by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 25, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
As I mentioned to Debbie Stier today, Fixing Paragraphs often feels like the neglected step-child of the SAT. It doesn’t seem as fun as the other Writing sections (relatively speaking), and no one seems to spend much time talking about it. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be underestimated. Missing just four multiple choice Writing questions is enough to get you from an 800 to a 700, and if stumbling on just one or two Fixing Paragraphs questions can have serious consequences if you don’t absolutely nail Error-IDs and Fixing Sentences. So here goes.
“Fixing Paragraphs” may be part of the Writing portion of the SAT, but its placement there is somewhat deceptive. The reality is that Fixing Paragraphs does test some writing skills, but it also tests reading skills. To do well on the section, it is therefore necessary to know which questions require which approach.
Fixing Sentences questions fall into two general categories:
1) Grammar and style questions require you to either choose the best version of a particular sentence or two choose the best way of combining two sentences. These are essentially Writing questions, and the rules for answering them are essentially the same as those for Fixing Sentences: shorter answers are more likely to be correct, gerunds are bad, and passive voice is bad. While it is not crucial that you go back to the passage to examine the sentence(s) in context, it may be necessary to do so.
2) Paragraph organization and rhetoric questions require you to identify main ideas and understand the relationships between ideas and paragraphs. These are essentially Reading questions (I call them “Critical Reading-lite”), and when you answer them, you need to approach them the basic same way that you would approach Critical Reading questions.
While tone is generally irrelevant, main point is still of the utmost importance. In order to determine where a particular piece of information should be inserted or moved within a given paragraph, you need to be able to distinguish between information whose function is to introduce an idea or provide an overview (i.e. a topic sentence) and information designed to provide supporting detail…neither of which you can do without first determining the point.
For these questions, you should plan to look back at the passage, ideally before you look at the answers. Go back and read, try to get an idea of the answer for yourself, and only then look at the choices. If there’s an option that’s more or less what you came up with, it will almost certainly be right.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 22, 2011 | SAT Grammar (Old Test)
When it comes to answer patterns, one of the easiest to spot on SAT Writing is undoubtedly the general wrongness of options containing the word “being.” What I think often gets overlooked in these discussions, however, is the fact that the rule regarding “being” — and gerunds in general — often plays out somewhat differently in Error-IDs and Fixing Sentences. Granted I haven’t done a statistical analysis, but I have spent enough time looking at tests to be able to say this with a fair amount of confidence.
In general it is true that in Fixing Sentences, an answer choice that contains the word “being” is virtually guaranteed to be wrong, either because the word is used in place of a main verb (e.g. Mark Twain being one of the best-known satirists of the nineteenth century) or because it is used to create an unnecessarily wordy and awkward construction (e.g. “Mark Twain is very well known today being that he was a brilliant satirist” rather than “Mark Twain is very well known today because he was a brilliant satirist”).
In Error-IDs, however, the same doesn’t quite hold true. Yes, “being” is perhaps somewhat more likely to be incorrect, particularly on the very easiest questions (where it may be used very obviously to replace a main verb), but otherwise it’s just as likely to be a distractor answer. This is in part because the only real error category that “being” falls into is gerund vs. infinitive, and it is highly unlikely that any given Error-ID section will include more than or or two such questions.
So yes, on Fixing Sentences, you should be very, very suspicious of any answer choice that contains the word “being,” but if the word is underlined on Error-IDs, take good look at your other options before you jump to pick it.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 21, 2011 | GRE, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Please note: this post was written in regard to the Reading section of the old (pre-2016) SAT. While it is still applicable to some social and natural science passages, which frequently discuss old models or theories vs. new/emerging ones, the overall writing tends to be more straightforward and journalistic than it was on the old test. If you are studying for a graduate exam such as the GRE, the GMAT, or the LSAT, however, the passages on those tests continue to be more more academic in nature.
While working with Debbie Stier this past weekend, I had something of an epiphany about the Critical Reading section (I think Debbie had a Critical Reading epiphany as well, but I’ll let her discuss that herself!). It is has to with the structure of many passages and the significance of that structure in terms of the SAT’s larger goal.
Let me back up a moment. In all the brouhaha over the “real meaning” of the SAT, it is to forget that it — like the ACT — is essentially a measure of college readiness. Regardless of what the SAT started out as, it is now recognized as a having validity only as a predictor of freshman college grades. And in my experience, a student’s comprehension of the passages on the Critical Reading section is, in general, a remarkably accurate gauge of whether she or he is prepared to handle college-level reading and thinking.
Here’s why: one of the classic structures of SAT passages — and indeed of passages on pretty much all of the graduate exams, including the GRE, the LSAT, and the GMAT — is exactly the same as one of the most common structures of an academic article.
Part I: Introduces the topic, often through an anecdote. Provides general and/or historical overview
Part II: What “they” say
Discusses the standard interpretation, “received wisdom” surrounding that topic
Part III: Problematizes the standard interpretation: raises objections, points out inconsistencies and places where the argument doesn’t hold up
Part IV: What “I” say
Offers own interpretation, either in the form of a more nuanced version of the standard interpretation or, on occasion, the complete opposite of the standard interpretation
Why is it so important to be able to distinguish these parts, to be able to understand what an author offers up as standard interpretation versus what she or he actually thinks?
