Update: I finally have a real website!

Sorry I haven't been posting much recently. I've been busy with a few things: writing the SAT Verbal curriculum for Aristotle Circle's Peer2Peer Tutors program, getting people ready for the March SAT, and attempting to work on my newly redesigned website.

I can't say I've made a huge amount of progress, but I did, however, actually manage to post on my new blog (it only took about half an hour of clicking around and swearing at my computer, but I digress...) If you'd like to read it, it's here:

http://thecriticalreader.com/SAT/ACT-Blog.html

Most of my archived blog posts have been moved over to the new site as well. They're catalogued here:

http://thecriticalreader.com/free-study-guides.html

They're grouped by category, which should make searching for relevant topics a bit easier, but I haven't gotten around to removing all of the Latin placeholders yet. Please ignore them (unless of course you're prepping for the AP Latin exam and want to have a hand at translating them!)

Slowly but surely, I'm also adding exercises -- I just have a couple up so far, but I will be gradually adding more. You do have to create an account to try them out, but I'd be very grateful for any feedback at this point. Please excuse any funky formatting stuff. Joomla Quizmaker can be a tad unpredictable at times and sometimes messes up the spacing at random (I know, who would have ever imagined that technology could malfunction...?)

And if you're planning to purchase my book, you can get a discount off the Amazon price if you buy directly through the site. I also have my eight full writing tests with answer explanations available for purchase and direct download.

Finally, if you want to contact me, please continue to use satverbaltutor@gmail.com! 

The SAT and Phonics

Catherine Johnson's recent post over at Kitchen Table Math got me thinking about a relationship that's I've been curious about for a while: namely, that between exposure to phonics and the ability to figure use roots to figure out unfamiliar words on the SAT.

One of the things I've begun to notice recently is that I can generally distinguish between kids who were taught to read using a whole language approach and those taught to read using phonics. Almost invariably, the kids who were taught using whole language have considerably more difficult breaking words apart and examining their component parts. I tend to see this much more prominently when I tutor French or Italian -- often a student will read the first couple of letters in a word and then simply guess what the rest of it says, which is an absolute disaster in French -- but I see it when I tutor the SAT as well, albeit in a more roundabout way.

For example, one Blue Book sentence completion contains the the answer choice "deferential," which is a word that most of my students are unfamiliar with. What's interesting, though, is how they react to it. Usually I ask them if they can relate it to a word they know, and typically they can't think of anything, but recently one of my students said that it looked like "different." That one threw me a little. On one hand, my student was absolutely right: "defer" and "differ" do sound similar. Unfortunately, they have nothing to do with one another. And that, in turn, made me wonder about the whole idea of asking students to relate unfamiliar words to words they already know. The underlying assumption of that strategy is that students already know what parts of words they should and should not focus on, that they can distinguish between "sounds similar" and "related in meaning." And that assumption, as I've discovered, is not necessarily a valid one.

I realize that this isn't directly related to the phonics issue, but it did get me thinking about how some students approach language in general. If you're taught to look at words as complete entities rather than composites of individual parts (preflxes, roots, suffixes), each of which makes a distinct sound, then of course you won't know what constitutes a real (etymological) relationship between two words you've never seen. And if you're encouraged to think that way in first grade and then work that way for the next ten or so years, you're going to have a very difficult time approaching any unfamiliar word systematically by the time you hit 16.

(As a side note, I think foreign language classes squander an unbelievable opportunity to introduce whole-language students to phonetics. I do my best to make my foreign-language students sound out unfamiliar words in French and Italian, and they hate it, but sometimes, once they understand that knowing exactly what a word says makes it so much easier to follow a sentence or paragraph or article, they start to see the usefulness behind it.)

Second Meanings are Usually Right

One of the cardinal rules of SAT sentence completions is that the closer you get to the end of the section, the less you can take for granted. On number one or two, or even three, you can be pretty sure that if a word doesn't initially appear to fit the sentence, it's not going to be the answer. The same does not hold true at the end of the section, however. Mindlessly eliminating words that seem obviously -- perhaps too obviously -- wrong can get you in a whole lot of trouble.

Sometimes the word that you want to show up just won't be among the answer choices, and sometimes the right answer is something that never would have occurred to you,  even if you'd spent ten minutes staring at the question. That's why #8 is #8 and not #2. And that's also why, as you get close to the end of a section, you need to be particularly on the lookout for words that are being used in their second or third meaning. Why? Because the people at ETS know that those are exactly the last words that it would occur to most test-takers to pick. Which is precisely why they're likely to be correct.

The following question is a classic example of this kind of question. It's also a question that lots of my students tend to get wrong.

The judges for the chili competition were -------, noting subtle differences between dishes that most people would not detect. 

(A) obscure

(B) deferential

(C) discriminating

(D) sanctimonious

(E) unrelenting 

Most of my students don't have much of a problem figuring out that the word that goes in the blank has to go along with the idea of "noting subtle differences" and that it has to be relatively positive. As a result, they're usually pretty quick to cross out C because everyone knows that discrimination is a bad thing, especially on the political correctness-obsessed SAT. In other words, it doesn't occur to them that they're being played by the test, and it never even crosses their mind that "discriminating" might have another meaning. (As a side note, I feel obligated to mention here that people who read on a regular basis and are familiar with phrases like "a discriminating palette" don't have any problem with this kind of question. It doesn't even occur to them that it could be a "trick.") 

So there we have a problem: it's not much help to know that second meanings are usually right if you can't recognize them! Admittedly, there's no surefire way around it. As a general rule of thumb, though, you need to pay particular attention to "easy" words on hard questions: if you're on question #8 and see a simple, everyday word that you've known forever and that seems to obviously wrong, you need to think again. There's a pretty good chance it's being used in some other way. And if it's being used some other way, there's a very good chance it's correct. That's not to say that you should automatically pick it, but you shouldn't be too quick to get rid of it either. 

So remember: if you're on sentence completion #8 and you think that a word sounds funny, it's probably because someone at ETS wants you to think just that. 

Score Choice, Superscoring, and Test-Optional

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

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

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?

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

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.

(C) Most dangerous predators hunt during the day

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

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

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.