Not All Guesses are Created Equal

A lot of test-prep discussions seem to center on guessing: when to do it, when not to do it, and how many answer choices you should eliminate before trying to do it.

Interestingly, though, no one ever seems to discuss just what it means to guess. I think that this is largely because most people assume that the term is self-evident: a "guess" is what you take what you take when you've eliminated at least one or two option(s) but have absolutely no idea what the real answer is and don't want to leave a question blank. 

What largely gets overlooked in these discussion, however, is the fact that there are different kinds of guessing, and they are not at all alike. In general, I find that there are three major types of guesses, and I want to discuss each one in turn:

1) Wild guesses 

2) "Gut feeling" guesses 

3) Educated Guesses 

Wild Guesses 

I'm going to come right out and say that I'm not a big fan of this type of guessing, no matter how many answer choices you've eliminated. Not simply because I'm a cautious person when it comes to test-taking (although anyone who's seen me work through an SAT Critical Reading section will testify that I don't *ever* pick an answer without double-checking that it's actually backed up by something in the text) but because also because from what I've observed, most wild guesses tend to be wrong -- even when you're down to two answers. 

Repeated wild guessing on questions you really don't know how to answer has the potential to drag your score down a whole lot. Especially if you're trying to top 750 or even 700, you need to be very careful about answering questions you don't really know the answer to (and if you have the chops to pull above a 700, you shouldn't see more than a question or two per test that fall into that category anyway). 

The other reason that I dislike wild guessing is that doing it habitually, especially for a relatively high scorer, reinforces the idea that the SAT CR is fundamentally a guessing game. It isn't, and treating it that way can get you in a lot of trouble. 

"Gut Feeling" Guesses 

Interestingly enough, I find that these guesses tend to almost always be right, and more often than not I have to convince people that it's ok to make them! In fact, I feel as if I have the "trust your instinct" conversation at least once every tutoring session. That's totally understandable. "Gut feeling" guesses are scary because they don't seem to be based on anything, and no one wants to ruin their score by going on a feeling. But usually people get questions wrong because they don't trust their instincts, not because they do!

Here's the thing: these guesses are usually based on something, even if it can't be put into words. If you're generally a strong reader, it's perfectly possible to grasp in some corner of your mind what's fundamentally going on in a passage but lack the vocabulary to put it explicitly into words. That glimmer of understanding is usually enough to get you the right answer. 

For example, even if you've never actually learned that many words with anglo-saxon roots tend to sound clearly negative or positive, you can probably guess that "dolt" is something negative. If you have a decent ear for language, you can probably intuit that it's bad, whether or not you know how you did so.

From what I've seen, the most effective way to know whether this kind of guessing will actually be effective is to take a bunch of tests and practice doing it. It can be incredibly scary to trust yourself at first, especially if you're not 100% sure of the answer, but if you take a bunch of practice tests and consistently get questions right because you trusted your instincts, you'll start to feel more comfortable. 

If, on the other hand, you discover that your instincts tend to lead you in the wrong direction, you can learn to deal accordingly.

In any case, you NEED to test this out beforehand; you can't just wing it when you get to the real test. 

Educated Guesses 

Even more often that "gut feeling" guesses, this kind of guess usually ends up being correct -- in large part because the SAT is test of logical conjecture, designed so that you can reason your way through the questions. In general, my rule is that if you've arrived at any answer by employing some sort of logical process (provided that it isn't too farfetched), you should go ahead and pick it because it's probably right. 

There are a couple of different ways in which this type of guess can manifest itself, the first being simple process of elimination. If you can conclusively discard four answers, the remaining one must be correct. Even if you don't know why the right answer is the right answer, you can still pick it with a fair degree of confidence. 

In addition, on sentence completions, you can choose an answer that includes unfamiliar words based on your knowledge of roots. So even if you don't know what "multifarious" and "polymath" mean, you know they probably go along with the idea of diversity or many of something. As I've said before, the SAT isn't just based on how many words you can memorize -- it's also based on how you can use your knowledge about language to put words together (or take them apart). If you can relate an unfamiliar word to French or Latin or Spanish, you might not get the exact meaning, but you'll probably get it close enough to answer the question.

Furthermore, understanding how the SAT is constructed can also go a long way toward helping you make these kinds of guesses. Knowing, for example, that the correct answer to many passage-based questions will essentially be a rephrasing of the passage's main point can help you identify the likely answer -- even if you can't find the necessary evidence to back it up and/or don't 100% understand what the question is asking. Granted you still have to nail the main point, but provided you can do that, you'll almost certainly be right. 

This is also where the question of "implied authorship" comes into play -- the idea that the writers of the test have their own set of biases to which correct answers tend to conform. That means that extreme answers are usually wrong; women and minorities are portrayed positively (and tone questions relating to them typically have positive answers); and challenging conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to science, is a good thing. Knowing that the right answers tend to slant this way does not guarantee that you'll get a question correct, but it can significantly up your chances.

So to sum up, if you're about to take a wild guess just for the sake of not leaving a question blank, you might want to think twice; but if you have good reason for picking the answer you're picking, you should probably go for it. 

Don't Ever Read Just Half of a Sentence

The SAT makes people do some strange things.

