Five reading tips for the new SAT

Five reading tips for the new SAT

1) Start with your favorite passage(s)

You’re going to be sitting and reading for over an hour (well over an hour, if you count the Writing section), so you don’t want to blow all your energy on the first couple of passages. Take a few minutes at the start of the test, and see which passages seem easiest/most interesting, and which ones seem hardest/least interesting. Start with the easy ones, and end with the hard ones. This is not the ACT; you have plenty of time, and taking a few minutes to do this step can help you pace yourself more efficiently. You’ll get a confidence boost upfront, and you’ll be less likely to panic when you hit the harder stuff later on.

2) Be willing to skip questions

Unless you’re absolutely set on getting an 800 or close to it, you don’t need to answer every question — in fact, you probably shouldn’t (although you should always make sure to fill in answer for every question, since the quarter point wrong-answer penalty has been eliminated). If your first reaction when you look at a question is that you have no idea what it’s asking, that’s probably a sign you’re better off moving onto other things. That is particularly true on the Reading section because questions are not presented in order of difficulty. A challenging question can be followed by a very easy one, and there’s no sense getting hung up on the former if you can answer the latter quickly. And if you truly hate graph questions or Passage 1/Passage 2 relationship questions, for example, then by all means just skip them and be done with it. 

3) Be willing to skip an entire passage 

This might sound a little radical, but hear me out. It’s an adaptation of an ACT strategy that actually has the potential to work even better on the new SAT than it does on the ACT. This is especially true if you consistently do well on the Writing section; a strong score there can compensate if you are weaker in Reading, giving you a respectable overall Verbal score. Obviously this is not a good strategy if you are aiming for a score in the 700s; however, if you’re a slow but solid reader who is scoring in the high 500s and aiming for 600s, you might want to consider it.

Think of it this way: if four of the passages are pretty manageable for you but the fifth is very hard, or if you feel a little short on time trying to get through every passage and every question, this strategy allows you to focus on a smaller number of questions that you are more likely to answer correctly. In addition, you should pick one letter and fill it in for every question on the set you skip. Assuming that letters are distributed evenly as correct answers (that is, A, B, C, and D are correct approximately the same number of times on a given test, and in a given passage/question set), you will almost certainly grab an additional two or even three points.

If you’re not a strong reader, I highly recommend skipping either the Passage 1/Passage 2, or any fiction passages that include more antiquated language, since those are the passage types most likely to cause trouble.

4) Label the “supporting evidence” pairs before you start the questions

Although you may not always want to use the “plug in” strategy (plugging in the line references from the second question into the first question in order to answer both questions simultaneously), it’s nice to have the option of doing so. If you don’t know the “supporting evidence” question is coming, however, you can’t plug anything in. And if you don’t label the questions before you start, you might not remember to look ahead. This is particularly true when the first question is at the bottom of one page and the second question is at the top of the following page. 

5) Don’t spend too much time reading the passages

You will never — never — remember every single bit of a passage after a single read-through, so there’s no point in trying to get every last detail. The most important thing is to avoid getting stuck in a reading “loop,” in which you re-read a confusing phrase or section of a passage multiple times, emerging with no clearer a sense of what it’s saying than when you began. This is a particular danger on historical documents passages, which are more likely to include confusing turns of phrase. Whatever you do, don’t fall into that trap! You will waste both time and energy, two things you cannot afford to squander upfront. Gently but firmly, force yourself to move on, focusing on the beginning and the end for the big picture. You can worry about the details when you go back. 

The College Board is kicking tutors out of the March SAT

The College Board is kicking tutors out of the March SAT

This just in: earlier today I met with a tutor colleague who told me that  the College Board had sent emails to at least 10 of his New York-area colleagues who were registered for the first administration of the new SAT, informing them that their registration for the March 5th exam had been transferred to the May exam. Not coincidentally, the May test will be released, whereas the March one will not. 

Another tutor had his testing location moved to, get this… Miami. 

