by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 29, 2013 | Blog, General Tips
I know I’m posting this a day late, after some of the “omigod I got my scores back” hysteria has subsided, but please forgive me: I’m recovering from several weeks of what can only be described as book-formatting hell (columns are a dangerous, dangerous thing when it comes to Word), and frankly I could barely stand to look at my computer yesterday.
So if you are by chance scouring the Internet looking for some advice about what to do for your less-than-stellar SAT scores, here, for what it’s worth, are my thoughts.
A couple of months back, when Debbie Stier was giving a talk about Perfect Score Project at Bronxville High School, I suggested she open her segue into the SAT-prep part of her talk with three big questions, which I’m going to pose to you now:
1) Where are you and why?
2) Where do you want to be?
3) What are you realistically willing to do to get there?
I ask these questions because it’s very tempting to assume your score was a quirk of fate, or of the curve, or of the fact that you didn’t get quite as much sleep as you should have, or of the kid who sat in front of you tapping his pencil incessantly and making it just impossible for you to concentrate the way you obviously would have been able to otherwise… Scores don’t usually go way up on the real test; if anything, they tend to go down because you’re under so much pressure.
When you’re convinced that your score just had to be the result of some seemingly minor external factor — especially if that score was a lot lower than the ones you’ve been getting on practice tests — the natural reaction is to jump to take the test again as soon as possible because you just want to get it over with and never have to look at another prep book again, and hey, maybe you’ll luck and get an easier test and your score will go way up and then you’ll just be done. I call these “rebound tests,” and unfortunately, scores on them tend to be almost identical to the scores on the original test.
Now, to be clear, if you did genuinely happen to be ill or in need of a root canal (I do actually know of a kid that happened to), then yes, by all means, sign up for the next SAT so that you can get see what your score is like when you’re healthy and lucid. But absent some sort of serious mitigating factor, it’s well worth your while to stop, take stock, and figure out what you need to work on before plunging back in to the real thing. Unless there are one or two superficial thing consistently holding you back (e.g. timing problems on CR but zero comprehension issues), there might not be a quick fix. This is especially true if you’re trying to break through a major barrier (high 500s to 600+, high 600s to 700+, etc.). Those “walls” exist for a reason, and usually if you want to get past them, something substantial has to change. Otherwise you just end up beating your head against them.
Think of it this way: although you may not find the thought of being stuck in SAT-prep land for another six months particularly appealing, you’ve still actually got some time. True, if you want to apply early, you should be done be October, but still… that’s a pretty long while. Even if you’ve got big gaps, you can go some way toward plugging them.
This is, however, where question #3 above comes into play. I can’t count the number of times parents have told me earnestly, “But my child really wants do well on the SAT,” as if merely wanting to do well were enough. I can’t say I’ve ever worked with anyone who didn’t want to do well. That’s not the point. The point is that you have to be willing to sit down and struggle, maybe for longer than you’d like, and perhaps admit that you don’t know everything after all. It also means that you might have to devote more of your summer than you’d like to studying: if you just can’t do it, that’s perfectly fine, but you probably shouldn’t expect your scores to skyrocket in October. Again, it’s about being realistic and knowing just how much you can honestly handle.
I’ve worked with a handful of kids who had major lightbulb moments after just a session or two: they suddenly “got” what it was the test was trying to do, and they saw the logic behind it. But then they went and the worked on their own. A lot. And not because anyone was forcing them to. They brought a wonderful sense of curiosity and enthusiasm because they saw studying for the test as an opportunity to actually learn something that went way beyond the SAT (one of them turned into a huge Oliver Sacks fan and wrote his essay for Columbia, where Sacks teaches, about him).
