Reading and Writing Tips for the SAT and ACT

Score Choice, Superscoring, and Test-Optional

2012-02-12T12:10:00.000-05:00

Debbie Stier asked me a question about score choice the other night (in case anyone wants to read it, she posted my answer on her blog), and it occurred to me that I should probably say something about it as well.

First, I'm just going to start by re-posting my definitions of score choice and superscoring. They are not the same thing!

Score Choice:

This means that *you* can pick which scores to send. Most schools will let you do this, but a handful will not. And no, you can't simply get around that rule by picking the scores you want to send anyway: when you send scores to these schools via the College Board website, you will *not* be given the option of selecting individual scores. You simply have to send all of them. Non-score choice schools include Yale, Cornell, Penn, Georgetown, George Washington, Pomona, and Tufts.

Say you take the SAT three times. Score choice means that you can choose to send one, two, or three of those scores. If you blew the first test completely, did best on Math on test #2, and did best on CR and W on test #3. You would ignore #1 and send two and three because of...

For the complete list of colleges and universities and their score-reporting policies, please see:

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat-score-use-practices-list.pdf

Superscoring:

Superscoring is what *colleges* do to position themselves best in the rankings, regardless of whether they offer the score choice option or not.

So if you submit scores from tests #2 and #3, they'll take the highest M, CR, and W from those two tests and look only at those. They'll see the other scores you got on those tests, but they won't count them. They really do ignore the other scores, unless there's clearly something very weird going on.

A 50 or 70 point variation won't draw much attention, but a 200 point on will. If you got a 500CR/700M on one test, then 700M/500CR the next, they'll know you simply tried to game the superscoring process by taking the test to focus on one section. This practice isn't explicitly, but it makes you look as if you didn't try, and it certainly won't earn you any Brownie points with admissions officers. Don't do it.

A school can offer both score choice and superscoring, or it can just superscore. Almost all schools that do not offer score choice still superscore.

If you have great grades and extracurriculars but don't think that your test scores measure what you're capable of doing in the classroom, you should look at schools that are...

Score Optional

Yet a third category of school does not require you to submit scores at all, although you need to be aware some of them may still require scores for merit-scholarship consideration. Here is the complete list of score-optional schools: http://fairtest.org/university/optional

In general, if your scores fall at or above a school's average, you should probably send them; if they're well below, you probably shouldn't. If some are above and some well below... That's a conversation for you and your guidance counselor.

If you're so anti-standardized testing that you want a school that refuses to even consider scores, I would suggest that you look at Sarah Lawrence College. And if you're looking for a school with a slightly more flexible policy when it comes to standardized testing, you might want to look at Middlebury College, which allows you to submit three SAT II scores in place of the SAT or the ACT.

And a warning...

While it's nice to have lots of options, all these different policies can create the illusion that you have more leeway in the standardized testing process than you actually do. Yes, it is nice to know that you can choose not to send that embarrassing first SAT score -- the one, let's face it, that you got when you really weren't ready to take the test but hoped that you might just be able to ace it anyway -- but don't get too complacent.

From what I've seen, the most successful applicants are the ones who ignore the whole score choice thing, don't take tests unless they're really ready (even if that means waiting until May or even June of junior year for their first SAT), and treat every test like it counts. That goes for SATs, ACTs, and SAT IIs. The"Oh, I can just take it again attitude" can get you in a lot of trouble. You do not want to be taking the SAT for the fourth time in December of your senior year, just hoping that you'll be able to pull that CR above 700.

Try not to take the SAT or the ACT more than two or three times at most. I once tutored a girl who had taken the (real) ACT *seven* times before she started to work with me -- and was stuck at around a 21. Because she knew she didn't have to submit all her scores, she just kept taking it and hoping she'd miraculously improve. That's a recipe for disaster.

Take lots of practice tests and know where you stand before you take it for real. If you're not comfortable with how you're scoring already, you need to wait. Your score probably won't just zoom up 100 points during the real thing, and you'll be stuck with a score you don't like and may still have to submit to some schools.

Why new errors are unlikely to appear in the SAT Writing section in the near future

2012-02-03T00:59:00.000-05:00

Every so often, after I've doled out official my list of errors covered on the multiple-choice portion of the SAT Writing section, I'll get asked what would seem to be a very logical question: how do I know that the list you've given me is really comprehensive? Who's to say that other errors won't suddenly show up? Shouldn't I learn the rule for "who vs. whom" just in case, even though it's never actually shown up on a test?

Well, my response would be yes, you should learn the rule for "who vs. whom" because you should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom" correctly, but the chances of it appearing on the SAT any time soon are pretty slight.

One of the things that people tend not to take into account when speculating about what could theoretically appear on the SAT is how rigidly standardized the creation of the test actually is -- how rigorously questions are vetted and tested (and re-tested) before they even show up on an *experimental* section. It's a hugely politicized process, and it moves very slowly. It isn't as if someone suddenly says, "Hey, let's test "who vs. whom this time," and presto, a question testing it appears the next month. Every precaution is taken to ensure that a given score has the same significance from test to test. That's why the questions get recycled, in some cases almost word for word, from test to test.

Any new element, anything that would have the potential to throw that balance out of whack, would have to be calibrated and re-calibrated in committee meetings and focus groups and experimental sections for a very, very long time until it was established that it met all the pages and pages of criteria for inclusion on the test. There's a reason that the SAT only changes every few decades. (Side note: I was recently doing some reading about the history of the SAT and encountered a vocabulary question from one of the earliest versions of the test. Guess what word was on there? Didactic. The SAT's favorite words have been its favorite words for well over 50 years.)

I'd never dissuade someone from learning grammar for the sake of learning grammar, but if you're a high school junior with a full load of AP classes and extracurriculars and consider five hours of sleep to be an exceptional night's rest, it's strongly in your interest to just focus on mastering the concepts that are known to have appeared on past SAT Writing sections. It's not worth it to speculate about what new errors could show up because they almost certainly won't. What you do need to worry about is having common errors (like subject-verb agreement and word pairs) combined or reconfigured in unfamiliar ways, and the best way to prepare for that situation is to know individual concepts so well that you can attack a confusing question from multiple angles and reduce it down to something more manageable.

You can't write a 12 essay in 25-minutes if you can't write a 12 essay period

2012-01-31T01:36:00.002-05:00

Hi Everyone,

I'm back from my somewhat inadvertently extended hiatus from posting. For those of you wondering where I've been, let me put it this way: Juniors. January SAT. And SAT IIs. I've also been writing exercises for my new and improved website, which hopefully should be up and running sometime in the next couple of weeks. Not that I don't completely love Blogger, but it's just not letting me do everything I'd like to be able to do -- to put it mildly.

Anyway, I happened to be chatting with PWN the SAT last week, and inevitably, the topic turned to the infamous SAT essay and how (I think) that the time factor has a tendency to get blown out of proportion. PWN made the exceedingly astute comment that since most test-prep advice gets doled out by adults, it occasionally has a tendency to focus on the things that *adults* find difficult about the SAT. And let's face it: if you haven't sat in an English class since sometime around 1983 and are no longer required to churn out in-class essays about The Great Gatsby on a regular basis, popping out a coherent, specific piece of writing on, say, the nature of heroism, in a mere 25 minutes might seem like a pretty big challenge. That's just not a lot of time, and consequently the rush/panic factors loom large. Here are some things, however, that are not typically problematic for most college-educated adults who attempt to write an essay in 25 minutes:

-Using clear, coherent standard written English
-Using correct grammar, punctuation, and syntax
-Formulating a clear thesis statement
-Staying on topic
-Using examples that clearly support the thesis
-Making clear the relationship between the examples and the thesis
-Providing specific details when discussing examples
-Separating ideas into paragraphs
-Using tenses correctly and consistently
-Varying sentence structure
-Using logical transitions to connect ideas
-Throwing in a couple of correctly used "big" words

If you can take all of that for granted, of course the biggest challenge is the time limit! But that's really an awful lot to take for granted.

All of these things -- I repeat, ALL of these things -- have serious potential to cause problems for most teenage writers. And they do. Often the problem isn't just one or two of the above factors but five or six. Unfortunately, having real trouble with even just one or two of them is enough to prevent someone from ever attaining a 12 without going back and shoring up the fundamentals. A kid who just cannot maintain focus on a thesis throughout an essay will have an exceedingly difficult time scoring above an 9, no matter how good their ideas are. A kid who truly does not yet understand how to make examples specific by providing concrete detail and offers vague and repetitive assertions instead is also unlikely to ever score above an 8, maybe even a 7. It doesn't matter how many timed essays they write; the score just won't go above a certain level.

I'm not trying to deny that time is an important factor, just to suggest that it isn't *the* factor par excellence that it often gets treated as. A clear, well-argued essay whose author runs out of time to stick on a conclusion still does have the potential to receive a high score: maybe not a 12 but a 10 or even an 11. Conversely, a finished essay with intro, conclusion, and body paragraphs may score several points lower if it exhibits serious technical errors. As with many things on the SAT, there's no quick fix if the basic skills aren't already in place.

One of the things I try to look at in conjunction with my students' SAT essays is a school essay that they haven't written under timed conditions -- it's the only way to tell what their actual level of writing is. If there's a significant gap, then yes, timing (or just not knowing what to write) may be the problem. But if I see the same technical errors -- sentence fragments, tense switching, lack of a clear thesis, unsupported statements -- that's a pretty big red flag that we have to take a couple of steps back and talk about how to write an essay period.

Should high schools do more to prepare students for the SAT?

2012-01-06T22:29:00.000-05:00

Well, it all depends on what you mean by "prepare."

Let me back up for a moment and explain how this post came about: a couple of months ago, I was talking with a friend who was applying to dental school, of all things, and we somehow got into a conversation about the role of standardized testing in the American college admissions process. Having grown up in Korea, where the test-prep culture is actually a good deal more intense than it is in the US, my friend knew a thing or two about how crazy the whole standardized testing process can be, and I started telling her about some of the more common misconceptions that international students have about the SAT (particularly international students coming from countries where admission to top schools is determined solely by test scores). One thing led to another, and before I knew it, she told me that I should write up everything I'd just told her and post it on my site as an overview for international applicants. She even offered to translate it into Korean.

So I started writing it up (I have a draft that I'm editing, in case anyone cares), and about halfway through I started explaining how a lot of material on the SAT, particularly on the verbal side of things, is presented in a totally different way from how it's presented in American schools, and that a lot of kids get incredibly thrown because they've never been explicitly taught the skills that it tests and simply have no idea whatsoever of how to handle it. I remembered the the half-French/half-Spanish father of one of my students was once surprised to learn that most American high schools spend essentially no time preparing students specifically for the SAT -- coming from France, where high school students basically spend their entire last year of high school just prepping for the baccalauréat, he must have found that extremely odd, and so I figured that was the sort of thing that would require explaining.

And as I was writing that, it suddenly struck me how utterly and completely bizarre the American system really is. Who in their right mind would dream up a system that required students to take the most important test of their high school careers and then have no compulsory preparation for it? Even the hardest-core cram schools in Shanghai and Seoul are designed to supplement the university entrance preparation given in schools, not replace it entirely (this is my understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong).

I do understand how the American system ended up as such an anomaly: because the SAT was developed specifically to give colleges a tool to assess students' "aptitude" or "potential to learn" rather than the specific knowledge they had acquired in high school, thus giving students from Iowa the chance to compete with those from Andover, schools saw no reason to get involved. The problem is that the College Board recognized a while ago that the SAT is not really an aptitude test -- which is why the initials SAT no longer officially stand for anything -- but schools retained their traditional role of non-interference, a role that remains largely unquestioned.