Well, because that’s exactly what college-level thinking ultimately entails: being able to understand and synthesize other people’s arguments in order to be able to formulate a well-reasoned, well-supported response with precision and nuance. And it is impossible to formulate such a response without truly understand how the existing arguments work and what their implications are.
If you take an economics class and reading an article about the limits of Keynesian theory, for example, you need to be able to distinguish the description of Keynesian theory from the author’s discussion of the standard interpretation of Keynesian theory (what other people think) from the author’s own argument (what I think) in order to even begin to think up a response.
The world of academia essentially consists of an ongoing dialogue between scholars, sometimes separated by hundreds of years — sometimes the result is brilliant and sometimes it’s nothing more than inane and petty squabbles (far more the latter than the former!), but it’s a dialogue nonetheless.
This is not something one is generally made aware of in high school, where the goal is simply to memorize and regurgitate as much information as possible in the shortest period of time, but it is the underlying context for much of what shows up on the SAT. And simply having that knowledge can go a long way toward putting Critical Reading into perspective.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 18, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
This post was inspired by Akil Bello’s Best SAT Prep Tip Ever on the Bellcurves blog. While I agree 100% that reading the full question (along with reading full answers) is indeed one of the most important things you can do on the SAT, I also think that advice takes a bit too much for granted because it assumes that most test-takers will understand what a question is asking, provided that they read it carefully enough. In my experience, however, that’s simply not the case.
I think there’s a tendency to forget that vocabulary issues can crop in passage-based questions themselves as well as in passages and answer choices. If you don’t understand precisely what a question is requiring you to do when it asks you which of the following would most undermine a given theory, it’s very hard to answer that question correctly!
Take inference questions. When a question asks you make an inference about what a particular person mentioned in a passage would believe, it is generally asking you to make a reasonable assumption about that person’s beliefs based on specific information that the author says about that person. It is not simply asking you to summarize what that person says or believes. It is asking you to form a general, often more abstract idea that will not be found word-for-word in the text. But if you don’t make that distinction, if you just try to summarize what the person says or thinks, you’ll be lost when you look at the answer choices.
Or, to give a slightly more concrete example, it will be very hard for you to answer a question that uses the word “analogous” if you don’t really know what that means.
So I’m going to suggest two things.
First, treat any unfamiliar vocabulary you find in the actual questions the exact same way you would treat any other SAT vocabulary — write it down and learn it.
Second, try rephrasing the questions in your own words to make sure you actually understand what you need to do. For example, if a question asks you what “transition is marked” in a particular line, you can rephrase it as “what change happens in the passage here?” Define, sum up, simplify. Whatever you have to do to make sure you understand.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 15, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Although some Critical Reading questions are phrased as inference questions, they are in reality closer to “main point” questions and can be treated as such. I find the following to be an ideal example (from https://satonlinecourse.collegeboard.com/SR/digital_assets/assessment/pdf/0833A611-0A43-10C2-0148-CC8C0087FB06-F.pdf):
The ability of the “I Have a Dream” speech to high- light King’s early career at the expense of his later career accounts for the tone of impatience and betrayal that often appears when modern-day supporters of King’s agenda talk about the speech. Former Georgia state legislator Julian Bond said in 1986 that commemorations of King seemed to “focus almost entirely on Martin Luther King the dreamer, not on Martin King the antiwar activist, not on Martin King the challenger of the economic order, not on Martin King the opponent of apartheid, not on the complete Martin Luther King.”
Question: It can be inferred that, for Julian Bond, a portrait of “the complete Martin Luther King” (lines 10-11) would
(A) celebrate King’s influence both within and outside the United States
(B) acknowledge the logical lapses in some of King’s later work
(C) compare King with other significant figures of his era
(D) achieve a balance between King’s earlier concerns and his later ones
(E) reveal information about King’s personal as well as his public life
The primary mistake most people make when attempting to answer a question such as this is that they only read the lines directly involving Julian Bond. These lines tell us that Bond favors a public image of King that would include his more radical activities (antiwar activism, economic equality, etc.) as well as his less provocative ones (MLK the dreamer). That much is relatively clear.
There is, however, no answer that matches that summary, and so here a lot of people start to get confused. The key to answering a question such as this is to realize that we are being asked not to summarize Bond’s words but rather to understand why they are placed where they are within the argument. In other words: what point is the author using Bond’s words to support?
Where does an author typically place the point in relation to the evidence? Before. So we must back up and look at the preceding sentence, which tells us that King’s modern-day supporters are often upset that people focus on King’s early career rather than his later career.
In other words, they want to “achieve a balance between King’s earlier concerns and his later ones” (D).
What makes this an inference question, however, is the fact that the words “For example” (or “for instance”) never appear in the second sentence. Based on our knowledge of where examples are typically situated in relation to the points they support, we must therefore make the logical jump that Bond is being cited in order to provide evidence for the idea that King’s modern-day supporters are unhappy with the relative lack of focus on his later career.
So it turns out that the right answer is simply a reworded version of an idea explicitly stated in the passage — it’s just not the idea that we were perhaps expecting.
