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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Sometimes, there is no shortcut 

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

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

4) Getting a very top score is hard

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

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

Abstract Out All Unimportant Information

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

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

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

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

But back to the SAT: 

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Reading is not the place for thinking or feeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Analysis of the Infamous "New Zealand" Writing Question

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

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

First, the sentence should correctly read as follows:

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

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

1) Had fostered

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

2) To reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But note that this version still includes "that!" 

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

What makes a score "high enough?"

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

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

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

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

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

So to sum up, for unhooked applicants:

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

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

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

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

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

Just some thoughts as application-season begins in earnest. 

Your scores don't have to be perfect, just high enough

So October SAT scores came out today. I'm sure that some of you are elated, but others of you are probably not. Especially if you're a senior thinking of applying early and this was your last shot. Maybe you put off studying until the last minute, or maybe you had too many other responsibilities to really worry about the SAT, or maybe you gave it your all and still got trampled on by the test.

In no way do I want to minimize the achievement of those of you who did reach your goals. I simply want to say that in the end, college admissions officers do look at a whole lot more than your test scores. They're actually not lying when they say that they consider you application holistically -- provided that you're somewhere in the ballpark, even on the low side (say you want to go to Columbia but have 720s rather than 800s), they will give the rest of your application serious consideration. And if your scores across the board are nowhere near the level necessary to be competitive for a given school... that could be a sign that it's not really an academic match for you.

I'm actually not just saying this to try to soothe anyone's ego. I've helped quite a few students go through the full admissions process (SAT, SAT IIs, Common App essay, supplements, interviews, etc.), and one thing I've seen is that people with scores that are a bit on the low side for a particular school but who nonetheless are fantastic matches and really have something to offer frequently get in, while others who are solidly in the competitive range score-wise but otherwise undistinguished often do not.

Here's an anecdote:

Last spring, one of my students came to me mystified about why a classmate of hers with an SAT score of only 2170 had been admitted to Princeton (I'm not even going to comment on the fact that she knew his exact score). She was totally perplexed by the fact that Princeton had picked him over thousands of applicants with higher SAT scores. My response was that the score, while a bit on the low side for Princeton, was nevertheless high enough to put him in the range for consideration, and that he must have had some characteristic that made him particularly interesting to Princeton despite his comparatively lower test scores.

I put the conversation out of my mind until last month, when the 2012 edition of the US News and World Report rankings came out. As I was flipping through it, I noticed a story about a boy with a 2170 SAT score who had been admitted to Princeton. That soundly oddly familiar, so I kept reading. It turned out that he did in fact attend my student's high school, and from various details in the articles, it became clear that he was the boy she had mentioned to me.

So why did Princeton take him? Although he may not have broken 2200, he was, of all things, a countertenor -- possibly the only countertenor to apply out of 30,000+ applicants, and an accomplished one at that. Faced with 10,000 seemingly identical soccer-team captains and newspaper editors, the admissions committee must have been thrilled to see something so unusual. (The fact that Princeton is trying to make itself a tad more attractive to "artsy" students certainly didn't hurt him either.)

That's obviously an extreme case (which is undoubtedly why USNWR chose to profile him), but it does confirm my observation: if a school is faced with a high-scoring but otherwise average applicant and slightly lower-scoring applicant that has something really interesting about them, the school will pretty much always choose the second kid. Remember: Harvard could admit an entire class of 2350+ scorers, but sometimes it rejects those kids (including half of the 2400s who apply) in favor of people with mere 2200s or even (gasp!) 2150s.

So the bottom line if your scores are a little on the low side for your dream school, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily out. It just means that you have to put in a bit more effort everywhere else. Admissions officers are generally quite adept at figuring out who's a good match for their school, and while scores are undeniably important, they're not the whole story either.

If + would have = WRONG

I'm normally very cautious about not correcting people's grammar in daily speech, for fear of coming off as an inveterate snob. As a matter of fact, it makes me intensely self-conscious when people not preparing for the SAT or the ACT make jibes about how they'd better watch their grammar around me; I don't want to be responsible for making anyone uncomfortable. Unless explicitly asked to comment, I keep my mouth shut.

That said, the one thing that truly makes me grimace when I hear it in public conversation is a statement along the lines of the following:

"Well, if we only would have known the store was going to close at 6, we would have come sooner."

I confess, I practically have to physically restrain myself from commenting; it's like nails screeching on a blackboard. I know that the construction is (unfortunately) becoming more common, but it's still flat-out wrong, and it sounds AWFUL. It's also tested on the SAT -- not every test, but often enough that for no other reason, it's well worth your while to know the rule.

