by Erica L. Meltzer | May 30, 2012 | Blog, Time Management
I sometimes get students who have already been through a prep class or two, and in such cases, I’m almost inevitably responsible for breaking the students of some very bad habits — for example an excessive concern with finishing every section on time.
I don’t dispute that timing is a major problem for some people, and in those cases, it really is necessary to spend a good deal of time experimenting with strategies to make the time constraints more manageable. But in my experience, those cases are less common than most test-prep programs assume — the reality is that many people struggle just a little bit with time. They’d like another five minutes to feel comfortable, but they make it through nonetheless.
The problem, however, is that making it through every question in the allotted time is not necessarily a worthy goal in and of itself. If rushing is costing you questions that you truly could have answered correctly, especially at the ends of section, then you need to give yourself more time. But that means you need to plan upfront to skip questions, even questions that you might know how to do.
Think about it it this way:
Say you’re scoring in the high 600s, and the only thing holding you back from scoring higher is that you always rush through the last few questions because you’re running out of time and make some mistakes along the way as a result. Say 2 mistakes at the end of each Critical Reading section x 3 sections = 6 mistakes.
Then let’s say you make another three mistakes scattered throughout the test. That’s nine mistakes total, plus an additional 2 points from the quarter point you lose for each wrong answer, which is 11 points off your raw score: a 56, which is about a 690. Definitely not bad, but still, you’re trying to break 700.
Now let’s say you plan to skip one question per section to take some of the pressure off at the end. Let’s say that the extra time gets you one more question per section. With three other errors on the whole test, you now have 6 errors total, for a raw score of 60 (61 – 1.5 = 59.5, which rounds up).
That’s a 740, which puts you smack in the middle of the range at the Ivies.
Three questions, fifty points, between having a CR score that puts you around the 25th percentile and one that puts you around the 50th.
Think about it.
Likewise, say you feel like you have to race through and usually miss about seven questions per section. That gets you down to 46, minus an additional 5 = 41 = 560. Now let’s say you forget about four questions per section. Just forget about them completely. Don’t even try. If you can spend more time and get three additional questions right per section, you’re down to only 4 wrong per section.
That’s 67 total – 12 wrong – 3 from the quarter point off each wrong answer = 52 raw score, which is a 650.
90 points gained from not even attempting three questions per section.
In order for this strategy to work, you do need to fully commit to it. You can’t let yourself get tempted into thinking that just this once, you really might be able to answer every single question and get that magical 800. The chances of that happening are, well…slim. The SAT is a standardized test, which means that unless you really do something differently, you’ll score in more or less the same range on every time. If you’ve been having problems with time, you’ll almost certainly continue to do so. You can’t count on getting interesting passages or an easy test.
But if you know exactly where your problems lie and just give yourself those extra thirty seconds to stop panicking and think things through, you might be able to shift things just enough in your favor to make a difference.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 28, 2012 | Blog, The Mental Game
Occasionally I’ll be working through a section — usually a Reading section — with a student, and I’ll come across a question that just makes my head spin. Usually it’s an “all of the following EXCEPT” or a “which of the following would most undermine the author’s assertion that…” or a “which of the following is most analogous to the situation in lines 35-47?”
At that point, I generally turn to my student and declare that I just can’t deal with it right then. We’re moving on. I don’t care if my student wants to try it. I don’t want to end up with smoke pouring metaphorically out of my ears, which is frankly what will happen if I try to muddle through. Either that, or I’ll sit and stare at it uncomprehendingly for about five minutes, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be seeing and not quite managing to make logical sense out of the letters on the page.
In other words, exactly the same thing that happens to most of my students when they look at a question like that. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
I realize that this post might seem like a bit of a contradiction, given my railing against the dumbing down of AP exams (or at least AP Comp) in my previous post, but even assuming that some of the exams are easier than they were, say, ten or fifteen years ago, they’re still not all that easy.
