by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 27, 2011 | Uncategorized
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.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 24, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
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 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. In addition, the word “absence” usually has negative connotations, which means that in the absence of context, you’re a lot more likely to pick (A), (B), or (C). If you go back and see that the photographs were “empowering,” however,” you won’t fall into that trap.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 21, 2011 | Blog, Vocabulary
I’ve been doing some thinking about the relationship between the Critical Reading and Math sections of the SAT, particularly in relation to the the idea of associative interference — the notion that unrelated concepts have a tendency to get tied up with one another and interfere with understanding. Catherine Johnson at Kitchen Table Math has written about it in relation to the Math section, but I would venture to say that for most people, it’s actually much more of a problem on Critical Reading section. Here’s why:
One of the things that the SAT tests is the ability to draw conclusions based solely on the information in front of you and to ignore any preconceived notions or biases you may bring with you into the test. In terms of the math section, this means that you need to be able to understand the concept of a variable — that is, that the letter “a” or “x” or “y”(or whatever else happens to be used) stands for whatever it happens to mean within the context of a particular problem, regardless of how you’re used to seeing it elsewhere.
I think that in general, this is not a terribly foreign concept for most people who have achieved a reasonably high level of mathematical understanding. If you don’t really get what a variable is but are still attempting to take any sort of advanced math class, you’re going to get thrown the second you see a familiar letter in an unfamiliar context, and that’s probably going to cause you some trouble in math class at some point. In other words, “school” math does often overlap with SAT math in this regard, and if there’s a serious weakness in your understanding of the concept, there’s a halfway decent chance it’ll get picked up on eventually.
When a similar issue emerges on the verbal side of things, however, there chances of it being caught are comparatively slim. I think it’s safe to say that most high school students have never been explicitly asked to think about words in quite the way the SAT tests them — namely, that a word can be made to mean almost anything that an author wants it to mean, even the exact opposite of what it usually means. Or, to draw a math analogy, that words = variables. In other words, sometimes it doesn’t matter how a word is usually used, only how it’s being used in that particular context at that particular moment. (In order to answer higher-level questions dealing with things like irony and mockery and skepticism, it is of course necessary to understand whyan author would use a word to mean its opposite, but in order to get there, you first have to understand what’s literally being said. And in my experience, plenty of kids who take AP English struggle even with that.)
In this sense, the SAT is exactly the opposite of a traditional vocabulary test. It’s also the exact opposite of the kind of English assignment that asks you to connect what you’re reading to your own experiences — which, as far as I can tell, seems to comprise a substantial portion of the English assignments at a lot of schools. Knowing the dictionary definition of a word, pondering what it reminds you of, or remembering how your Aunt Sally used it last weekend will get you exactly nowhere. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even matter if you know the definition of the word being tested — all that matters is that you know the definitions of the words in the answer choices.
So what this means, practically speaking, is that when you see a question that that says, “In line 17, suffered most nearly means,” you need to rephrase the question as, “In line 17, x most nearly means.” The fact that the word “suffered,” as opposed to some other word, happens to be used in the original text is almost entirely incidental. Yes, knowing that “suffered” is negative might help you make some headway in eliminating answer choices, but if the passage indicates otherwise, that knowledge might actually drag you in the wrong direction.
Thinking about vocabulary words as variables also eliminates the option that you’ll try to answer the question without looking back at the passage — you might think you know what “suffering” means, but you probably wouldn’t dare to guess what “x” meant without checking out the context. Even if you think you remember, you’ll be a whole lot more likely to play it safe.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 16, 2011 | Blog, SAT Essay
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, 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.
One of the things I want to emphasize, though, is that 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, albeit one that has a lot of detail and whose relationship to the prompt is absolutely clear. Incidentally, that’s the danger in making up examples: they tend to be bland and vague. If you’re a strong writer and know how to use detail effectively, however, essays that focus on a single (personal) incident can really work.
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.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 9, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
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?