The short version of the rule is that a clause beginning with "if" should never contain "would have." So "If I would have, If you would have, If she would have, If they would have...." All wrong. The correct phrase is, "If I had, If you had, If she had," etc.

In case you're wondering about the full-on grammatical explanation, the reason is that the construction "If + subject + had + past participle" (e.g. "If I had gone") is a subjunctive construction.

The subjunctive is a verb mode used to indicate importance, suggestions, and hypothetical situations -- and the word "if" makes it clear that we're talking about a situation that did not actually occur. The construction "would have," on the other hand, is the conditional, which, coincidentally, is also used to refer to hypothetical situations! Hence the confusion.

So why can't you use the conditional if it implies the same thing? Well... Because you just can't. The rules is that in a sentence that describes a hypothetical situation, the "if" clause (If we had known the store was going to close) must be in the subjunctive, while the main clause (we would have come earlier) must be in the conditional.

So the next time you start to say, "If I would have only known..." you might want to think twice. You don't have to know that it has anything to do with the subjunctive, but you do need to know that it isn't correct. And if you say it to someone at a time when it counts to speak well (say, to an admissions officer during a college interview), you risk making a less than stellar impression.

Is the ACT less Coachable than the SAT?

Every now and again, I'll stumble across some tutoring website announcement declaring that because the ACT is a "content-based" exam, designed to directly measure the kinds of skills that people learn in school, it is much less sensitive to tutoring than the SAT, which is primarily an exam about strategy and "how well someone can take the SAT."

As someone who has spent a good deal of time both writing and helping people prepare for both exams, I'd like to spend a little bit of time debunking that myth.

First of all, in response to the idea that the ACT directly tests what students are learning in school, I'd like to say that I'm not really aware of any high school that teaches punctuation with anywhere near the level of thoroughness it's tested on the ACT.

I've worked with numerous students from a particular "top-tier" NYC private school known, as James Atlas puts it, for its "intensely competitive students" (whom it requires to take several years of grammar), and not one of them has come close to knowing everything tested on the English portion of the ACT. In fact, some of them have been among the weakest students I've ever worked with. I've also worked with kids from tip-top suburban districts who had idea how to use a colon or identify a non-essential clause. It seems to me that the ACT is testing the content that high schools *should* be teaching rather than the content they actually are teaching. The fact that the average national ACT score is 21.1 out of 36 seems to testify to that fact.

But does tutoring raise scores? Absolutely. Every one of my students who has put in a reasonable, consistent amount of study time has improved markedly -- in some cases by 10 points. Most people scoring in the mid-high 20s can gain a good five points on English from capable tutoring. Some of the questions are very straightforward, but some of it them are extremely subtle (and tricky) and completely impervious to being answered by ear. As is the case for the SAT, you're almost certain to get certain questions wrong unless you really understand the rules they're testing. You learn the rules well enough, you get the questions right -- it's usually that simple.

As for the Reading... I'm not going to lie: tutoring ACT Reading can be more challenging than tutoring SAT Reading. The questions are often less predictable, less based on a holistic understanding of the passages, and most people have problems managing their time rather than actually knowing how to work through the questions. But as I've written about before, ACT time management problems are usually something else in disguise.

Many of the skills involved in locating information quickly actually involve logic skills similar to those tested on the SAT -- how to make reasonable conjectures based on the organization of a passage or paragraph; how to identify important places in a passage based on the presence of particular transitions and punctuation marks; and how to determine the main idea or function of a passage or paragraph from reading key places (e.g. introduction, topic sentences) in the text. Work on the fundamentals enough and you usually see some improvement. My biggest obstacle is convincing students that the ACT actually tests logic skills, even in a roundabout way, when they've fled the SAT precisely to avoid that kind of thinking.

So no, the ACT is in no way less coachable than the SAT, at least on the Verbal side of things. It has its own quirks and strategies, but the skills and concepts it tests can be taught just as thoroughly as they can for the SAT. As always, there are no guarantees, but in the hands of a competent tutor, most students should be able to raise their scores by at least a few points.

It's not just about how much vocabulary you can memorize

Let me make it clear that this post is in no way a suggestion that you should *not* study vocabulary for the SAT. I don't think anyone would dispute that the more vocabulary you learn, the better off you'll be -- especially if your vocabulary isn't all that strong to begin with.