So before you rush to take the test again as soon as possible, think about what you actually need to accomplish between where you are now and where you hope to be. Then ask yourself what specific steps, if any, you’re actually willing to take to get there.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 26, 2013 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
A while back, I was discussing Critical Reading strategies with Catherine Johnson, and she told me that even when she wasn’t familiar with the topic of a passage (e.g. modern art), she just looked for the argument and figured out what the author was for and against. More recently, I was complaining to someone that my students didn’t know how to identify arguments, and he asked me — in perfect innocence — why they didn’t just look for transitions like “however” and “therefore?”
To both of these statements, I burst out laughing. Both people were approaching the test like the adults with graduate degrees they were — they took for granted that a reader would not only know that they were supposed be looking for an argument and its key places, but also that the reader would know that there even was an argument to be looked out for in the first place! From what I’ve seen, neither of those considerations can be taken for granted.
For example, it recently emerged one of my students scoring around 700 did not know that authors usually put main ideas before the supporting evidence — he thought they put them after. A couple of years ago, I would have been stunned by that level of misconception in such a high-scoring student, but now I’m no longer even mildly surprised. (This is apparently what happens when schools decide that teaching students things explicitly is tantamount to destroying their creativity forever.)
To be clear: while there is also no single approach to Critical Reading that is guaranteed to result in a score increase, there are many approaches to Critical Reading that can result in a score increase. I’m ultimately a pragmatist, and in the end, I’ll encourage anyone to use the method that gets them results. The student is, after all, the one taking the test, and my job is to help them get the highest score they can — regardless of whether their approach is something I would personally go out of my way to advise.
There is, however, only one way to approach Critical Reading that directly addresses what Critical Reading is testing, which is something quite different. Critical Reading is fundamentally a test about arguments and how the various elements that go into making them (words, phrases, punctuation marks, rhetorical figures) contribute to those arguments’ meaning. Details have importance primarily insofar as they relate to the overall argument or point that the passage is making (and yes, there is pretty much always some sort of main idea). To read in a way that directly addresses what CR is testing, you have to be able to read for the big picture.
It is certainly possible to get a very high — even a perfect — score doing otherwise, but you’re reading in a way that fundamentally misses the point of the test. And you’re also reading in a way that has the potential to make things much, much more complicated.
More and more now, I’m getting students who are stalled somewhere in the 650-750 range, and lots of those students have done a fair amount of prep — either on their own or with another tutor — before coming with me. Unfortunately, a lot of those students have also used their current strategy to max out their skills. They’re getting pretty much everything they can right given what they know and how they read, but to get to the next level, there’s no strategy that can help them — they need to actually work on whatever skill(s) they’re missing. And very often, that skill is recognizing the big picture — or as one SAT passage put it, recognizing “the message through the static.”
A lot of time, they’re also reading in such a way that encourages them to view passages as random collections of details — that is, they’re focusing only on the areas around the line references and ignoring the big picture completely. From a high school reader’s perspective, this makes sense: if the question tells you to look at line 17, why on earth would you pay attention to line 12, especially if you’re pressed for time? Besides, the test is telling you to look at line 17, so that means the answer has to be right there. (Well… sometimes yes, sometimes no.) It simply doesn’t occur to them that other things could be more important than what the test is telling them to look at.
If these kids are generally strong readers, they tend to get to about 700-730 this way. And then they can’t get any further. Often that’s because when they hit a “big picture” question, they can’t take all the details they’ve read and form them into something coherent, so they stumble through by process of elimination and sometimes completely miss the mark. It never occurs to them to go back and read key places in the argument because they don’t know really know that those key places exist or how to identify them.
This is exactly the opposite of how most educated adults read: they figure out the argument, its basic structure, and its key points, and then consider everything in relation to those factors. It doesn’t matter if they’re familiar with the topic; they know how to recognize arguments, and they know how to work from the big picture down.
