venture to say that for most people, it’s actually much more of a problem on Critical Reading section. Here’s why:
One of the things that the SAT tests is the ability to draw conclusions based solely on the information in front of you and to ignore any preconceived notions or biases you may bring with you into the test. In terms of the math section, this means that you need to be able to understand the concept of a variable — that is, that the letter “a” or “x” or “y”(or whatever else happens to be used) stands for whatever it happens to mean within the context of a particular problem, regardless of how you’re used to seeing it elsewhere.
I think that in general, this is not a terribly foreign concept for most people who have achieved a reasonably high level of mathematical understanding. If you don’t really get what a variable is but are still attempting to take any sort of advanced math class, you’re going to get thrown the second you see a familiar letter in an unfamiliar context, and that’s probably going to cause you some trouble in math class at some point. In other words, “school” math does often overlap with SAT math in this regard, and if there’s a serious weakness in your understanding of the concept, there’s a halfway decent chance it’ll get picked up on eventually.
When a similar issue emerges on the verbal side of things, however, there chances of it being caught are comparatively slim. I think it’s safe to say that most high school students have never been explicitly asked to think about words in quite the way the SAT tests them — namely, that a word can be made to mean almost anything that an author wants it to mean, even the exact opposite of what it usually means. Or, to draw a math analogy, that words = variables. In other words, sometimes it doesn’t matter how a word is usually used, only how it’s being used in that particular context at that particular moment. (In order to answer higher-level questions dealing with things like irony and mockery and skepticism, it is of course necessary to understand whyan author would use a word to mean its opposite, but in order to get there, you first have to understand what’s literally being said. And in my experience, plenty of kids who take AP English struggle even with that.)
In this sense, the SAT is exactly the opposite of a traditional vocabulary test. It’s also the exact opposite of the kind of English assignment that asks you to connect what you’re reading to your own experiences — which, as far as I can tell, seems to comprise a substantial portion of the English assignments at a lot of schools. Knowing the dictionary definition of a word, pondering what it reminds you of, or remembering how your Aunt Sally used it last weekend will get you exactly nowhere. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even matter if you know the definition of the word being tested — all that matters is that you know the definitions of the words in the answer choices.
So what this means, practically speaking, is that when you see a question that that says, “In line 17, suffered most nearly means,” you need to rephrase the question as, “In line 17, x most nearly means.” The fact that the word “suffered,” as opposed to some other word, happens to be used in the original text is almost entirely incidental. Yes, knowing that “suffered” is negative might help you make some headway in eliminating answer choices, but if the passage indicates otherwise, that knowledge might actually drag you in the wrong direction.
Thinking about vocabulary words as variables also eliminates the option that you’ll try to answer the question without looking back at the passage — you might think you know what “suffering” means, but you probably wouldn’t dare to guess what “x” meant without checking out the context. Even if you think you remember, you’ll be a whole lot more likely to play it safe.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 16, 2011 | Blog, Vocabulary
Let me make it clear that this post is in no way a suggestion that you should *not* study vocabulary for the SAT. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the more vocabulary you learn, the better off you’ll be — especially if your vocabulary isn’t all that strong to begin with.
That said, however, I also feel obligated to point out that the sentence-completion portion of the SAT isn’t just a straightforward vocabulary test. Yes some of the words are a bit on the esoteric side, but the more time I’ve spent tutoring, the more I’ve become aware that the test is deliberately set up so that someone with a fairly strong vocabulary and a reasonable knowledge of roots and prefixes can figure the answers out through a carefully reasoned process of elimination — even if that person doesn’t know what one or more of the words mean. In some ways, just knowing lots of definitions is less helpful than knowing how to figure things out.
I seriously don’t think that the College Board intends for people to spend huge amounts of time trying to memorize 5,000 words; that’s just not what the test is about. (If you’re not a native English speaker or come from a home where the primary language spoken is not English, that’s a little different, however.)
One of the things the SAT tests is the ability to make reasonable conjectures — that is, the ability to use the information you do have in order to figure out the information you don’t have, and to determine the correct answer through a careful process of elimination.
For example, one of the questions that my students routinely have trouble with is the following:
Orangutans are ——- apes: they typically conduct
most of their lives up in the trees of tropical rain forests.
(A) indigenous (B) transitory (C) recessive
(D) pliant (E) arboreal
The question is #5/8, and it’s usually a pretty safe bet that the average test-taker might not be 100% certain what (B), (D), and (E) mean. A lot of people tend to pick indigenous because they have a decent idea of what it means and have heard it used in the context of animals. The answer, though, is actually E, arboreal, a word that makes a lot of people screw up their faces and say, “How was I supposed to know what that meant?”
But here’s the thing: the College Board doesn’t really expect you to have memorized the word. It does, however, assume that you may have some basic knowledge of French or Spanish or Latin (given that most high school students take Spanish, this isn’t a terribly unfair assumption), all of which have words for tree (arbre, arbol, arbor) that are awfully similar to arboreal — and the sentence practically shouts at you that it’s talking about an animal that lives in trees. If you can make that connection, you’ll get the question no problem, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen the word arboreal before in your life. The ability to make that type of connection what the SAT is really testing.
Precisely the same logic applies to a word like “membranous,” often of late cited as the sort of “obscure” word the new SAT will no longer test. It’s true that it’s not a word that regularly gets thrown around in everyday conversation, but if you know what a membrane is (which should be the case for anyone who’s taken a halfway decent Biology class) and that adding “-ous” onto a noun turns it into an adjective, you’re pretty much set.
The SAT is also testing your knowledge of connotations. Another question that my students tend to have a terrible time with is this one:
Lewis Latimer’s inexpensive method of producing
carbon filaments ——- the nascent electric industry by
making electric lamps commercially ——-.
(A) cheapened…affordable
(B) transformed…viable
(C) revolutionized…prohibitive
(D) provoked…improbable
(E) stimulated…inaccessible
Most people can get it down to (A) and (B) pretty quickly by looking at the second side: prohibitive, improbable, and inaccessible are all negative, and the phrase inexpensive method suggests that Latimer did something positive.
The problem generally hinges on the word cheapened: most people assume that it simply means “made cheaper” and that it goes along with the idea that Latimer lamps were less expensive. The problem, though, is that to cheapen means not to make cheaper but rather to debase or to reduce the quality of. It is a decidedly negative word, but the sentence is suggesting that Latimer did something positive to the electric industry. The answer is therefore (B).
While this may look like a “trick” question, the reality is that it’s simply testing whether you understand that a word can have a connotation apart from the one it literally appears to denote. Using cheapen in a more neutral way in your own writing wouldn’t make that usage of it any more correct.
Now, words like cheapen are unlikely to show up on any “hard words” list; it simply wouldn’t occur to anyone that they could be made hard. And unfortunately, there really aren’t any surefire ways to study for them — other than reading a whole lot.
So what to do? Well, you do need to know the top few hundred “hard” words, ones like trite and laconic, equivocate, and ineffable, which show up a whole lot. But beyond that, it’s probably not worth it to sit and try to memorize the dictionary. You’re better off reading Dickens (admittedly, I’m not much of a fan of his, but he uses a ton of SAT-level vocabulary) or Jane Austen or Oliver Sacks or Foreign Policy, for that matter. And when you look at sentence completions, take a minute and really think about just what it is they’re asking for. Provided you have some basic tools, there’s a chance you can figure it out.