Now, most critics of the SAT would argue that the only thing that the SAT tests is the ability to take the SAT, and as I've said before, I agree -- up to a point. But unlike them, I believe that in the reading department, the SAT tests some pretty crucial skills whose importance is in no way lessened by the fact that they're not being taught in elsewhere (e.g. in school). Yes, the correct answers do often follow a pattern -- but first, even perceiving those patterns in the first place requires pretty sophisticated reasoning skills and second, if the test were really that easy to game, a whole lot more people would score 800s. Or even 700s. But thousands upon thousands of kids take test-prep courses every year, and still only 5% of test-takers score above a 700 in Critical Reading and only 2% above a 750. Strategy-based prep really only works for the people who've already acquired the necessary skills elsewhere, either in school or on their own.

So back to the original question: should high schools do more to prepare students for the SAT? Well, yes and no.

If "preparation" is defined as going over how to guess efficiently, teaching how to write a stock five-paragraph essay because "that's what the essay graders look for," and discussing whether to fill in the little bubbles as you answer the questions or circling the answers and then bubbling everything in at the end, then the answer is no. Absolutely, incontrovertibly no. Schools already spend far too much time on that kind of drivel for state tests.

Interestingly, my students who just cannot get top scores on their essays for either the SAT or the AP English exams are the ones who spend their time in class learning...how to write high-scoring essays for the test. Trite formulas have been so ingrained in them that their writing completely lacks the kind of fluidity and daring that comes across as truly impressive. They also tend to lack the kind of broad cultural knowledge that lends itself to coming up with stellar examples at a moment's notice. Almost uniformly, my highest scorers come from classically-oriented schools with virtually zero emphasis on test prep. Of course you don't have to be an extraordinary writer to get a 12 on the SAT essay, but if you really want to learn to write for college, spending your time learning to please the College Board won't cut it. (I pity the freshman writing instructors responsible for deprogramming kids who have spent the last thirteen years of their lives learning primarily to conform to standardized testing rubrics.)

On the other hand, if "preparation" is understood to mean the kinds of underlying skills that the SAT tests, then yes, by all means, these are the skills that high schools should be teaching but that they seem to have forgotten somewhere around the time they stopped giving grades below B- to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.

I'm not quite sure what to think of the College Board's assertion that school alone is the best preparation for the SAT. As a tutor, I know that for many kids school simply isn't enough and wonder whom the College Board actually thinks it's fooling -- but then I also look at that statement as an example of its naïveté (kind of like the reality TV question...) I actually wonder whether the people who develop the SAT have any idea what gets taught -- or rather, what doesn't get taught -- in most English classes, or if they're living in some kind of dream world where public students are still routinely forced to recognize the difference between anapests and dactyls the way they were in 1964. Most of my students have never even had a vocabulary test in high school. The disconnect is so extreme it's almost surreal.

In terms of grammar, schools need to teach what's on the SAT. Period. The mistakes the SAT tests are the mistakes that kids make in their everyday writing. Trust me: I see them over and over and over again. Not knowing how to identify a comma splices has nothing to do with being a good test-taker -- it's about knowing what is and is not a sentence, and how sentences should be punctuated. This is something that should be mastered by around sixth grade. If an eleventh grader can't recognize a sentence, that's a big problem. If schools aren't teaching students to recognize sentences, that's an even bigger problem. Most of them just won't figure it out by themselves.

In terms of Critical Reading, the rhetorical devices that regularly get tested on the SAT (metaphor, allusion, anecdote, euphemism, irony) may have once been standard fare in high schools but are now largely absent from most curricula beyond the simplest level. I think one of my students summed it up best when he asked me, as innocently as a 6-foot tall wrestler with studs in his ears possibly could, what "rhetoric" was. The SAT is playing a game they don't even know exists.

While SAT reading may have once been more like a series of logic puzzles, from what I've seen recently, the logic aspect is really only one aspect among many. Sifting through a bunch of CR sections recently, I was struck by the amount of overlap with the Literature SAT II, which is purportedly a "skills-based" rather than a "reasoning" test. Most of all, I was surprised by just how many questions there really are that ask about rhetorical strategies, and I was taken aback by the number of devices actually tested outright: metaphor, allusion, euphemism, repetition, analogy, personification, understatement... I actually got a list of about 20 different things. Knowing them has next to nothing to do with aptitude -- if students can't recognize them, it's usually because they haven't studied them in English class in more than a superficial manner. They might have been mentioned once or twice, but they were never reiterated enough for students to really understand how they work or why they might be used.

From what I've seen, though, most students, even very bright ones, who consistently score poorly on Critical Reading do so because they don't fully understand what they're reading. They get bits and pieces but don't really know how to get a coherent whole because they have no context for the ideas. And that, in large part, is because they simply aren't accustomed to reading texts at the level or with the content of those on the SAT. Aside from a handful of American and maybe British classics, in high school they've read...textbooks. And that's it. They've had little to no exposure to the grown-up world of ideas and debates and polemics (global warming anyone?), and so of course what they read on the SAT is completely foreign to them. They've been taught that reading = Great Literature (if you're studying for the SAT and happen to be reading this, btw, ask yourself why I put "Great Literature" in caps.); the notion that there are different kind of reading for different kinds of texts is largely foreign to them. If high schools actively tried to expose their students to a wider range of writing -- and asked them to consider more closely how authors use particular kinds of language to convey particular kinds of ideas -- the SAT might not come as such as shock.

A couple of years ago, one of my students was required to read and summarize an Economist article every week for a Social Studies class, and she said that assignment helped her more for the SAT than anything else she'd ever been asked to do. If high schools gave more assignments like that (and required students to keep running lists of all the unfamiliar vocabulary they encountered AND to consider how the authors go about making their arguments), they'd end up preparing their students for SAT without ever even touching on the exam. Ironically, that's much more effective test-prep in the long run than going over how many answer you should eliminate before you guess.

So to wrap up this tirade, a thought: everyone seems to think that strong high school curricula and SAT prep are somehow opposed, but the truth is that they're two sides of the same coin. In the long run, the best test prep is not test prep, and the College Board is right in saying so. Everyone complains that the SAT has nothing to do with real life, but the truth is that many of the passages found on the SAT come from *exactly* the kind of serious adult non-fiction that students will encounter in college and beyond. And yes, some of it is boring, and some of it will have to be read anyway. If high schools actually took a cue from the SAT and exposed their students to sophisticated contemporary readings, ones closer to what they'll find in college and that actually connect to the world at large, then students might not have to learn the skills tested on the SAT from scratch.

Treat Critical Reading More Like Math

2011-12-31T19:28:00.000-05:00

Because of the nature of my job, I tend to get a lot of students with very significant imbalances between their math and verbal scores. Most people scoring a 760 in Math without much prep just don't bother with math tutors, although the same people sometimes find themselves stuck in the 600s or even the 500s in Reading and Writing. What I look at the (full) tests of students like these, however, what often strikes me the most is the difference between the sheer amount of stuff they've written in the Math sections vs. the CR sections.

Even just glancing at the math, I can see that they've really worked those problems out. In fact, it probably wouldn't occur to them to do otherwise. There are equations scribbled all over the place. Maybe not for every question, but often enough for it to be clear that they haven't been approaching the SAT like some kind of glorified guessing game but rather solving the problems. They might use their knowledge of a particular rule to eliminate answers quickly, but at no point have they simply decided to abandon working things out in favor of making a guess they hope will be right.

The same, alas, cannot be said for the Reading. Sure, they've probably underlined and circled some things in the passages, maybe written the main point and perhaps the tone, but the spaces next to the questions are totally and completely blank. Even if they've made an attempt to reason their way through the problem, they haven't bothered to write down all the steps. More likely, though, it hasn't really occurred to them that they *can* approach CR in more or less the same way they would approach Math What seems like an obvious way to work through a math problem seems far less obvious when applied to reading -- especially since they've never been asked to think about reading in quite that way before.

What really gets me, though, is that even after I demonstrate -- in some cases, multiple times -- how to work through a CR question step by step like a math problem, writing down each part of the process and moving systematically through the choices when the answer isn't initially obvious, they still refuse to even attempt to replicate the process on their own. (Actually, after I demonstrate the first time, they usually give me a look that says approximately, "Oh s*&^! That's hard. No way, there has to be an easier way to do it." Um, no, there isn't.) It doesn't matter how many times I tell them that this was how I got an 800, and that if they're really serious about wanting one as well, they need to make themselves go through the entire process. They still want the magical shortcut that'll get them a perfect score without having to work quite so hard. Guess what, folks: it doesn't exist. The closest thing to a fail-safe technique I have for getting an 800 on CR is this, take or leave it.

So having said that, I want to work through what is quite possibly the hardest CR question I know of -- one that absolutely demands to be worked out like an equation and that pretty much every student I've ever had, no matter how high they ultimately scored, screwed up on. (True confession, I actually had to look at the answer the first time I saw it. It was only when I went back that I was able to work out the reasoning behind it). It's from the College Board Test 4, section 6, question 20, p. 592.

In case you're wondering, yes, I would actually write all of my reasoning down. Note that I constantly, quasi-obsessively reiterate both what the question is asking and the point of the paragraph. It may seem excessive, but it's necessary. It's the only way to leave no room for error.

What of the following assertions detracts LEAST from the author's argument in the second paragraph (lines 25-42)?

(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day
(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear
(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day
(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities
(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer's personal life

Paragraph 2

Things that live by night live outside the realm of "normal" time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good, people who have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms. Also night is when we dream, and so reality is warped. After all, we do not see very well at night, we do not need to. But that makes us nearly defenseless after dark. Although we are accustomed to mastering our world by day , in the night we become vulnerable as prey. Thinking of bats as masters of the night threatens the safety we daily take for granted. Though we are at the top of our food chain, if we had to live alone in the rain forest, say, and protect ourselves against roaming predators, we would live partly in terror, as our ancestors did. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw - a ghoul.

Solution:

I. Since the question is phrased in a somewhat convoluted manner, we need to make sure that we are absolutely clear about what is actually being asked before we do anything else. The question is asking us which option detracts LEAST.

That means that four of the options will detract from (go against) the argument and one, the correct one, will not detract from the argument. It does not, however, mean that this option will SUPPORT the argument. Just because an idea does not explicitly go against an argument does not mean that it supports it; there might just be no relationship.

So we are simply looking for something that does not really go against the argument.

II. The next step is to determine what the argument actually is. While the question gives us a lot of lines to read, they can be pretty much summed up AND WRITTEN DOWN as follows:

-Humans sleep @ night & think it's normal, get scared stuff awake @ night b/c = abnormal.
-Bats don't sleep @ night, THUS: B/c bats assoc. w/dark = scary.

Notice that I've crammed down the paragraph into just the essential, disregarding the details entirely.

III. Before we look at the answers, we need to consider very clearly what we are looking for. The question asks us to find the answer that does NOT suggest that bats & stuff @ night = scary. It might not support that idea, but it won't go against it either. So now we consider the answers.

(A) Many people work at night and sleep during the day

If many people work at night and sleep during the day, they go against typical patterns. But that happens all the time and people don't get scared. So that DOES detract from the idea that night is only for scary stuff, and we can eliminate the answer.

(B) Owls, which hunt at night, do not arouse our fear

Again, owls go against normal human patterns but NOT scary. So that also detracts from the idea that night = scary stuff. It can be eliminated.