But why does it matter how someone reads a passage if they’re getting a high score anyway? 730, or even 700, is nothing to sneeze at, and no school would reject a student merely for having a score in the (gasp!) low 700s. Well, I would say that it matters because you simply cannot read in college using high school strategies. The SAT is the only place in high school that lots of kids will encounter college-level reading, and if they’re never exposed to the idea of reading for big-picture arguments, they’ll be in for a rude shock once they get to college and have to get through hundreds of pages per week. Studying for the SAT is a way to practice those skills on a small, manageable scale. If you enter college only knowing how to read for details, you’ll waste a whole lot of time sweating over things you don’t need to worry about, and your classes will be a whole lot harder.
My job, as I’m increasingly coming to see it, is to help people make that leap from high school to college reading, and to better do so, I’m trying to understand *how* someone moves from reading texts as a series of random details to reading texts as arguments structured around a central claim or idea. How on earth does that leap occur? What factors have to be in place? What prior knowledge has to exist?
It’s certainly not enough to simply tell someone to focus on key places in the introduction and conclusion because they sometimes can’t see the relationship between the points being made there and the information in the rest of the passage.
It’s not entirely a content issue, although familiarity with a topic certainly plays a role; readers like me and Catherine have no problem understanding arguments about topics we know next to nothing about.
Literal comprehension — the ability to understand complex syntax, diction, and sentence structure — also plays a role; if someone can’t understand what a text is actually saying, they’re pretty limited right there. But that’s not the whole story either because plenty of times kids can understand what discrete parts of the passage are saying but can’t turn those separate bits into a coherent picture.
I think that what it comes down to, in addition to the above factors, is the ability to understand the kinds of “cues” that indicate an author isn’t “just talking about” a subject but actually taking a stance. I’m becoming increasingly aware of this since I finally (finally!) got a copy of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say,” which is basically a primer for recognizing those “cues” in academic writing. Phrases like “Many people say,” “Other people say,” and “It is commonly believed” are red flags that an author is introducing an idea that they do NOT agree with, and authors tend to present ideas that they don’t agree with *first.*
The purpose of a passage/section of a passage that starts off with those kinds of phrases is, by definition, to “dispute/refute an idea/claim/assertion,” but kid who skips the introduction because he “might get confused” if he reads places that aren’t in the line references and jumps to line 17 is probably going to miss that fact completely. A reader like me or Catherine, on the other hand, would quickly take note of what the author *didn’t* believe, jump down a paragraph or two to confirm what the author *did* believe, and then probably jump to the conclusion to reiterate. Based on that information alone, the answers to most of the questions would be immediately obvious.
It would also take us a lot less time, but the speed is beside the point: the point is that we would using the author’s textual cues to pinpoint the argument. And if you really understand the argument, everything else usually falls into place without too much difficulty. If you just see a mass of details, you’ll grope, and eliminate, and cross out, and second guess… and you might get to the right answer in the end, but you also might not fully understand why it’s the right answer. And then you’ll probably conclude that the whole thing is really pretty subjective and pointless, and that it doesn’t really have anything to do with anything beside the SAT. In which case you would be absolutely, completely, utterly mistaken.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 6, 2013 | Blog, General Tips, Time Management
When a student who consistently runs out of time comes to me, one of the first thing I try to do is pin down what exactly is causing them to slow down. In the absence of a serious comprehension problem, I frequently find that as they work through the sentence completions and encounter words they don’t know, they simply stop and stare.
I can almost hear the little voice in their head saying “Wait… I’ve seen this word before… It looks really familiar… We talked about it in English class last month… It means like “stubborn” or something, right? I think…” Meanwhile the seconds and then the minutes tick by, and they’re still struggling their way through the same medium-level question.
As I constantly have to remind my students, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what the wrong answers means as long as you do know what the right answer means. In other words, if you see a word whose meaning you’re absolutely certain of and it fits the sentence perfectly, it’s the answer, and you need to just pick it and move on. The fact that there might be three or four other words whose meanings you’re not sure of is completely irrelevant. The point is to answer the questions correctly, not to know the definition of every single word.