That said, however, I also feel obligated to point out that the sentence-completion portion of the SAT isn't just a straightforward vocabulary test. Yes some of the words are a bit on the esoteric side, but the more time I've spent tutoring, the more I've become aware that the test is deliberately set up so that someone with a fairly strong vocabulary and a reasonable knowledge of roots and prefixes can figure the answers out through a carefully reasoned process of elimination -- even if that person doesn't know what one or more of the words mean. In some ways, just knowing lots of definitions is less helpful than knowing how to figure things out. 

Believe it or not, I seriously don't think that the College Board intends for people to spend huge amounts of time trying to memorize 5,000 words; that's just not what the test is about. (If you're not a native English speaker or come from a home where the primary language spoken is not English, that's a little different, however.)

One of the things the SAT tests is the ability to make reasonable conjectures -- that is, the ability to use the information you do have in order to figure out the information you don't have, and to determine the correct answer through a careful process of elimination.

For example, one of the questions that my students routinely have trouble with is the following:

Orangutans are ------- apes: they typically conduct
most of their lives up in the trees of tropical rain forests.

(A) indigenous   (B) transitory   (C) recessive
(D) pliant   (E) arboreal

The question is #5/8, and it's usually a pretty safe bet that the average test-taker might not be 100% certain what B, D, and E mean. A lot of people tend to pick indigenous because they have a decent idea of what it means and have heard it used in the context of animals. The answer, though, is actually E, arboreal, a word that makes a lot of people screw up their faces and say, "How was I supposed to know what that meant?"

But here's the thing: the College Board doesn't really expect you to have memorized the word. It does, however, assume that you may have some basic knowledge of French or Spanish or Latin (given that most high school students take Spanish, this isn't a terribly unfair assumption), all of which have words for tree (arbre, arbol, arbor) that are awfully similar to arboreal -- and the sentence practically shouts at you that it's talking about an animal that lives in trees. If you can make that connection, you'll get the question no problem, regardless of whether you've ever seen the word arboreal before in your life. The ability to use that kind of logic is what the SAT is really testing. 

It's also testing your knowledge of connotations. Another question that my students tend to have a terrible time with is this one:

Lewis Latimer's inexpensive method of producing
carbon filaments ------- the nascent electric industry by
making electric lamps commercially -------.

(A) cheapened...affordable
(B) transformed...viable
(C) revolutionized...prohibitive
(D) provoked...improbable
(E) stimulated...inaccessible

Most people can get it down to A and B pretty quickly by looking at the second side: prohibitive, improbable, and inaccessible are all negative, and the phrase inexpensive method suggests that Latimer did something positive. 

The problem generally hinges on the word cheapened: most people assume that it simply means "made cheaper" and that it goes along with the idea that Latimer lamps less expensive. The problem, though, is that to cheapen means not to make cheaper but rather to debase or to reduce the quality of. It is a decidedly negative word, but the sentence is suggesting that Latimer did something positive to the electric industry. The answer is therefore B.

While this may look like a "trick" question, the reality is that it's simply testing whether you understand that a word can have a connotation apart from the one it literally appears to denote. Using cheapen in a more neutral way in your own writing wouldn't make that usage of it any more correct.

Now, words like cheapen are unlikely to show up on any "hard words" list; it simply wouldn't occur to anyone that they could be made hard. And unfortunately, there really aren't any surefire ways to study for them -- other than reading a whole lot.

So what to do? Well, you do need to know the top few hundred "hard" words, ones like trite and laconic, equivocate, and ineffable, which show up a whole lot. But beyond that, it's probably not worth it to sit and try to memorize the dictionary. You're better off reading Dickens (admittedly, I'm not much of a fan of his, but he uses a ton of SAT-level vocabulary) or Jane Austen or Oliver Sacks or Foreign Policy, for that matter. And when you look at sentence completions, take a minute and really think about just what it is they're asking for. Provided you have some basic tools, there's a chance you can figure it out.

The Importance of Understanding Comma Splices

When, in the course of going over a Writing section with a student, I mention the term "comma splice, I am almost inevitably met with something between a groan and an eye-roll. I can almost see the words, "ok, enough already, will she please stop going on about the stupid comma-thingies already?" floating above their heads.

Unfortunately, though, it's a point I feel compelled to belabor.