But scary stuff is supposed to happen @ night, not during the day. So that detracts from the idea that scary stuff just comes out @ night. It can be eliminated.

(D) Some cultures associate bats with positive qualities

This is dealing with the other other main point in the paragraph: bats = scary. But if bats are really so scary for everyone, then they shouldn't be associated w/positive qualities. So this DOES detract from the idea that bats = scary. It can be eliminated as well.

(E) Some dream imagery has its source in the dreamer's personal life

Since we've reasoned through the other options and have determined that they cannot be correct, this must be right. But before we pick it, we're going to double check it against the original question to make sure that it works. This is part of the whole "not leaving yourself any room for error" thing, and if you want to certain, you can't leave this step out.

We know that the right answer will not detract from the idea that bats/night = scary, and this option has nothing whatsoever to do with that idea. And if it has nothing to do with that idea, it can detract from it. It does, however, support the idea that bats/night = scary; it just does NOT detract from it. So it's right.

Most of my students groan when I explain the logic to them; it seems so ridiculously convoluted. And such an outrageous amount of work. But there is no other way to figure it out. Even if some people can get the answer very fast, they're still going through the entire process -- they're just doing it at warp speed.

Now to be fair, this question is very extreme. Most don't have anywhere near this level of complexity. The problem is that there are always a couple of outliers that have something close to it, and those are the questions that separate the 800s from the mid-700s. I'll admit that working like this does not initially feel natural. It can be time consuming (although in reality no more time consuming than staring blankly at the answers), but it's also the sort of thing that gets faster the more you practice it. You have to be able to do it before you can do do it fast. Even if you screw it up the first few (or twenty) times you try to do it, practicing the approach is what counts. You're dealing with the SAT in terms of what it's actually testing -- your ability to reason your way logically through complex material -- and that'll get you a lot further than looking at it just about any other way.

If you can't find the answer in the lines you're given, it must somewhere else

2011-12-18T14:26:00.003-05:00

As I've said before, I'm generally suspicious when people claim to have timing issues on Critical Reading. While I certainly appreciate that some people read much faster than others and do work on timing when necessary, the time itself is almost never the real root of the problem. Upon doing a bit of probing, I typically discover one of two things:

1) the student has genuine comprehension issues, weak vocabulary skills, and rereads portions of a passage three or four times just trying to understand what's literally being said. Ditto for the answer choices.

2) the student has solid comprehension skills but an incomplete understanding of what they're looking for when they read the passages. Like the students in the first category, they tend to waste a lot of time staring at answer choices and trying to distinguish between them without really understanding how to relate them back to the passage. Equipped with some tools for understanding just what to look out for, however, they tend to get rid of their timing issues very quickly.

If you fall into category #2, this post is for you.

Part of the problem for people in this category often comes from not fully understanding what line references mean: if a question refers to "the historians in line 18," that only means that the word "historians" appears in line 18 -- not that the answer to the question is in line 18. The answer could be anywhere.

Usually, this type of misunderstanding plays out in the following way:

You encounter a question that says something like, "In lines 25-37, the author's description of photo albums serves primarily to," and so of course you go and read lines 25-37 because those are the lines that the question gave you.

But when you read lines 25-37 and then look at the answers, nothing seems to work. At that point, you start to wonder whether you were missing something.

There are a couple of answers that just totally don't make sense, so you cross those off, but out of the two or three answers you have left, it seems any of them could work. So you go back and read lines 25-37 again, trying to match them to one of the answers. But it still seems terribly ambiguous.

At which point, you go back and start to read the lines again, only now you realize that you're wasting an awful lot of time on the question and start to skim through without really knowing what you're looking for.

Then you start to think, "well maybe if I interpret it this way, it could be B." The author must be trying to suggest it without really saying so directly. Yeah, that must be it. So you pick B and move on but still really aren't sure. Your mind keeps going back to it as you work through the rest of the questions in for that passage, so your concentration is compromised, and you end up missing other things that you could have gotten right.

When this happens, there's a really good chance that the answer was actually spelled out for you somewhere around line 23. Why? Because the question was asking you what purpose the lines served (i.e. what point did they support?), not what the lines themselves said, and usually the information necessary to determine that purpose is found before the lines themselves. In these cases, the lines are only important insofar as they relate to that point -- for the purposes of answering the question, they're virtually irrelevant.

Plenty of times, of course, it doesn't work that way, and the answer can in fact be found in the given lines. The problems is that just as often they can't, and you really have no way of knowing in advance which category a particular question will fall into before you actually look at the passage.

So if you're a slow-ish reader and don't want to waste time by always backing up and reading a sentence or two before, try this: read the lines you're given, and see whether you can definitely answer the question from what you've read. Not, "well if I interpret it this way, C might kind of work," but "the answer must be A because this passage says xyz." If you can't answer the question from those lines you've been given, it's probably because the answer isn't there. And if it isn't there, it has has to be located someplace else.

Your job is to locate that someplace else: if it isn't right before, it's probably right after. It doesn't matter if it takes a little more time to go back and read that extra bit; there's essentially no other way to determine the answer, and you'll be far worse served if you just keep looking at the lines given in the question. Just keep in mind that if your comprehension skills really are good, the problem is most likely not that you've overlooked something or didn't interpret the lines in the way the SAT wanted you to. It's just that the answer was probably never there in the first place.

Overstudy

2011-12-12T19:13:00.000-05:00

Among the tidbits of wisdom that I attempt to impart to my students is the fact that it doesn't really matter if they understand a particular rule/concept/strategy after I've explained it to them once. The real test is whether they can apply at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning, when they're still not 100% awake, and, oh yeah, are in the middle of taking an exam that will play a very significant role in determining where they spend the next four years of their lives.

In general, I do my best not to pile on the pressure for my students (they're certainly under enough already, and I certainly don't want to be responsible for anyone having a nervous breakdown!), but every now and then, when someone needs a reality check about what's involved in really and truly mastering a concept, I give them that little speech. Usually it's met with a small giggle and a look of minor incredulousness. Until they actually go through the process of taking the SAT and end up sitting in front of question 9 in section 10, desperately trying to wade through four-and-a-half hours of test-taking fatigue and figure out just what is wrong with the stupid sentence already, most people don't fully appreciate what it means to understand comma splices.

So let me spell it out. If you haven't taken the SAT yet, you might not quite believe, but trust me, it's something to keep in mind as you prepare. True mastery of a particular concept, whether it be comma splices, dangling modifiers, or right triangles, means that you can always recognize when it's being tested. Always. No matter how tired you are, no matter what you were doing beforehand, no matter how much room the people in the next room are making, no matter what angle it's being tested from -- the knowledge is just there.

If you can usually recognize comma splices on the SAT but use them rampantly in your own writing, that means you don't fully understand them -- which means that you still have the potential to get fooled on the exam. Likewise, if formulating a clear thesis statement and composing an argument that adheres consistently to it something that's just beginning to sink in for you, there's no guarantee you'll be able to pull it off on the real test. This is not just a question of "getting familiar" with how the SAT works. Until you get to the point where it's an extension of a real-life skill, one that you consistently apply in your actual schoolwork, there will always be an element of chance. (If you don't believe me, ask a kid who got a 12 on the essay without doing a zillion practice runs: I can virtually guarantee that coming up with a clear thesis and keeping their argument directly focused on it is something they can do in their sleep.)

I think, by the way, that this is part of why so many people perceive the SAT to be so "tricky." If you've just brushed up on a couple of things for the test but haven't fully assimilated them, of course you're going to miss things; it's inevitable, especially since the test is written to exploit those misunderstandings.

What does this mean in terms of studying? Well... I'll put it this way. For most people, the inclination is to study until they've gotten more or less where they want to be. And then stop. But that doesn't really work: just because you did incredibly well on one practice test doesn't mean that you'll necessarily do as well on the next test (unless, of course, you really do know what you're doing). So take another one. And another one. Do it until there's absolutely no way you can possibly score below a certain level, even on your worst possible day. And when you go back and review the questions you've missed, make sure that you're not just looking at the questions themselves but rather at the underlying concepts they're testing. If you have trouble with subject-verb agreement, take a book and try to identify the subject and verb in every single sentence; if your ability to identify dangling modifiers is hit or miss, try writing some of your own. If you can produce it correctly, you'll be a lot less likely to overlook someone else's error.

You might not be able to master everything, but you can pick a handful of concepts that seem well within your control and focus on them. Even three or four more questions per section could boost your score well over 100 points.

The bottom line is that you never know just what's going to happen when you go in and take the test. If you perceive your score as the result of chance, whether particular the test is "easy" or "hard"... well, chances are you're not going to do nearly as well as you could have. Or, at the very least, you're going to feel as if the whole experience is somehow beyond your control. But if you've trained yourself past the point of mastery, the whole experience might actually border on. . .maybe not quite pleasant, but at least not so bad.

A (P)SAT score is feedback, not a judgment

2011-12-07T01:27:00.002-05:00

Update: Somehow or other, I neglected to notice that PSAT scores were coming out just as I posted this (usually my students flip out about them, but this year everyone seems remarkably laid back about the whole thing, so I apparently I'm the last to know;) Anyway, I wanted to add a couple of things in light of that fact. First, if you're less than thrilled with your score, don't panic -- a lot of people are in exactly the same situation. A weaker-than-expected PSAT score is in no way a harbinger of doom -- it's simply an indication of the approximate score you would get if you were to take the SAT tomorrow, without any additional studying.

That said, however, PSAT can be a major wake-up call for a lot of people who thought they were going to skate through standardized testing. (I always cringe internally whenever a junior that I know really needs to work on things tells me that the PSAT was "easy;" it's usually an indicator that they fell into every trap in the book, and seeing scores 100+ points lower than what they expected can be a major blow.) It can be exciting to hit junior year and actually start the whole college process you've been hearing everyone go on about forever, but getting a less than stellar PSAT score can suddenly make the whole process get old really fast.

Here's the thing: your improvement from here on largely depends on your attitude: if you get disgusted with the whole process now and decide that it's futile to even try to raise your score, you probably won't. If, on the other hand, you can accept it as what it is -- a diagnostic -- and use the information it gives you to motivate you and focus your study process, you have the potential to make truly massive gains.

I'm not going to lie: it can be a lot of work, but provided you have the basics in place, it is totally doable. I've had students who improved literally hundreds of points from the PSAT to the SAT -- and yes, that includes major (150+ point) increases in Critical Reading. Yes, I did help them, but they also put in huge amounts of work independently.

Despite claims to the contrary, what's tested on the (P)SAT is not some sort of undefinable "aptitude" but rather a set of concrete skills. They may not be tested in quite the same way that you're accustomed to being tested in school, but that doesn't make them any less real. And as a result, there are specific steps that you can take to improve them. For that reason, it can be helpful to view your scores not as some sort of ultimate, immutable indicator of your ability, but rather as a general indicator of where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and of what sorts of things you need to focus on improving.

Looking at your score as feedback makes the process more neutral. Yes, of course SAT scores do ultimately count for a lot in the admissions process; I'm not about to deny that. But they're also a relatively accurate, unbiased measure of where you stand in some key areas -- how to recognize the point that an author is trying to make; how to distinguish between what they think and what they think about what other people think (!); and how to read objectively without allowing your own opinion to cloud your understanding of what's literally being said. It could be that you simply need to practice taking the test or work more carefully, but chances are that there's a skill or two you need to brush up on -- even if it doesn't seem to obviously correlate with the questions you missed.