The more time I spend tutoring AP exams — or, should I say, the more time I spend tutoring people who are seriously underprepared for AP exams — the more I wonder why everyone (read: the College Board) is so obsessed with promoting AP exams, and worse, why schools are being ranked according to a formula that weights the number of AP exams taken by students more heavily than the students’ actual grades on those exams.
Part of the answer is of course economic: at $87 a pop, those exams are a virtual gold-mine. Sure there a fee-waivers, but most of the kids taking those tests in the first place are middle- to upper-middle class. The number of kids who get granted waivers is minuscule in proportion. Furthermore, the College Board does not pay outside proctors to administer the exams. Teachers themselves are responsible for administering them during school hours (and for dealing with all the ensuing hassles). The College Board sits back, does nothing, and collects the cash. It’s a pretty good deal.
On a less cynical note, I understand the argument that students achieve at a higher level just by being exposed to AP-level material, even if they don’t achieve passing grades, but unfortunately, that’s not what I observe. What I do observe is kids who don’t yet possess the necessary intellectual maturity being forced to cram huge amounts of information down their throats and regurgitate it back without any true understanding or ability to analyze it, then forgetting it the instant the exam is over.
I would go so far as to argue that sometimes they actually learn less in some AP classes than they would in a regular class. Just sticking the “AP” level on a class does not mean that it’s anything of the sort, and simply taking an AP class does not indicate that someone is even remotely ready to do college-level work. When a student who’s taken a year of “AP English” at a top-ranked public school tells you that she’s not really sure what rhetoric is, that’s not a good sign. One sophomore who told me she was praying for a 2 (!) on the AP World History exam told me that more than anything, she was sorry that she hadn’t learned anything the entire year. Her review sheets consisted of pages and pages of terms and definitions, grouped by very general era but otherwise entirely unrelated — not exactly an ideal way to achieve a coherent understanding of anything.
Yes, I understand that presenting a couple of personal anecdotes does not a comprehensive critique make, but at this point I’ve spent enough time with drilling basics that should be a given for an AP student, not to mention encountering students (over and over again) who just don’t have enough academic experience or cultural context to really understand what they’re being asked, to wonder how beneficial the push for everyone to take AP classes is.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not trying to suggest that the program doesn’t have a good deal of merit when students are genuinely prepared to tackle the work, and when their teachers are not pressured by their administrations too spend all their time on test-prep. But fifteen year-olds are, well, fifteen, not eighteen or nineteen, and that in the long run, they’ll be better served by mastering the fundamentals of English and History and everything else before they try to tackle more advanced work. Presumably, that’s the whole point of high school.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 5, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
I tutored an awful lot of AP comp this year… Somehow, I didn’t quite realize that the exam had been tweaked since I took it in 1999. Although I’ve tutored it before, I think I blocked out the actual experience of taking the exam as soon as it was over, and so I was mildly taken aback when one of my students mentioned how incredibly glad he was that it no longer included anything like the Susan Sontag prompt from 2001 (third question). Granted the 2001 question is very difficult, even by AP standards, but it’s still closer to what I remember (click here to see the 1999 questions from the test I took).
Here, by way of comparison, is the 2012 test (see the third question): the open-ended quote has now been replaced by the presumably more “relevant” synthesis essay.
I was under the mistaken impression that AP exams are intended to test college-level skills. I think it’s fair to say that 2001 fulfills that requirement; 2012 I’m not so sure about.
Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the incoming president of the College Board and champion of the AP program, is concerned about why so many students are unable to achieve passing grades on AP exams.
The obvious solution? Make the exams easier, of course!
That way everyone wins: the College Board can extol the virtues of the Common Core and its curriculum reforms program, and no one ever has to confront the fact that kids aren’t actually learning anything of substance because they’re spending all their time prepping for standardized tests. And since the kids will be totally lacking in critical thinking skills, it won’t occur to them to protest the watered-down excuse for an education they’re being served.
After all, who really cares about Sophocles and the dangers of pride when there’s the United States Post Office to worry about?
