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 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.
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.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 8, 2011 | ACT English/SAT Writing, SAT Grammar (Old Test)
Present perfect = has written
The present perfect is used to describe an action that began in the past and that is continuing into the present. It is usually used in conjunction with the words for and since, which serve as “tip-offs” that this tense is required.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels since 1977.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels for more than thirty years.
Although these sentences describe actions that began in the past, they both clearly imply that that Leslie Marmon Silko is *still* a best-selling author.
Simple past = wrote
The simple past is used to describe an action that began and ended in the past.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
OR
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko was twenty-nine years old when she published her first novel.
On the SAT, sentences that require the simple past typically include a date or time period that clearly indicates a past action or event (e.g. 1815, The Renaissance, etc.).
Past perfect = had written
This is the tense that people tend to have the hardest time with. It is used only in the following case: when you have two finished actions in the past, the past perfect is used to describe the one that happened first.
In other words, if a sentence does not clearly indicate two separate actions, you should not use the past perfect!
Correct: Before Leslie Marmon Silko published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she had already written a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #1: Leslie Marmon Silko published a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #2: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
The past perfect is therefore used to describe the first action.
Under no circumstances is the following correct:
Incorrect: Before Leslie Marmon Silko had published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she wrote a number of well-regarded short stories.
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.