Look at it this way: you missed the questions you missed for a reason. Even if you really did know how to do them, there wasn't some mysterious force that forced your hand to pick up that #2 pencil and bubble in B rather than C. Something in your process went awry, and that resulted in your getting the question wrong. The way to improve your score is to try to identify the problem at its core and deal with it from there.

If, for example, you misread a Math question and solved for x instead of 2x, that's a sign that you need to read more carefully; it doesn't matter how good you are at math in school. The Math portion of the SAT is a math-based reasoning test, not a math test per se, and it asks you to integrate English and math skills simultaneously in the same way that Critical Reading asks you to use logic skills similar to those used in Math. Blaming the test for asking a question in a way that you weren't expecting won't help. What will help is putting your finger on the page as you read the question, taking a moment to reiterate for yourself exactly what it's asking, and, if necessary, scribbling yourself a note so that you don't forget. Those are important skills too. But that said, pretty much every math tutor I've ever talked to has told me that plenty of kids in AP Calc are missing some of the fundamentals, either because they forgot them or because they never really mastered them in the first place. If you're so convinced that you're above going back and reviewing the math on the test, you probably won't get your score up anywhere near as much as you hoped.

Likewise, if you're a straight-A student in AP English but can't get past 650 on Critical Reading, it won't do you any good to get indignant. You need to look honestly and objectively at why you're making so many mistakes. If your score reflects the fact that you consistently get down to two answers but tend to pick the wrong one, you need to look at why you always pick the wrong one. It could be because you're not going back to the passage and really checking things out (or are reading too quickly or not extensively enough when you do), but it could also be because you have a tendency to insert your own knowledge and not look closely at what's actually being said. It could also be that you have trouble recognizing how specific words contribute to the creation of a particular tone, or in decoding particularly unfamiliar types of syntax or phrasing -- things that have absolutely nothing to do with your test-taking ability. In that case, you need to spend some serious time reading SAT-level material. One of my students who got himself up 100 points in CR did so in part by devouring Oliver Sacks' books, passages from which frequently show up on the SAT (it helped that he absolutely loved the books, though); the level of his comprehension skyrocketed.

I recognize that it can be hard to identify just what you're missing, especially if you're trying to do it all on your own, and it can be even harder to be brutally honest with yourself about just what you need to work on. But the key is not to take it personally. If you can leave your ego at the door and focus on solidifying some of the fundamentals that got lost along the way, you might even learn something in the process.

Tricky is in the Eye of the Beholder

2011-12-05T03:11:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I feel like the SAT is a kind of Rorschach test. It's so laden down with cultural baggage and anxieties (about race, class, social mobility, you name it) that people's opinions -- and they tend to be very, very strong opinions -- seem to reveal more about their own concerns than they do about the actual test itself.

I also sometimes feel as if people who complain about the SAT's purported "trickiness" are missing the point of the it: both the questions and the incorrect answer choices are deliberately written to exploit the kinds of mistakes that people are most likely to make when working through the various kinds of questions. The real issue is whether that whole setup is a valid means of testing, well... whatever it is that the SAT is supposed to be testing (which is of course something that no one can agree on anyway).

I do feel obligated to point out that for the small percentage of test-takers whose skills are such that they can disregard the multiple-choice aspect and simply answer the questions, the whole concept of trickiness is essentially a moot point.

I say this because so much of the criticism that gets leveled at the SAT seems to be based on the notion that no one could possibly do well on the SAT without extensive coaching on how to avoid the traps, and that's simply not true. If it were that impossible, the College Board would never keep administering the test in its current form. Some people can in fact do extraordinarily well with virtually no studying at all. It may be horribly unfair, but they do exist. (I know, I went to high school with them, and no, they weren't lying about not getting tutored and are now getting Ph.Ds at Stanford in things like particle physics). The fact that other families are willing to spend thousands of dollars so that their children can obtain scores that are even remotely competitive in no way lessens that fact. And no, that isn't fair either.

I also say this because in my experience, focusing on the trickiness of the answer choices is often a convenient way for people to deflect from the fact that they really didn't know how to answer a particular question. I'd say that a good 85% of the time, people miss Critical Reading questions because they didn't totally get what was going in the passage. They might think they understood, but when I ask them to put things in their own words, they usually don't quite hit the mark. And if they don't nail the big picture, other things have a tendency to go off as well.

But back to the question at hand, namely what do people actually mean when they say that the SAT is tricky? To start with, I'm going to give an example of a couple of Writing questions that my students routinely miss:

1) For people in many ancient societies, work was only a means of survival rather than a way to improve your standard of living.

2) At the reception were the chattering guests, the three-tiered cake, and the lively music that have become characteristic of many wedding celebrations.

For the first question, my students consistently pick B (a means of) because "a" always goes before a singular noun, and "means" looks like it's plural because of -s on the end of it.

For the second question, they pick D (characteristic of) because they interpret it as a noun agreement question and think that it should be "characteristics of," not realizing that "characteristic of" = "typical of" and is a fixed phrase that doesn't need to agree.

I admit that the first time I had a student miss these questions, I was a bit taken aback; it had never actually occurred to me that those particular answer choices could be misinterpreted in those particular ways. I just assumed that my student was an anomaly in reading them the way she did.

But then the same thing happened with someone else. And then someone else. And before I knew it, I was explaining their reasoning to them before they could even explain it to me. Only at that point did it begin to occur to me that ETS might have deliberately included those answer because kids would be likely to use that reasoning. But they might have also not worked things out that precisely -- they might have underlined it randomly, and it just so happened that lots of kids picked that answer in the focus groups. It's easy to fall into a kind of circular logic/conspiracy theorist mentality and start thinking that everything that you perceive as tricky was put on the test specifically to trick you, when in reality ETS occasionally does things by chance that lots of people happen to misinterpret the same way. ETS can be sloppy. It happens.

Anyway, I digress again. The point I'm trying perhaps not very lucidly to make is that those kids undoubtedly perceived those questions to be evidence of how "tricky" the SAT was. They had learned certain rules about SAT grammar, and now those rules were being broken. Why should they be penalized? And besides, what sort of test would judge them on something so blatantly unfair?

But here's the problem: almost inevitably, the kids who miss that question are the ones who do not read SAT-level texts independently and who consequently haven't really developed an ear for what is and is not standard usage -- and that in turn shows up in their general writing and reading skills. The ones who do read extensively on their own generally have the same reaction as I did; it simply doesn't occur to them that it could be a trick. For a question like that, it doesn't matter how much coaching someone has received; even if they've learned the rules flawlessly, there's absolutely no way to prepare for all of the exceptions. Worse, people who conceive of the SAT primarily in terms of tricks are more likely to miss those questions because they tend to only see it in terms of "the way the SAT tests things" and not in terms of how English actually works. They also tend to be the ones who are surprised to discover that concepts tested on the SAT actually have something to do with real life writing (more than one student of mine has been shocked to discover that the rules tested on SAT Writing are not just something made up by ETS).

I know that everyone is intent on denying the relationship between SAT scores and actual skills, but from what I've seen, the correlation between those two little questions and overall dexterity with the English language is remarkable. To be clear, I am not saying that someone's responses to these questions form any sort of final judgment about their capabilities and/or potential, simply that they serve as a remarkably accurate signpost for other kinds of knowledge. It is of course theoretically possible to be a phenomenal writer and brilliant English student and still miss those two questions... but from what I've seen, the reality is that most of the time it just doesn't work that way.

Not All Guesses are Created Equal

2011-11-27T22:12:00.000-05:00

A lot of test-prep discussions seem to center on guessing: when to do it, when not to do it, and how many answer choices you should eliminate before trying to do it.

Interestingly, though, no one ever seems to discuss just what it means to guess. I think that this is largely because most people assume that the term is self-evident: a "guess" is what you take what you take when you've eliminated at least one or two option(s) but have absolutely no idea what the real answer is and don't want to leave a question blank.

What largely gets overlooked in these discussion, however, is the fact that there are different kinds of guessing, and they are not at all alike. In general, I find that there are three major types of guesses, and I want to discuss each one in turn:

1) Wild guesses

2) "Gut feeling" guesses

3) Educated Guesses

Wild Guesses

I'm going to come right out and say that I'm not a big fan of this type of guessing, no matter how many answer choices you've eliminated. Not simply because I'm a cautious person when it comes to test-taking (although anyone who's seen me work through an SAT Critical Reading section will testify that I don't *ever* pick an answer without double-checking that it's actually backed up by something in the text) but because also because from what I've observed, most wild guesses tend to be wrong -- even when you're down to two answers.

Repeated wild guessing on questions you really don't know how to answer has the potential to drag your score down a whole lot. Especially if you're trying to top 750 or even 700, you need to be very careful about answering questions you don't really know the answer to (and if you have the chops to pull above a 700, you shouldn't see more than a question or two per test that fall into that category anyway).

The other reason that I dislike wild guessing is that doing it habitually, especially for a relatively high scorer, reinforces the idea that the SAT CR is fundamentally a guessing game. It isn't, and treating it that way can get you in a lot of trouble.

"Gut Feeling" Guesses

Interestingly enough, I find that these guesses tend to almost always be right, and more often than not I have to convince people that it's ok to make them! In fact, I feel as if I have the "trust your instinct" conversation at least once every tutoring session. That's totally understandable. "Gut feeling" guesses are scary because they don't seem to be based on anything, and no one wants to ruin their score by going on a feeling. But usually people get questions wrong because they don't trust their instincts, not because they do!

Here's the thing: these guesses are usually based on something, even if it can't be put into words. If you're generally a strong reader, it's perfectly possible to grasp in some corner of your mind what's fundamentally going on in a passage but lack the vocabulary to put it explicitly into words. That glimmer of understanding is usually enough to get you the right answer.

For example, even if you've never actually learned that many words with anglo-saxon roots tend to sound clearly negative or positive, you can probably guess that "dolt" is something negative. If you have a decent ear for language, you can probably intuit that it's bad, whether or not you know how you did so.

From what I've seen, the most effective way to know whether this kind of guessing will actually be effective is to take a bunch of tests and practice doing it. It can be incredibly scary to trust yourself at first, especially if you're not 100% sure of the answer, but if you take a bunch of practice tests and consistently get questions right because you trusted your instincts, you'll start to feel more comfortable.

If, on the other hand, you discover that your instincts tend to lead you in the wrong direction, you can learn to deal accordingly.

In any case, you NEED to test this out beforehand; you can't just wing it when you get to the real test.

Educated Guesses

Even more often that "gut feeling" guesses, this kind of guess usually ends up being correct -- in large part because the SAT is test of logical conjecture, designed so that you can reason your way through the questions. In general, my rule is that if you've arrived at any answer by employing some sort of logical process (provided that it isn't too farfetched), you should go ahead and pick it because it's probably right.

There are a couple of different ways in which this type of guess can manifest itself, the first being simple process of elimination. If you can conclusively discard four answers, the remaining one must be correct. Even if you don't know why the right answer is the right answer, you can still pick it with a fair degree of confidence.

In addition, on sentence completions, you can choose an answer that includes unfamiliar words based on your knowledge of roots. So even if you don't know what "multifarious" and "polymath" mean, you know they probably go along with the idea of diversity or many of something. As I've said before, the SAT isn't just based on how many words you can memorize -- it's also based on how you can use your knowledge about language to put words together (or take them apart). If you can relate an unfamiliar word to French or Latin or Spanish, you might not get the exact meaning, but you'll probably get it close enough to answer the question.