Of all the grammatical concepts tested on the SAT, this is by far one of the most important (I'd say it ranks somewhere up there with subject-verb agreement). I'm the first to admit that there are plenty of grammar rules tested on the SAT that you can get away with fudging in real life: if you use most rather than more when comparing only two things, there's a pretty good chance no one's going to call you on it. Likewise, if you use a collective noun (team, jury, agency, university, organization, etc.) with a plural verb or pronoun, it's highly unlikely that anyone will  care -- or even notice, for that matter. the College Board's insistence that collective nouns be considered immutably singular is one of its quirks.

Not so for comma splices. In my experience, people who can't always recognize when a comma is being used to separate two complete sentences tend to demonstrate the same problem in their own writing. And usually that indicates a larger problem: they don't really know how to recognize a sentence.

Now, call me stodgy and old fashioned, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that high school students know what does and does not constitute a sentence by the time they graduate. Not even be able to to define it in grammatical terms or discourse about it at length, but simply to recognize when something is a complete, stand-alone statement.

Why? Well, in practical terms, let's just say that you've probably been taking it more or less for granted that you don't have to work terribly hard to follow my argument here. It's pretty clear where the divisions between thoughts are.

But what if I were to write like this?

I dislike being the bearer of bad news but when people out there in the real world (employers) see writing (resumes and cover letters) that contains flagrant grammatical errors they won't be particularly eager to hire you, as a matter of fact they probably won't even be terribly eager to give you an interview. Surveys have shown that the number one skill employers think is missing from their new hires is: the ability to write well, this is particularly true for people with degrees in fields like business. If you're lucky enough to get hired by company and can't even write memos clearly you're not going to win yourself any points, you're also definitely not going to be first in line for a promotion.

Ok, so I threw in a few extra mistakes, but I think I've made my point. Reading writing that contains a lot of comma splices requires effort -- it's certainly comprehensible, but it's also tiring and annoying to have to constantly figure out where one thought stops and the next starts. In the end, it has nothing to do with having to write about The Great Gatsby or the Declaration of Independence, and everything to do with making yourself understood.

Can Tutoring Really Raise Critical Reading Scores?

I'm writing this in response to the SAT Reading vs. Math post over at Kitchen Table Math. In case you don't want to read the entire post, the gist of it was essentially that college tend to be more impressed by high Critical Reading scores than they are by high Math scores because SAT Reading scores essentially can't be raised through tutored (although Catherine was nice enough to cite me as the exception to that rule!). I originally meant to leave a comment, but Blogger for some reason decided that I wasn't logged in and kicked me off when I attempted to publish my comment, so I figured that instead of tussling with Blogger (on someone else's blog nonetheless!), I would simply post something here.

So, as someone who spends a good deal of time on this purportedly impossible task, my response to the assertion that CR is somehow un-tutorable would be no and yes. Or rather, it depends.

Before I launch into my reasons, however, I'd like to say that tutoring CR is one of the hardest parts of my job. For starters, it's completely exhausting -- I spent about three-and-a-half hours one day this past weekend just doing CR (one of those hours was devoted *just* to working on how to determine a main point), and I had to go home and sleep afterward. Teaching CR ruins me for the day; it wears me out mentally so much that I often just have to wander around the city aimlessly for a few hours to recover. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy teaching it, and when I finally have a breakthrough with someone, it's hugely rewarding. But it is hard.

I think that this is because teaching CR-- at least the way I do it -- is not just about the SAT; it's actually about teaching people to read closely ("Don't tell me approximately what the author says. Look at the passage -- no, look at the passage -- and tell me exactly what the author is saying. Exactly as in word for word.") and to draw relationships between specific words and their functions or the more abstract categories they represent ("Yes, the passage talks specifically about women artists, but the fact that they're referred to as a group of individuals in the answer choice doesn't mean you should eliminate it. Think about whom that phrase is referring to"). A few of my students see these relationships naturally. Most do not. Some lack the decoding skills to even begin to draw these relationships, but the majority fall some somewhere in between.

But back to the original question: when it tutoring effective for raising a CR score, and when is it not?

My first response would be, "define raise." Are we talking 50 points? 100 points? 200 points? Most people will get something out of high-quality tutoring, but it's probably unrealistic to expect someone with a 550 to try for an 800. And the higher scores go, the harder it is to raise them -- the margin of error is so tiny, sometimes even a question or two out of 67, that it almost comes down to chance. (For the record, I have gotten people from the low to high 700s, but they had virtually no comprehension issues and were willing to work very, very carefully and do everything I said).