I also heard from another tutor in North Carolina whose registration was also transferred to May for “security measures.” Apparently this is a national phenomenon. Incidentally, the email she received gave her no information about why her registration had been cancelled for the March test. She had to call the College Board and wait 45 minutes on hold to get even a semi-straight answer from a representative. Along with releasing test scores on time, customer service is not exactly the College Board’s strong suit.  (more…)

The SAT will still have an experimental section — but not everyone will be taking it

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the new SAT will in fact continue to include an experimental section. According to James Murphy of the Princeton Review, guest-writing in Valerie Strauss’s column, the change was announced at a meeting for test-center coordinators in Boston on February 4th.

To sum up:

The SAT has traditionally included an extra section — either Reading, Writing, or Math — that is used for research purposes only and is not scored. In the past, every student taking the exam under regular conditions (that is, without extra time) received an exam that included one of these sections. On the new SAT, however, only students not taking the test with writing (essay) will be given versions of the test that include experimental multiple-choice questions, and then only some of those students. The College Board has not made it clear what percentage will take the “experimental” version, nor has it indicated how those students will be selected.

Murphy writes:

In all the public relations the company has done for the new SAT, however, no mention has been made of an experimental section. This omission led test-prep professionals to conclude that the experimental section was dead.

He’s got that right — I certainly assumed the experimental section had been scrapped! And I spend a fair amount of time communicating with people who stay much more in the loop about the College Board’s less publicized wheelings and dealings than I do.

Murphy continues:

The College Board has not been transparent about the inclusion of this section. Even in that one place it mentions experimental questions—the counselors’ guide available for download as a PDF — you need to be familiar with the language of psychometrics to even know that what you’re actually reading is the announcement of experimental questions.

 The SAT will be given in a standard testing room (to students with no testing accommodations) and consist of four components — five if the optional 50-minute Essay is taken — with each component timed separately. The timed portion of the SAT with Essay (excluding breaks) is three hours and 50 minutes. To allow for pretesting, some students taking the SAT with no Essay will take a fifth, 20-minute section. Any section of the SAT may contain both operational and pretest items.

The College Board document defines neither “operational” nor “pretest.” Nor does this paragraph make it clear whether all the experimental questions will appear only on the fifth section, at the start or end of the test, or will be dispersed throughout the exam. During the session, I asked if all the questions on the extra section won’t count and was told they would not. This paragraph is less clear on that issue, since it suggests that experimental (“pretest”) questions can show up on any section.

When The Washington Post asked for clarification on this question, they were sent the counselor’s paragraph, verbatim. Once again, the terminology was not defined and it was not clarified that “pretest” does not mean before the exam, but experimental.

For starters, I was unaware that the term “pretest” could have a second meaning. Even by the College Board’s current standards, that’s pretty brazen (although closer to the norm than not).

Second, I’m not sure how it is possible to have a standardized test that has different versions with different lengths, but one set of scores. (Although students who took the old test with accommodations did not receive an experimental section, they presumably formed a group small enough not to be statistically significant.) In order to ensure that scores are as valid as possible, it would seem reasonable to ensure that, at bare minimum, as many students as possible receive the same version of the test.

As Murphy rightly points out, issues of fatigue and pacing can have a significant effect on students’ scores — a student who takes a longer test will, almost certainly, become more tired and thus more likely to incorrectly answers questions that he or should would otherwise have gotten right.

Second, I’m no expert in statistics, but there would seem to be some problems with this method of data collection. Because the old experimental section was given to nearly all test-takers, any information gleaned from it could be assumed to hold true for the general population of test-takers.

The problem now is not simply that only one group of testers will be given experimental questions, but that the the group given experimental questions and the group not given experimental questions may not be comparable.

If you consider that the colleges requiring the Essay are, for the most part, quite selective, and that students tend not to apply to those schools unless they’re somewhere in the ballpark academically, then it stands to reason that the group sitting for the Essay will be, on the whole, a higher-scoring group than the group not sitting for the Essay.