Furthermore, understanding how the SAT is constructed can also go a long way toward helping you make these kinds of guesses. Knowing, for example, that the correct answer to many passage-based questions will essentially be a rephrasing of the passage's main point can help you identify the likely answer -- even if you can't find the necessary evidence to back it up and/or don't 100% understand what the question is asking. Granted you still have to nail the main point, but provided you can do that, you'll almost certainly be right.

This is also where the question of "implied authorship" comes into play -- the idea that the writers of the test have their own set of biases to which correct answers tend to conform. That means that extreme answers are usually wrong; women and minorities are portrayed positively (and tone questions relating to them typically have positive answers); and challenging conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to science, is a good thing. Knowing that the right answers tend to slant this way does not guarantee that you'll get a question correct, but it can significantly up your chances.

So to sum up, if you're about to take a wild guess just for the sake of not leaving a question blank, you might want to think twice; but if you have good reason for picking the answer you're picking, you should probably go for it.

Don't Ever Read Just Half of a Sentence

2011-11-24T00:04:00.000-05:00

The SAT makes people do some strange things.

I think it's safe to say that in everyday life, most people don't pick up a book, open to a random page, start reading in the middle of a sentence, and then wonder why they don't fully understand what's going on. Barring some sort of bizarre circumstances, it just doesn't happen. But it happens constantly on the SAT.

Now, I fully admit there are some aspects of SAT Reading that are different from the types of reading most test-takers have been asked to thus far, but contrary to conventional test-prep wisdom, SAT Reading is not completely detached from the normal act of reading. That means that you need to read words and phrases within the larger context of the sentences where they appear. Always.

I realize that this is one of those pieces of advice that might sound pretty obvious, but please just hear me out. One of the biggest mistakes that I see my students consistently make when they answer Critical Reading questions is to focus only on the word/phrase/line references given and ignore the surrounding information -- which is what they actually need to read in order to answer the question correctly. Not backing up and starting from a sentence or two above is bad enough, but actually starting in the middle of the sentence has the potential to cause a lot of problems.

For example (passage excerpt):

...Now that I am passionately involved with thinking
critically about Black people and representation, I can
confess that those walls of photographs empowered me, and
that I feel their absence in my life. Right now I long for those
walls, those curatorial spaces in the home that express our will
to make and display images.

Question: In line 26, "absence" refers metaphorically to a
lack of a

(A) constraining force
(B) cluttered space
(C) negative influence
(D) sustaining tradition
(E) joyful occasion

By SAT standards, the question is right in the middle of the road difficulty-wise. In fact, it's a level 3. The reason that people tend to get into trouble with questions like it, however, is as follows: the question refers specifically to the word "absence," then tells us that the word appears in line 26 -- a piece of information that leads most people to *begin* reading at the word "absence" in line 26, then continue down to the rest of the paragraph (and often, when they can't find the answer, to the paragraph below it).

In other words, they start reading halfway through the sentence, but they're so focused on the word "absence" that it never even occurs to them that they might be missing something important. And once they hit the phrase "curatorial spaces," they so hung up on the fact that they don't quite understand what it means that it never occurs to them that they might be missing something a lot more straightforward.

The problem, of course, is that the answer is found in the first part of the sentence: the photographs were absent, and they empowered the narrator. Empowered = sustaining (more or less), hence D. (The beginning of the passage also makes quite clear that those photographs were an important tradition in her family.) But if you don't read the beginning of the sentence, you miss the context and end up going in the completely wrong direction.

Vocabulary and Variables

2011-11-21T18:31:00.000-05:00

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 actual 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 why an 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.

Adverbs and Comma Splices

2011-11-18T17:03:00.000-05:00

At first glance, it might seem that adverbs and comma splices don't have all that much to do with one another. On both the SAT Writing section and the ACT English section, however, they're actually quite connected, even if the relationship isn't particular obvious.

For those of you who need a quick review, a comma splice is a nefarious invisible beast that sneaks onto your papers after you've finally gone to bed at 3 a.m. and gobbles up your commas so that you turn in assignments filled with run-on sentences.

No, I'm just kidding (obviously). It's almost as bad, though. It's actually just a comma placed between two full sentences (aka independent clauses), and it can be fixed by replacing the comma with a semicolon.

For example:

Comma Splice: Gandhi rejected violence as a means of political revolt, he advocated peaceful protest instead.

Correct: Gandhi rejected violence as a means of political revolt; he advocated peaceful protest instead.

An adverb is a word that modifies a verb. You may be familiar with them from the infamous "adjective vs. adverb" error that appears in the Error-Identification section (e.g. John and Bob pulled the sled slow up hill, pausing only occasionally to catch their breath). For that section of the test, it's usually enough to know that most adverbs end in "-ly."

Now, most adverbs do in fact end in "-ly," but not all of them do. And it's the ones that don't that tend to cause a lot of trouble when it comes to Fixing Sentences.

So back to comma splices: in order to recognize when a comma is being incorrectly placed between two sentences, you have to first be able to recognize when something is a sentence and when it isn't. For a lot of test-takers, though, this is much harder than it sounds. Most people have no problem recognizing that this is a sentence:

Gandhi advocated peaceful protest.

But stick in an adverb (underlined below), and all of the sudden some people aren't quite so sure:

Gandhi advocated peaceful protest instead.

At this point, a lot of people will look at the sentence and say, "instead of what?" Because the sentence suddenly doesn't make complete sense on its own, they mistakenly believe it can't be a sentence anymore. Actually, though, it can and it is.

It even gets worse: move the adverb to the beginning of the clause, and a lot of people will simply have no idea whatsoever whether or not they're dealing with a sentence:

Instead, Gandhi advocated peaceful protest.

This is still a sentence. It doesn't matter whether it makes any sense out of context, OR whether the adverb comes at the beginning or the end; it's still a stand-alone, grammatically correct sentence. And that means that it can't have a comma before it -- only a semicolon or a period.

Both the SAT and the ACT play with this concept a lot. They know that lots of high school students get confused by syntax and lose their ability to distinguish between sentences and fragments when adverbs are placed at the beginning of a sentences. Furthermore, if my own observations are any indication of things, they also know that this one of the top errors that high school students make in their own writing.
(Actually, it's something I see adults do in their writing sometimes too, and that looks really bad). In this case, learning that placing an adverb at the beginning of a sentence doesn't make it any less of a sentence can go a very long way toward making writing sound clearer and more polished and, well, more like something produced by an adult.

Sometimes It's Ok Just to Tell a Story

2011-11-16T16:51:00.000-05:00

So much gets made out of the "right" way to write the SAT essay: plug in a couple of examples about The Great Gatsby or the Civil Rights movement, throw in a bunch of big SAT words whether or not you really know their definitions, make up a quote or two, stick in some transitions, and presto....! You've just written pretty much the same essay as a hundred thousand other people. So don't be shocked when you get an 8.

Even though I frequently remind my students that if they write a paint-by-numbers essay, they're likely to end up with average score, I'm still a little surprised by just how risk-averse they are. On one hand, I of course understand why: it's the SAT, for crying out loud! One false step and you've ruined your chances at the school you've dreamed about going to since you were five and, by extension, the entire rest of your life. But on the other hand, you're not particularly likely to get a stellar store on the essay if you don't step out of your comfort zone and do something a little more interesting. Something that actually holds your reader's interest and gives them a break from the tedium of reading hundreds if not thousands of essays about MLK and Hitler. This does not, however, mean trying to sound like a 50 year-old and overloading your writing with ten dollar words. Simple does not necessarily equal unsophisticated.

I was reminded of this by Debbie Stier couple of days ago, when she posted her "6" essay (scroll down) about The Things They Carried over at Perfect Score Project. If you're looking for a great example of a relatively un-formulaic top-scoring essay, I would highly suggest that you read it. The first thing that struck me was how utterly easy it was to go through. I dare say I actually enjoyed it. It drew me in, but not because Debbie was trying to grab her reader in an an obvious way: she simply told a story, tying it back into the prompt just often enough that I never lost focus of what the essay was about. It wasn't a perfect piece of writing, but it held my attention far, far more than most SAT essays ever do -- I actually wanted to finish it. (And trust me when I say that I read *lots* of SAT essays, and I usually try to get through them as fast as possible.) Yes, there were some conventional elements, especially in the beginning, but they never felt particularly forced.

And that's the part that I want to insist on here: the best essays often don't feel forced. They don't even always feel as if they were written for the SAT. They don't scream, "Please give me a high score because see, look how much big vocabulary I used and how sophisticated I tried to sound even though I don't really know what half of these words mean." They just tell a story.

Now in all fairness, I know how hard Debbie worked for that 6. In this case, what feels like an artless piece of writing is actually the result an incredible amount of effort. But I remember telling Debbie months ago that if she stopped writing just what she thought, even subconsciously, that the College Board wanted to hear and started writing about things that she had a genuine emotional connection to, the score would follow. I'm not saying that this will always work; 25 minutes is not a long time, and if you get thrown a question you just don't have great examples for, it's easy to flounder. But in general, if you approach the essay from the standpoint of trying to engage your reader, to interest them, not just to impress them, you might do a lot better than you expected.

A Quick SAT vs. ACT Litmus Test

2011-11-15T17:50:00.000-05:00

When I start working with someone early in their junior, the first thing I try to get figured out is whether they're going to take the SAT or the ACT. I'd rather have them go through a couple of weeks of indecision early on than suddenly decide to switch tests after six months of preparation (especially because every year I do get people who've already been prepping for one test for six months, then decide to switch two weeks before the other and want to cram. That's really not fun for me.) Usually I just tell my students that if they can't stomach the thought of taking both a full SAT and a full ACT, they should just do a couple of sections from each test and see which one they like better.

I've realized recently, however, that at the extreme end, there can be a simpler litmus test, at least on the verbal side of things, and that test involves sentence completions. Interestingly enough, though, it has very little to do with vocabulary per se. The giveaway is how easily you can either 1) plug in your own words, or 2) correctly determine whether the word that goes in a given blank should be positive or negative -- regardless of how many of the words in the answer choices you actually know. If you try a handful of sections and are consistently stumbling over this exercise by the third question or so, that's a pretty good sign that you should seriously consider the ACT.

Here why: while having a good vocabulary will help you on the SAT, the sentence completion section isn't just a vocabulary test. It actually functions as a microcosm of the Critical Reading section as a whole in that it also tests your ability to perceive relationships between ideas. Vocabulary can be memorized, but if you have difficulty sorting out the basic connections between ideas in a sentence or identify key pieces of information, the unfortunate reality is that you're probably not going to develop that skill in a couple of months. If you can't even figure out what sorts of words go into the blanks on relatively straightforward questions, how are you going to be able to consistently determine nuances between words on vocabulary-in-context questions or nail the relationship between the authors' ideas on Passage 1/Passage 2? I'm not trying to be harsh, just realistic.

I'm also not suggesting that this is a fool-proof method, just that it can provide some quick insight into some of the struggles certain students might have down the line. To be fair, it's not that these skills are not tested at all on the ACT -- they are, but they feature less prominently and tend to be tested in a somewhat less circuitous way. There's no sense in making yourself crazy if there's a less headache-inducing option available.

A few more thoughts about the difficulty of raising critical reading scores

2011-11-09T23:54:00.000-05:00

Granted I'm no math expert, but from following some of the debates over just why SAT Math is so difficult, it seems to me that there's a very fundamental difference between that section and Critical Reading -- a difference that accounts for a lot of the trouble many people have in raising their CR score as compared to raising their Math score.