The second thing I would say is that the crucial factor isn't the person's baseline score but rather their actual skill at understanding relationships between words (for sentence completions) and comprehending the meaning of relatively sophisticated texts. Kids who have no trouble understanding what the passages are literally saying but who work too quickly and fall for wrong answers because they don't read carefully or think through the questions probably have at least the potential to score in the high 600s or  700s. I've had students in this category who started around 500 (junior PSAT) and ended up close to 700 (senior SAT).

On the other hand, someone with a poor vocabulary and trouble perceiving relationships between words, plus weak comprehension skills is probably not going to make it past 600 with tutoring alone (if the person is willing to spend significant amounts of time reading and working on vocabulary independently, that's a different story, but that is not realistically the case for most high school juniors). I've helped students in that situation move from the low to the high 500s, but they all got stuck below the 600 line. In that case, the SAT does precisely what it was designed to do: it reveals persistent weaknesses in comprehension, and there's really no way to "beat" it past a certain point.

So in general, I think that high-quality CR tutoring can be effective insofar as it allows people to take the fullest advantage of the reading skills they do have. But the "600" and "700 walls" are there for a reason -- students who don't read much on their own and who don't really understand how texts work (how authors play with language to convey a point, how very common words can be used in unexpected ways to mean different things, and how specific phrasings relate to broader concepts), and no amount of test-prep alone will typically get them past it.

Writing Test Preview and Explanations Now Available

I've posted a preview with selected questions +  answer explanations from one of my Writing tests (the text is a little small, but if you click on the pages, you can enlarge them). If you're interested in obtaining the full test -- or any of the additional seven tests I have available -- please contact me at satverbaltutor@gmail.com for purchase details.

Don't Take Sophomore PSAT Scores Too Seriously

On a fairly regular basis, I get contacted by both high school sophomores and parents of high school sophomores who are concerned about their or their child's less-than-stellar sophomore year performance on the PSAT and wondering whether there's any hope. Here's my response:

While sophomore year PSAT scores can serve as a general indicator of someone's strengths and weaknesses, they are in no way an indicator of a student's potential and often bear little relationship to the scores achieved in the spring of junior year or the fall of senior year.

Let me make this perfectly clear: the SAT is intended to be a test for eleventh and twelfth graders, not one for tenth graders, and certainly not one for ninth graders. Except in very unusual circumstances, scores attained prior to eleventh grade are not of great interest to most colleges and should not generally be a cause for concern.

While some students will have finished the learning the math they need to know in order to do well on the SAT by the beginning of their sophomore year, a good deal fewer will have acquired the requisite reading or writing skills.

To put that in some perspective, I've only ever had two students who scored above a 700 on CR before they turned sixteen, and one of them was a junior who had skipped a year of school. Most of my current 700-750+ scorers failed to top the low 600s as sophomores, but when they started working with me the summer before junior year, they were already naturally scoring in the high 600s.

To put that in even more perspective, a Critical Reading score of only about 570 would put a test-taker in the 90th percentile for sophomores -- an equivalent percentile for a junior would require a score 60 points higher. Likewise, a Writing score of only 560 counts as the 90th percentile for a sophomore; for a junior, about a 620.

These gaps are not ones that necessarily require extensive test-prep to be remedied; closing them is often largely a question of intellectual maturation. Most sophomores are just coming off of freshman year when they take the PSAT -- in many ways, they're still adjusting to high school. Most of them have net yet completed an AP class or been required to grapple with material written for a college-to-adult audience on a regular basis. They lack both the vocabulary and the literal decoding strategies to make sense out of much of the reading they'll encounter on the SAT.

Many of the skills necessary to succeed on the SAT are typically acquired throughout sophomore year -- not just during the month-and-a-half that precedes the PSAT. Unless a student is truly academically precocious, it is unfair to expect him or her to perform at a level that students a year or two older must often struggle to attain. In fact, forcing students into rigorous, strategy-based test-prep before they have acquired the fundamental academic skills being tested is pretty much useless. It's like trying to hang a coat on a shadow instead of a coat hanger -- there's just nothing there to hold it up.

It also has a nasty tendency to backfire. Students burn out, get discouraged, and end up scoring lower than they would have otherwise. And because their focus has been on acing the test rather than on acquiring a genuine appreciation of words and language, they tend to not to develop the sense of linguistic nuance and dexterity that is absolutely crucial for a 750+. Only after students have acquired those skills can they realistically aim for a very top score.

So the bottom line is that if you're a sophomore or the parent of a sophomore about to take the SAT, it's not worth your time to worry. Go in, take the test, see what it's like, and use the results as a general gauge of the things you need to focus on over the next year or so. And that's pretty much it.