What happens, however, is that students see the unfamiliar words and assume that they know far less than they actual do. For those trying to break the 600 mark, that reaction is a disaster because it causes them to 1) get easy-medium-ish questions wrong that they should be getting right, and 2) waste huge amounts of time so that they run out of time and end up missing additional questions at the end of the section that they could have answered correctly.
One of the major mental adjustments that people have to make when they first start studying for the SAT is the fact that the exam tests flexible knowledge — the stuff you know so well that you can pull it out on autopilot, not the stuff you tried to cram last night or last week and that only got stored in your short-term memory. If you don’t know a word when you see it and don’t have any tools (roots, etc.) for figuring it out, there really isn’t much you can do about it on the spot. If that word hasn’t been stored in your long-term memory, the reality is that sitting and staring at it probably isn’t going to help, no matter how much it feels like it will; if anything, it’ll simply take time away from other things.
When I work through sentence completions with people, one of the major things I focus on is getting them out of staring mode and into “let me focus on something else” mode. The moment I see their eyes start to glaze over, I say “next.” Usually, that’s about five seconds after they’ve looked at the word. (To be perfectly honest, it’s probably more like a second or two, but if I called this post “the one second rule,” I’m not sure anyone would bother to read it. ). Inevitably, they’re startled, but I’ve learned that if they go any longer, they’re going to get stuck.
Consider this sentence:
Arsenic is a notoriously ——– substance; its ——- of groundwater poses a danger to the health of millions of people around the world.
Give yourself five seconds to come up with words to plug into the blanks. If you can’t come up with anything, just say whether each blank is positive or negative.
Now, when you look at the answer choices, you’re going to deal with each side individually, starting with whichever side you’re more certain of. Left or right, it doesn’t matter.
Go in order, (A)-(E).
If you know that a word won’t work, eliminate the entire answer; if you don’t know what a word means, keep it.
For each word, you have a maximum of five seconds to decide.
Repeat for the other side. Five seconds max.
Do not allow yourself to think, “well, maybe if I just stared at this word a little longer,” I might figure out what it means,” or “let me try plugging this word into the sentence and seeing how it sounds…” Just say “yes” or “no.” You can go back and plug in once you get down to a couple of answers.
If you go back and plug in your remaining answers and still aren’t sure, give yourself five seconds to decide what to do. You can guess, skip entirely, or circle it to come back to later. But you have to decide — you can’t just sit and stare.
GO:
Arsenic is a notoriously ——– substance; its ——- of groundwater poses a danger to the health of millions of people around the world.
(A) volatile . . anticipation
(B) edifying . . deprivation
(C) noxious . . contamination
(D) destructive . . purification
(E) benign . . pollution
How was that? If you usually have time problems, that was probably a much faster pace than you’re accustomed to working at. It might even feel a bit breathless. But yes, in order to finish on time, you do actually have to work that fast.
For the record, the answer is beside the point here; the point is the process. But you can scroll down for the answer.
The same is true for passage-based reading questions, by the way. If you’re consistently staring at answer choices for more than a few seconds without actively figuring out whether it’s right or wrong, you’re going to get into trouble. That doesn’t mean you have to answer the question in five seconds, just that staring at answer choices without actually engaging with those choices (thinking about how they relate to the main point, rephrasing them in simpler language, going back to the passage to check out something specific) will get you nowhere.
The answer is (C). If you did happen to get the question right, congratulations. You might, however, be thinking, “ok, fine, I tried it your way, but I would have gotten it right anyway — it wasn’t really that hard.” To which my response would be, “I appreciate that you might have gotten this question right anyway, but this is about 1) using time to maximum efficiency, and 2) working as systematically as possible so you don’t make careless errors — you know, the kind that can knock you down from an 800 to a 720, or a 700 to a 620. Besides, there will be other, harder questions that you will end up wasting huge amounts of time unnecessarily on if you don’t train yourself to make decisions quickly on the easier ones.