From what I gather (and please correct me if I'm wrong), many of the difficulties that people encounter on the Math section stem from the fact that the SAT requires them to deal with relatively familiar concepts in highly unfamiliar ways, and to combine and apply principles in ways that aren't immediately apparent. The specifics of the test might be different from what they've seen in school and can often be very hard, but the general principles behind them aren't fundamentally new for most people who've gone through a couple of years of algebra and geometry. So even they miss a question because they're used to solving for x instead of (x-y), they've still seen plenty of problems in math class that involve variables and parentheses.

The Critical Reading section is different. For a lot of high school students, it's the verbal equivalent of BC Calculus rather than algebra and geometry. In other words, it tests material of a level and content that they have never actually been exposed to, and it requires them to maneuver with it in ways that they've never encountered in school. Even in AP English.

Consider this: in sophomore and junior English class, the average American high school student probably reads a Shakespeare play or two and a handful of classics such as Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and maybe some Thoreau, Austen, Dickens, or in an advanced class, Joyce. The point is that pretty much all of it is fictional, and it's usually set in an English-speaking country sometime in the past. SAT passages, on the other hand, are largely non-fiction and are drawn from contemporary sources -- books that were published in the last couple of decades and that include subject matter only the most sophisticated independent high school readers will have even a passing familiarity with: art and media criticism, anthropology, cognitive science, and method acting to name a few. The novels that do appear are just as likely to be written by a nineteenth century Russian author as by a twentieth-century American one, and often the cultural milieux and scenarios are wildly unfamiliar.

The other piece of this is the level at which most of the texts are written -- at the risk of sounding reductive, if SAT Math is essentially middle school competition math, as some people have asserted, then Critical Reading is essentially introductory-level college reading. Those texts those passages are taken from are not written specifically to test high school students' reading ability (even though ETS will often edit them to make them somewhat more digestible) -- they're either written by professional academics for other professional academics, or by specialists in a subject for educated adult readers. And they sound like it.

It seems fair to say that most high school students have simply never been asked to deal with a text that reads like the following: "The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky ideas about the nature of art and the situation of its making, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this...Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art." (from Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," featured on the October 2009 SAT.)

The syntax of last part in particular is so unfamiliar that it tends to stop a lot of kids cold: "Basic to question...?" Are you even allowed to start a sentence that way? (Yes, you are.) And that first sentence is really long -- isn't it a run-on? (No, it isn't, it's ok to have a sentence that long.) And why does it have to sound so confusing? (Because that's just how academics write.) The only way you get comfortable dealing with sentences like that is to read lots of them. There's no shortcut, no trick. If you haven't been regularly exposed to people who talk and think and write like that, the reality is that you just can't compensate in a few weeks or even a few months. Most of the major test-prep companies do not even acknowledge the presence of this level/type of passage when they write their own materials, which is part of why people often get shocked by the difficulty of the real test.

The other problem is that most English classes revolve primarily around discussions, which are easily tuned out, and papers, which can be pulled together with minimal effort via a combination of Sparknotes and Wikipedia. The teacher might give a couple of quizzes just to make sure people are doing their reading, but those are easily dealt with.

In terms of rhetoric, figures such as metaphors and personification might be covered, but that's about it. Rarely if never are students asked to study how the text functions at its most basic level: how form and syntax and diction all work together to create meaning. Rather, the meaning itself is taken as the starting point for discussion (What do you think about that? Do you agree? Disagree? How does it relate to your own life?). The notion that a text is a rhetorical construction designed to elicit a particular reaction from the reader never enters into play. So it's no wonder that Critical Reading, whose questions tend to revolve around the relationship between form and meaning, comes as a shock. Besides, if you've always been asked for your own personal interpretation in English class, the idea that your own personal interpretation is totally and utterly irrelevant on the SAT can be hard to stomach.

Finally, most high school students are never introduced to the notion that different kinds of texts require different kinds of reading. Because they are only exposed to literary fiction in English class, they develop the idea that "real" reading involves carefully underlining and annotating and note-taking and "analyzing" (although a lot of these supposedly careful readers display a remarkably weak grasp of what the passages as well as the questions are actually saying). As a matter of fact, it isn't uncommon for students to take offense when I ask them to try reading for the main ideas and skimming over everything else; they consider it a betrayal of everything they've been taught and take it as further evidence of the stupidity of standardized testing.

And if the test is so stupid, why would you waste your time studying for it anyway?

Write Yourself Notes - It Helps

2011-11-08T18:07:00.000-05:00

I'm the first person to admit that I have a terrible short-term memory. Terrible. I think it used to be halfway decent, but then my senior year of college hit, and that was that. Now it isn't uncommon for me to get halfway through a sentence and drift off halfway through, unable to recall the point I was attempting to make.

This happens with alarming frequency when I'm tutoring, at which point I typically ask my student what I was saying. What really disturbs me, however, is that most of the time my student can't remember what I was saying either. I'm sorry, but you just shouldn't be losing your memory at sixteen. You have the entire rest of your life for that to happen. Besides, you need to have something to look forward to in middle age!

Given how much stress most high school juniors seems to be under, though, I can't say that this is entirely shocking. (As a matter of fact, looking back on my junior year of high school, it's kind of amazing that I managed to hang onto my own memory as long as I did.) Which brings me to the point of this post: when you're taking the SAT/ACT/other random test, you shouldn't assume that your memory will automatically work any better than it was last night when you were trying to recall what that English/Physics/Spanish assignment was and had to ask your friend.

Catherine Johnson over at Kitchen Table Math has written extensively about the issue of working memory and the effects of trying to perform under pressure on the SAT. While some parts of the SAT (e.g. Math and Writing) are more directly focused on memorization-based skills, the truth is that it's easy to forget crucial steps just about anywhere on the test. Everyone has particular things that they forget when the pressure gets ramped up -- it might be a particular formula or grammatical rule, but it might also be a matter of approach.

The truth is that that weak spot could be anything, and for practical purposes, it doesn't really matter what it is. What matters is that you become 1) aware of it, and 2) willing to write yourself a note about it.

So, for example, if you consistently forget to plug your own words into sentence completion blanks (assuming that helps you), you can write something like: PLUG IN WORDS! at the top of your page. Or, if you always second-guess yourself and change your answers from right to wrong, you can write: DON'T SECOND GUESS YOURSELF!

Trust me, it's more than worth spending the extra five seconds to write yourself the reminder -- and you do have to physically write it, not just think it. The reason is that halfway through a section, right at the point when you start to go into total panic mode, your memory is probably not functioning optimally (to put it mildly). You need something concrete to look at that will tell you to "LOOK OUT FOR DANGLING MODIFIERS!" Otherwise, it's too easy to give into the fear and freeze up, overlooking specific steps you can take to get yourself working and thinking again. You might also discover that you were looking right past something that was staring you in the face the whole time.

Critical Reading Tutoring as Remediation: the Limits of Test Prep

2011-11-05T00:38:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago, I tutored a pair of best friends for the SAT. Although one of them was considerably more motivated than the other, both were smart, intellectually curious, and lots of fun to work with. Neither, however, was what you would call a natural standardized test-taker when it came to Critical Reading: in their junior year, both had PSAT Reading scores of about 500.

I worked with them regularly starting in the fall of junior year, and fortunately they both managed to pull up their scores quite a bit: by the spring of their junior year, they were both reliably scoring more than 100 points higher, and both ultimately attained scores in the high 600s.

I wish that I could say that their experiences were typical, but unfortunately they were the exception rather than the rule. Critical Reading scores, unlike Writing and Math scores, are notoriously difficult to raise. While I've had many students who did manage to raise their CR scores by 100+ points, I've had others whose scores I simply could not get to budge, no matter how many different approaches I tried. (As I explained to their parents, I may be very good at what I do, but I do not actually possess magical powers when it comes to the SAT.)

So here I want to discuss the difference between these two groups: the ones who start out low but make huge gains relatively quickly, and the ones who start low and remain stuck below a certain point (usually 600). Their divergent experiences illustrate the distinction between actual test-prep tutoring (that is, tutoring geared almost exclusively to managing the kinds of questions that appear on the SAT) and remediation tutoring (tutoring geared primarily toward developing comprehension strategies).

Despite their initial low scores, both of the boys I worked with a couple of years ago had some major things going for them: they came from upper middle-class families and had highly educated, intellectually-oriented parents who were willing to spend substantial amounts of time drilling them on vocabulary, whether they wanted to study it or not; access to a challenging curriculum that regularly exposed them to the level of text found on the SAT; a high degree of intellectual curiosity, including an interest in relatively sophisticated subjects (e.g. seventeenth century Dutch art); and little trouble understanding or identifying the main point of most Critical Reading passages.

In other words, they had all of the fundamentals pretty much down -- they just needed to learn to apply them to the SAT.

I think that the assumption underlying a lot of test-prep is that most students fall into this general category. The problem is that most of them don't.

One of the first things I learned about teaching Critical Reading was that students had to begin by identifying the main point and tone of a passage; it was simply a given that said students would understand what they were reading well enough to identify those elements with relatively little effort and then be able to apply them in order to answer the questions. What I rapidly discovered, however, was that a lot of students got stuck way before they got to the questions themselves. They couldn't even figure out the main point because they didn't actually understand what they were reading. Sometimes, they were so thrown by the sheer unfamiliarity of the language that they couldn't even tell what the topic was, never mind how to look for important information about it.

These students form the second category, the ones for whom strategy-based test prep tends to be largely ineffective. Because they can't really understand what they're reading, they can't figure out what's important and thus can't skim efficiently; consequently, they often spend too much time reading passages and simply trying to make some sense out of them. Because their vocabulary skills are weak, they often can't follow general rules such as "eliminate extreme answers" or make fine distinctions between answer choices. And because they can't identify main points effectively, Passage 1/Passage 2 relationship questions are often a complete mystery to them and tend to be disastrous for their scores.

If their families can afford it, these tend to be the kids who go through Kaplan and Princeton Review without gaining a single point.

The more students I work with in this category, the more I also notice some specific weaknesses that they seem to share: first, they tend to have trouble understanding word relationships. Even if they memorize vocabulary, they often get thrown by words used in unusual ways, and they have difficulty separating negative and positive ideas from negative and positive words (e.g. a sentence that contains a positive idea and a negation may require a negative word).

They also tend to have a lot of trouble reading sequentially: instead of starting at the beginning of a sentence and reading word by word until the end, they often skip around internally, focusing on individual words without considering their context. As a result, they sometimes not only fail to understand what an author is saying but also end up with an interpretation that is exactly the opposite of the intended meaning! Likewise, they have considerable difficulty reading answer choices in order. They'll often skip from A to D to B, seizing on particular words but failing to consider what the answers as a whole are actually saying; and when they see a word or phrase in an answer choice that matches a word or phrase they've seen in the passage, they'll often jump to pick it without considering whether it means something different in the passage.

The final piece is that they often lack context. Because they do not read SAT-level material on their own and often lack even basic familiarity with the topics that appear on the test, they have no way of using their prior knowledge to bootstrap themselves into a basic understanding of what they read (note: this is *very* different from using outside knowledge to pick answers while neglecting the passage itself). They also tend to come from families that spend more time watching television or playing sports than discussing books or current events (not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'd be lying if I said I couldn't predict a student's general CR score just by knowing how many books their family owned). A student who lacks even a passing knowledge of the Italian Renaissance will find a passage about the Mona Lisa's identity infinitely more difficult than will a student who has at least a general awareness of that time period.