As a result, the results obtained from the non-Essay group might not apply to test-takers across the board. Let’s say, hypothetically, that test takers in the Essay group are more likely to correctly answer a certain question than are test-takers in the non-Essay group. Because the only data obtained will be from students in the non-Essay group, the number of students answering that question correctly is lower than it would be if the entire group of test-takers were taken into account. 

If the same phenomenon repeats itself for many, or even every, experimental question, and new tests are created based on the data gathered from the two unequal groups, then the entire level of the test will eventually shift down — perhaps further erasing some of the score gap, but also giving a further advantage to the stronger (and likely more privileged) group of students on future tests.

All of this is speculation, of course. It’s possible that the College Board has some way of statistically adjusting for the difference in the two groups (maybe the Hive can help with that!), but even so, you have to wonder… Wouldn’t it just have been better to create a five-part exam and give the same test to everyone? 

What is ETS’ role in the new SAT?

Update #2 (1/27/16): Based on the LinkedIn job notification I received yesterday, it seems that ETS will be responsible for overseeing essay grading on the new SAT. That’s actually a move away from Pearson, which has been grading the essays since 2005.  Not sure what to think of this. Maybe that’s the bone the College Board threw to ETS to compensate for having taken the actual test-writing away. Or maybe they’re just trying to distance themselves from Pearson. 

Update: Hardly had I published this post when I discovered recent information indicating that ETS is still playing a consulting role, along with other organizations/individuals, in the creation of the new SAT. I hope to clarify in further posts. Even so, the information below raises a number of significant questions. 

Original post: 

Thanks to Akil Bello over at Bell Curves for finally getting an answer:

Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 2.48.03 PM

(In case the image is too small for you to read, the College Board’s Aaron Lemon-Strauss states that “with rSAT we manage all writing/form construction in-house. use some contractors for scale, but it’s all managed here now.” You can also view the original Twitter conversation here.) 

Now, some questions:

What is the nature of the College Board’s contract with ETS? 

Who exactly is writing the actual test questions?

Who are these contractors “used for scale,” and what are their qualifications? What percentage counts as “some?”

What effect will this have on the validity of the redesigned exam? (As I learned from Stanford’s Jim Milgram, one of the original Common Core validation committee members, many of the College Board’s most experienced psychometricians have been replaced.) 

Are the education officials who are mandated the redesigned SAT in Connecticut, Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, and New York City aware that the test is no longer being written by ETS? 

Why has this not been reported in the media? I cannot recall a single article, in any outlet, about the rollout of the new test that even alluded to this issue. ETS has been involved in writing the SAT since the 1940s. It is almost impossible to overstate what a radical change this is. 

For what it’s worth (how the College Board stole the state-testing market from the ACT)

For what it’s worth (how the College Board stole the state-testing market from the ACT)

For those of you who haven’t been following the College Board’s recent exploits, the company is in the process of staging a massive, national attempt to recapture market share from the ACT. Traditionally, a number of states, primarily in the Midwest and South, have required the ACT for graduation. Over the past several months, however, several states known for their longstanding relationships with the ACT have abruptly – and unexpectedly – announced that they will be dropping the ACT and mandating the redesigned SAT. The following commentary was sent to me by a West Coast educator who has been closely following these developments.  

For What It’s Worth

On December 4, 2015 a 15-member evaluation committee met in Denver, Colorado to begin the process of awarding a 5-year state testing contract to either the ACT, Inc. or the College Board. After meeting three more times (December 10, 11, and 18th) the evaluation committee awarded the Colorado contract to the College Board on December 21, 2015. The committee’s meetings were not open to the public and the names of the committee members were not known until about two weeks later.

Once the committee’s decision became public, parents complained that it placed an unfair burden on juniors who had been preparing for the ACT. Over 150 school officials responded by sending a protest letter to Interim Education Commissioner Elliott Asp. The letter emphasized the problem faced by juniors and also noted that Colorado would be abandoning a test for which they had 15 years of data for a new test with no data. (more…)