So what this boils down to is that while students in this situation can benefit from some strategizing (knowing what questions to skip and which ones to go for; doing the questions as they read the passage to save time), there is no way to get past the fundamental weakness in their skills without a huge amount of work.

The SAT is designed to ruthlessly detect gaps in comprehension, and it does so with a remarkable degree of effectiveness. Below a certain level of understanding, there is no real way to "beat" the test. The College Board makes certain of that. Dramatically improving the score of a student who is missing some of the basics involves a lot more than SAT prep -- it involves solidifying skills that most test-prep programs take for granted. Unless a student is willing to devote an extraordinary amount of time to reading independently, there is no short-term solution. A couple of sessions won't do it. Neither will a couple of months. Given a year, I might be able to do something, but even then it isn't a guarantee.

I honestly find myself at a loss when I encounter a student in this situation. No one wants to hear that they (or their child) is missing fundamental skills and that there's no quick fix. Particularly if they believe that doing well on the SAT is just a matter of learning the right tricks (or worse, getting familiar with the test), it can be very hard to tell them otherwise. Sometimes I can get their score from the low 500s to the high 500s, but rarely can I get it to 650 or even to 600 -- and that's what they want. Those are the times I wish that I did have a magic wand, but alas, such an object is nowhere to be found.

Why marking line references can be a huge waste of time

2011-11-01T22:07:00.000-04:00

I find that it can sometimes help to think of the SAT as the standardized-testing equivalent of a parlor trick. Questions that appear at first glance to be exceedingly complicated can often be solved quickly and simply, and answers that would initially seem to be located in a particular place may be located somewhere else entirely. One of the places where this gap is most striking involves the line references that accompany most Critical Reading questions.

On one hand, it's rather generous of ETS to at least be willing to tell you where to look -- unlike, for example, the writers of the ACT, who basically leave you to fend for yourself in terms of figuring out where information is located. On the other hand, however, line references are not always quite the gift that they appear to be. As a matter of fact, in some cases they can be downright misleading.

In order to understand why, it helps to understand just what the SAT is and is not doing when a specific line reference appears. Take, for example, the following:

The author's attitude toward the "subfield" (line 65) is best characterized as one of:

(A) approval
(B) curiosity
(C) uncertainty
(D) surprise
(E) dismay

A question that is phrased this way is giving us exactly one piece of information: that the word "subfield" appears in line 65.

The question is not, however, telling us that the information necessary to answer the question -- information that will reveal the author's attitude about the subfield -- is in line 65.

Now, the answer will most likely be in the general vicinity of line 65, but we don't know where. It might come before, but it also might come after. In other words, it may be in line 63. Or 61. Or 68. It might even be in line 59 or line 70.

This is because the question is not asking us about the subfield itself. It is only concerned with the subfield insofar as it relates to the author's opinion of it. Establishing the author's tone is what counts; without it, there is no effective way to answer the question.

What this means, practically speaking, is that if you've spent your time carefully marking line 65 and the answer comes five lines earlier, you're out of luck. Especially if you're the sort of person who starts at a particular line and keeps on reading without bothering to consider that the answer might have might have preceded the line in question.

I'm not suggesting that marking line references is completely worthless, just that it shouldn't be overestimated as a strategy. It's fine to tell yourself to read carefully around a particular area, but if you're just reading carefully without really knowing what you're reading carefully for, you might end up wasting a huge amount of time.

Yes, some question can be answered by looking at the lines cited in the questions, but just as many, if not more, cannot. On the SAT, it's the big picture -- the relationship between detail and context -- that generally counts. And marking line references just for the sake of marking line references will not give you that relationship; you still have to take the time to figure it out on your own.

Why it would behoove you to pay attention in foreign language class

2011-10-30T23:55:00.000-04:00

Very often, before I even attempt to explain a particularly nasty concept involving verb tense to someone, I ask whether they've covered the tense in question during Spanish/French/Latin class. And almost inevitably, the response I get is something along the lines of, "Well, it sounds kind of familiar... I think we might have covered it, but I wasn't really paying attention."

People, I have some news for you: I'm sorry to say it, but most American high schools -- even supposedly very good ones -- do not teach grammar in English class. At all. Sure, they might cover how to use a comma or, if they're really ambitious, the difference between a compound and a complex sentence, but I have yet to meet anyone who did a thorough review of verb tenses or got drilled on the difference between direct and indirect object pronouns. When I ask my new students how much grammar they've had and get the predictably embarrassed response of, "None, my school doesn't really teach grammar," I have to reassure them that they're in exactly the same situation as almost everyone else. The ones who *have* done grammar in school are the anomalies (although they don't necessarily understand the grammar they have done very well).

So that said, there is exactly one place that you're likely to acquire some actual grammatical knowledge, knowledge that -- surprise, surprise -- might actually come in handy on the SAT. And that place is foreign language class.

Now granted taking Chinese probably isn't going to help you all that much. But if you take French or Spanish, there's a huge amount of cross-over; many common grammatical concepts in those languages carry over pretty directly into English. If you're lucky (!) enough to be in a class sufficiently advanced to cover concepts such as the past perfect and the subjunctive, it would strongly behoove you to pay very close attention because those are two of the concepts that regularly give people the most trouble on the Writing section. Even if you're not in an advanced class, you can still learn an awful lot about past participles and direct and indirect objects. Thrilling? If you're like most people, probably not. But highly useful when it comes to understanding the basics of how English is put together.

People are frequently surprised to learn that my degree is French rather than English, but I learned pretty much all of the grammar I know through foreign languages. I only translated that understanding back to English, so to speak, much later. As a result, when a student has a reasonably strong basis in the grammar of a foreign language, I find myself offering to teach certain thorny concepts through that language. More than once, I've found myself using French to teach English to a native English speaker! Bizarrely enough, it's actually easier that way. (As a side note, majoring in French also taught me infinitely more about teaching Critical Reading than majoring in English would have, but that's another story.)

I do recognize that learning a foreign language comes more naturally to some people than to others, and I'm not saying you have to become an all-out aficionado. But at the very least, try not to completely tune out the next time your French/Spanish/Italian/Latin, etc. teacher starts rattling on about the past conditional or object pronouns. You might end up being surprised at how much sense the Writing section makes later.

The Perils of Overconfidence (or: you won't always recognize the right answer)

2011-10-28T21:05:00.001-04:00

The distance between a high CR score and a truly outstanding one rarely runs along a linear path. Unlike Math and Writing, which are essentially based on a number of fixed rules and formulas and which can therefore be improved by the mastery of discrete concepts, Critical Reading cannot necessarily be improved by memorizing a few more rhetorical terms or vocabulary words. On the contrary, for someone stuck in the high 600s/low 700s on CR, raising that score into the 750+ range frequently involves completely rethinking their approach.

Given two students with identical solid comprehension skills and 650-ish scores at the beginning of junior year, the one who is willing to try to understand exactly how the SAT is asking them to think and
adapt to that requirement will see rapid and dramatic improvement (often 100+ points). The other one will flounder, maybe raising their score 30 of 50 points, but probably not much higher. Occasionally, their score won't budge at all or will even drop. They'll get stuck and get frustrated because they just know that they deserve that 750+ score, but the one thing they will absolutely not do is change their approach. And by change their approach I mean assume that their ability to recognize correct answers without thoroughly working through the questions is considerably weaker than they imagine it to be. In other words, they have to take a step back and assume that they know a lot less than they actually do.

Let me explain: one of the things I continually find fascinating is that people can spout on for extended periods of time about the supposed "trickiness" of the SAT, yet when it comes down to it, they won't actually take concrete steps to prevent themselves from falling from "trick" answers (i.e. answers that contain mistakes someone who is rushing or can't bothered to fully read the question would likely make). The best way I know of to reduce the possibility of getting "tricked" is to actually attempt to answer the question before looking at the answers -- or at least to determine the general idea that is probably contained in the right answer. Working this way, however, requires you to abandon the assumption that you'll be able to spot the right answer when you see it, even if you've made no attempt to figure it out beforehand.

Now, in case you haven't noticed, answers to SAT CR questions are deliberately worded in a confusing manner. Unless you really know what you're looking for, things that aren't necessarily the case may suddenly sound entirely plausible, and things that are true may sound utterly implausible. You need to approach the answers with that knowledge and consciously be on your guard before you even start to read them. But in order to do that, you need to be willing to admit a few things:

1) Your memory probably isn't as good as you think it is

Just because you think you remember what the passage said doesn't mean you actually remember what the passage said -- at least not all the time. Even if you remember well enough almost all of the time, it only takes a handful of slips to get you down from 800 to 720. Throw in a missed vocab question or two on each section and bang, you're back at 680.

If you want to get around the memory issue, you need to write down every single step of your process. It doesn't have to be neat or even legible to someone other than you, but it needs to be there for the times you don't actually remember.

2) Your thought process probably isn't as unique as you imagine it to be either

The people at ETS and the College Board are not stupid, and they know exactly how the average eleventh grader thinks -- questions and answers are tested out extensively before they show up on the real test, and the wrong answers are there because enough high-scoring students have chosen them enough times. Don't assume you won't do the same.

I also say this because many of my students are astonished when I trace the precise reasoning that led them to the wrong answer -- before they've told me anything about why they chose it. They were laboring under the illusion that their thought process was somehow distinct to them. It wasn't.

3) Sometimes, there is no shortcut

That's a little secret that most people in the test-prep industry would rather not admit. A lot of students who are accustomed to using common answer patterns (e.g. get rid of anything that's too extreme) to get to around 650-700 are shocked to discover that this technique won't get them any further and that they actually just have to understand pretty much everything.

Sometimes spotting the "shortcut" also requires very advanced skills that even relatively high-scorers don't possess. On CR, the ability to determine the function of a paragraph from a single transition in its first sentence is a highly effective shortcut, but it involves a level of sensitivity to phrasing that most sixteen year-olds -- especially ones who don't read non-stop -- haven't yet developed.

4) Getting a very top score is hard

If you really want to get your score up to 750-800 range, you need to respect that the SAT is in fact difficult and that it is your job to conform to it, not the other way around. If you don't understand why a particular answer is correct, stop before you jump to blame the test for not making it what you think it should be. It doesn't matter that you take hard classes. It doesn't matter that your AP English teacher thinks your essays are brilliant. There's something in your reasoning process that went awry, and it's your job to identify and fix it.

Reading this over, I realize that a lot of what I've written in this post may sound fairly harsh. But I also know from experience that overconfidence is one of the biggest problems that can hold you back from attaining the scores you're capable of achieving. It's hard -- I'm not denying it -- but if you can take a step back and start to admit that you might not know everything you think you do, you might just have a fighting chance at an 800.

Abstract Out All Unimportant Information

2011-10-26T18:33:00.000-04:00

I spend a lot of time teaching people to stop looking so hard at the details. Not that details are so bad in and of themselves -- it's just that they're not always terribly relevant. There's a somewhat infamous SAT Critical Reading passage that deals with the qualities that make for a good physicist, and since the majority of high school students don't have particularly positive associations with that subject, most of them by extension tend to dislike the passage.

The remarkable thing is, though, that the point of the passage is essentially the point of the SAT: the mark of a good physicist is the ability to abstract out all irrelevant information. Likewise, the mark of a good SAT-taker is the ability to abstract out all unimportant information and focus on what's actually being asked.

One of the things that people tend to forget is that the SAT is an exam about the big picture -- for Writing as well as Reading.

I say this because very often smart, detail-oriented students have a tendency to worry about every single thing that sounds even remotely odd or incomprehensible, all the while missing something major that's staring them in the face. Frequently, they blame this on the fact that they've been taught in school to read closely and pay attention to all the details (and because they can't imagine that their teachers could be wrong, they conclude that the SAT is a "stupid" test). Well, I have some news: not all books are the kind you read in English class, and different kinds of texts and situations call for different kinds of reading. When find yourself in college social sciences class with a 300 page reading assignment that you have two days to get through, you won't have time to annotate every last detail -- nor will your professors expect you to do so. Your job will be to get the big picture and perhaps focus on one or two areas that you find particularly interesting so that you can show up with something intelligent to say.

But back to the SAT:

On CR, it's fairly common for people to simply grind to a halt in passage when they encounter an unfamiliar turn of phrase. For example, most people aren't quite accustomed to hearing the word "abstract" used as a verb: the ones who ignore that fact and draw a logical conclusion about its meaning from the context are generally fine. The other ones, the ones who can't get past the fact that "abstract" is being used in a way they haven't seen before, tend to run into trouble. They read it and realize they haven't quite understood it. So they go back and read it again. They still don't quite get it, so they reread it yet again. And before they know it, they've wasted two or three minutes just reading the same five lines over and over again. Then they run out of time and can't answer all of the questions.

The problem is that ETS will always deliberately choose passages containing bits that aren't completely clear -- that's part of the test. The goal is to see whether you can figure out their meaning from the general context of the passage; you're not really expected to get every word, especially not the first time around. The trick is to train yourself to ignore things that are initially confusing and move on to parts that you do understand. If you get a question about something you're not sure of, you can always skip over it, but you should never get hung up on something you don't know at the expense of something you can understand easily. If you really get the gist, you can figure a lot of other things out, whereas if you focus on one little detail, you'll get . . . one little detail.

The question of relevant vs. irrelevant plays out a lot more subtly in the Writing section, where people often aren't quite sure just what it is they're supposed to be looking for, especially when it comes to Error-IDs. As a result, they want to understand the rule behind every underlined word and phrase, regardless of whether it's something that's really relevant. And because about 95% of the rules tested are predictable and fixed from one test to the next, a lot of the time the correct answers aren't terribly relevant. Worrying about every little rule makes the grammar being tested appear much more complex than it actually is.

The reality is that if you only look for errors involving subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, verb tense/form, parallel structure, logical relationships and comparisons, prepositions, and adjectives and adverbs, you're going to get most of the questions right. And if an error involving one of those concepts doesn't appear, there's a very good chance that there's no error at all. Thinking like that is a lot more effective than worrying about why it's just as correct to say "Though interesting, the lecture was also very long" as it is to say, "Though it was interesting, the lecture was also very long."

I'm not denying that understanding why both forms are correct is interesting or ultimately useful. I'm simply saying that if you have a limited amount of time and energy, you're better served by zeroing in on what you really need to know.

Critical Reading is not the place for thinking or feeling

2011-10-24T13:36:00.000-04:00

One of the most telling exchanges I can have with a student typically goes something like this:

Me: So what's the author saying in lines 34-37?

Student: Umm.... So I feel like the author is trying to say...

Me: Ok, but the question isn't asking about what you feel like the author is saying. Look back at the passage and tell me exactly what the author is saying. As in word for word.

At which point the student typically glances back at the lines, pulls out a phrase or two, and then gives me a look that clearly says "so what?"

I'm sorry if I'm destroying anyone's illusions here, but feeling (and to some extent thinking, at least in the sense of "I think") have absolutely no role in helping you to determine the answer to Critical Reading questions. The second you utter the words, "I feel like the author, passage, etc." is trying to say xyz," you've failed to make the very crucial distinction between restating -- a neutral action that simply uses different words to recapture the precise idea that an author is attempting to convey -- and interpreting, which by definition involves an element of subjectivity and personal bias that very likely extends somewhat beyond what the text is literally saying.

I feel like I've said it a million times, but I could probably stand to say it again, so here goes: the SAT is not a test of interpretation or "analysis," at least not as most American high school students have been taught to understand those words. It is a test of the ability to deal with a text on its own terms -- to understand clearly and precisely what a text is saying (and what the test-makers are asking), and then to make draw reasonable conclusions about its structure and intended meaning based exclusively on that understanding. Unless you know exactly what the text is saying, chances are that any conclusion you draw about it will probably not be 100% supported.

Since reading this way represents somewhat of a paradigm shift for most people (indeed, most people say "I think" or "I feel" so automatically that they don't even realize they're doing it), it can be helpful to have specific tools that help you practice reading more literally. One of them is as follows:

When you encounter a question that refers to only a short segment of the passage (say two or three lines), go back and read it out loud -- slowly. Practice saying, "the author is saying... and then read the text word by word. Make sure you do not utter the words, "I think/feel like author means xyz," and then try to remember just quite what it was that the author said. If you say "I think" or "I feel", you have to start over.

Now, this is not a technique to be used when you're actually taking the test. It's a practice tool only, designed to raise your concentration and make you read more precisely. But forcing yourself to get rid of the ingrained, almost instinctive assumption that you can somehow figure out the answer by ignoring the author and going by own particular impressions can completely revolutionize the way you approach the test.

An Analysis of the Infamous "New Zealand" Writing Question

2011-10-23T01:32:00.000-04:00

I'm aware that there's a debate raging on College Confidential over the following question from the October SAT, and I'd like to weigh in:

Although New Zealand (had fostered) music for decades, it was not until the 1980s (when) musicians began (to reach) an international audience. (No Error)

First, the sentence should correctly read as follows:

Although New Zealand had fostered music for decades, it was not until the 1980s THAT musicians began to reach an international audience.

Before I start in on why "when" is wrong, I'd like to go through the other options being debated:

1) Had fostered

In this case, the past perfect is correct because it describes an event in the past (fostering music) that clearly occurred before a second event (musicians began to reach an international audience). Now, the present perfect (has fostered) could also work, implying that New Zealand is *still* fostering music, but there's nothing in the sentence that demands it rather than the past perfect. Remember: if two options are both grammatically acceptable, neither can be considered wrong. Style and personal preference don't count.

2) To reach

To reach = infinitive. Infinitives get flipped with gerunds. "Began reaching" is also fine, but it isn't inherently better than "to reach" (if anything, it's a bit more awkward). Same issue: two acceptable options, both fine.

(Btw, I have no idea what the last option was -- I'm going by the version of the question that was sent to me and that I found on CC.)

Ok, here goes for why "when" is wrong. It's actually a question of standard usage more than anything else. The fixed construction is "it was not until x that y occurred" (the other variation of the phrase would be the inverted verb structure "not until x did y occur"). What ETS has done to confuse everyone, however, is to insert a decoy relative pronoun, "when," which looks and sounds as if it could be correct because it's placed immediately after a date (1980s) -- and everyone knows that "when" is supposed to refer to dates.

The problem is, however, is that the fixed construction "It was not until x that y occurred" trumps everything. It's like a word pair (e.g. "not only...but also"): you just can't separate the two parts (at least not in SAT land). That's what's actually being tested, even if it looks like something else.

(Side note: ETS often uses "when" to create incorrect logical relationships. It frequently replaces a stronger, clearer conjunction such as "for" or "because.")

Now, to add a further level of complication, there is a situation in which "when" could be legitimately placed after the date, namely if a non-essential clause were to be inserted (I believe that someone on CC addressed this option). For example:

Although New Zealand had fostered music for decades, it was not until the 1980s, when new forms of media technology became widespread, that musicians began to reach an international audience.

But note that this version still includes "that!"

To be fair, it's a very hard question, as well as an unpredictable one by SAT standards, but there's absolutely nothing unfair or subjective about it. Standard English usage requires "that," not when, be used with "it was not until." If someone were to write that sentence in a paper and use "when" rather than "that," it would still be wrong. As a matter of fact, it's the kind of error that college professors see in students' writing all the time. And that's exactly why it was on the test.

What makes a score "high enough?"

2011-10-22T00:10:00.000-04:00

After I posted yesterday, I realized that what I wrote simply begged the question, "Well, what makes a score high enough?" If your scores are borderline, how do you decide whether it's worth it to go all out for a school or simply let it drop?" In other words, at what point does admission become truly unrealistic?

That is of course a slippery question, especially when someone is being urged to aim high. When a school gets 30,000 applicants and accepts fewer than 10% of them, it's easy to feel that winning admission is somehow akin to winning the lottery and that it's always worth it to throw in an application because maybe, just maybe, you'll be one of the lucky ones.

The problem is that it doesn't quite work that way. College admission may be notoriously unfair, but it is certainly not random. The people who get in do so because they fulfill a particular institutional need -- be it academic, athletic, extracurricular, monetary, or social. For "unhooked" candidates (those who are not recruited athletes, legacies/siblings of current students, under-represented minorities, development cases, or faculty children), test scores of course tend to play a very significant role. These are the people that the committee can afford to be even choosier about, and unless they are truly accomplished in a particular area, they are the ones who can't afford a serious weakness in their scores. At that point, admissions officers need a way of eliminating applicants, and if an otherwise undistinguished applicant has a score or two that clearly aren't up to par, that applicants is almost certain to be rejected.

Think of it this way: Princeton -- I'm going to use it as an example since I talked about it in yesterday's post -- has 25th-75th percentile score ranges of 690-790 (CR), 700-790 (M), and 700-780 (W). It's a pretty safe bet that most of the people with scores below that level fulfill a significant institutional need or have a justifiable weakness in a particular area: for example, an international applicant with a 640 in CR who has never gone to an English-speaking school but who happens to be a top-notch math student with a bunch of 800s and international awards might have their CR score overlooked. If, on the other hand, a run-of-the-mill valedictorian from a decent suburban high school somewhere on the East Coast were to present with that same 640 in CR, they would probably be rejected pretty quickly. In other words, it's about context.

But while one score that's 100 points below the 50th percentile can hurt a lot, three scores that are just a little on the low side might not have quite the same impact. A student who has straight As in very hard classes (but not necessarily ranked first), an SAT breakdown of, say 730/740/720, fantastic recommendations, and an unusual interest or talent to which they've devoted an exceptional amount of time is going to get looked at very seriously -- even thought the overall score, a 2190, is on the low side by Princeton's standards, it's still high enough.

So to sum up, for unhooked applicants:

-If your scores are 20 or 30 points below average but are counterbalanced by another element that makes your application exceptional, they will be considered high enough; if they're 20 or 30 points below average and there's nothing particularly exciting about your application, your scores may not be the deciding factor, but it is unlikely that you'll be accepted.

-If you have some scores at the mid-high end of the range and a couple well below the average and there's nothing particularly exciting about your application, it is also pretty unlikely that you'll get accepted at the most competitive schools. They have to weed people out somehow.

-If your scores are uniformly 100 points below an institution's average, there's probably nothing else you can say in your application that will make a difference.

-If you've got scores at the top of the range but nothing else, they may help a bit, but they won't get you in on their own (think of all those 2400s that get rejected).

That said, I don't want to be responsible for dashing anyone's hopes. If you don't have sky-high scores but are nevertheless convinced that Princeton or Stanford or MIT or fill-in-the-blank super-competitive school is the perfect place for you, then by all means, go for it. But be realistic. A couple of reaches are great, but try to avoid having ten or fifteen of them. Throwing in more applications does not necessarily increase your chances if you aren't all that competitive to begin with.

Just some thoughts as application-season begins in earnest.