I think it's safe to say that in everyday life, most people don't pick up a book, open to a random page, start reading in the middle of a sentence, and then wonder why they don't fully understand what's going on. Barring some sort of bizarre circumstances, it just doesn't happen. But it happens constantly on the SAT.

Now, I fully admit there are some aspects of SAT Reading that are different from the types of reading most test-takers have been asked to thus far, but contrary to conventional test-prep wisdom, SAT Reading is not completely detached from the normal act of reading. That means that you need to read words and phrases within the larger context of the sentences where they appear. Always.

I realize that this is one of those pieces of advice that might sound pretty obvious, but please just hear me out. One of the biggest mistakes that I see my students consistently make when they answer Critical Reading questions is to focus only on the word/phrase/line references given and ignore the surrounding information -- which is what they actually need to read in order to answer the question correctly. Not backing up and starting from a sentence or two above is bad enough, but actually starting in the middle of the sentence has the potential to cause a lot of problems.

For example (passage excerpt):

...Now that I am passionately involved with thinking
critically about Black people and representation, I can
confess that those walls of photographs empowered me, and
that I feel their absence in my life. Right now I long for those
walls, those curatorial spaces in the home that express our will
to make and display images.

Question: In line 26, "absence" refers metaphorically to a
lack of a

(A) constraining force
(B) cluttered space
(C) negative influence
(D) sustaining tradition
(E) joyful occasion

By SAT standards, the question is right in the middle of the road difficulty-wise. In fact, it's a level 3. The reason that people tend to get into trouble with questions like it, however, is as follows: the question refers specifically to the word "absence," then tells us that the word appears in line 26 -- a piece of information that leads most people to *begin* reading at the word "absence" in line 26, then continue down to the rest of the paragraph (and often, when they can't find the answer, to the paragraph below it).

In other words, they start reading halfway through the sentence, but they're so focused on the word "absence" that it never even occurs to them that they might be missing something important. And once they hit the phrase "curatorial spaces," they so hung up on the fact that they don't quite understand what it means that it never occurs to them that they might be missing something a lot more straightforward.

The problem, of course, is that the answer is found in the first part of the sentence: the photographs were absent, and they empowered the narrator. Empowered = sustaining (more or less), hence D. (The beginning of the passage also makes quite clear that those photographs were an important tradition in her family.) But if you don't read the beginning of the sentence, you miss the context and end up going in the completely wrong direction.

Vocabulary and Variables

I've been doing some thinking about the relationship between the Critical Reading and Math sections of the SAT, particularly in relation to the the idea of associative interference -- the notion that unrelated  concepts have a tendency to get tied up with one another and interfere with understanding. Catherine Johnson at Kitchen Table Math has written about it in relation to the Math section, but I would venture to say that for most people, it's actual much more of a problem on Critical Reading section. Here's why:

One of the things that the SAT tests is the ability to draw conclusions based solely on the information in front of you and to ignore any preconceived notions or biases you may bring with you into the test. In terms of the math section, this means that you need to be able to understand the concept of a variable -- that is, that the letter "a" or "x" or "y"(or whatever else happens to be used) stands for whatever it happens to mean within the context of a particular problem, regardless of how you're used to seeing it elsewhere.

I think that in general, this is not a terribly foreign concept for most people who have achieved a reasonably high level of mathematical understanding. If you don't  really get what a variable is but are still attempting to take any sort of advanced math class, you're  going to get thrown the second you see a familiar letter in an unfamiliar context, and that's probably going to cause you some trouble in math class at some point. In other words, "school" math does often overlap with SAT math in this regard, and if there's a serious weakness in your understanding of the concept, there's a halfway decent chance it'll get picked up on eventually.

When a similar issue emerges on the verbal side of things, however, there chances of it being caught are comparatively slim. I think it's safe to say that most high school students have never been explicitly asked to think about words in quite the way the SAT tests them -- namely, that a word can be made to mean almost anything that an author wants it to mean, even the exact opposite of what it usually means. Or, to draw a math analogy, that words = variables. In other words, sometimes it doesn't matter how a word is usually used, only how it's being used in that particular context at that particular moment. (In order to answer higher-level questions dealing with things like irony and mockery and skepticism, it is of course necessary to understand why an author would use a word to mean its opposite, but in order to get there, you first have to understand what's literally being said. And in my experience, plenty of kids who take AP English struggle even with that.)

In this sense, the SAT is exactly the opposite of a traditional vocabulary test. It's also the exact opposite of the kind of English assignment that asks you to connect what you're reading to your own experiences -- which, as far as I can tell, seems to comprise a substantial portion of the English assignments at a lot of schools. Knowing the dictionary definition of a word, pondering what it reminds you of, or remembering how your Aunt Sally used it last weekend will get you exactly nowhere. As a matter of fact, it doesn't even matter if you know the definition of the word being tested -- all that matters is that you know the definitions of the words in the answer choices.

So what this means, practically speaking, is that when you see a question that that says, "In line 17, suffered most nearly means," you need to rephrase the question as, "In line 17, x most nearly means." The fact that the word "suffered," as opposed to some other word, happens to be used in the original text is almost entirely incidental. Yes, knowing that "suffered" is negative might help you make some headway in eliminating answer choices, but if the passage indicates otherwise, that knowledge might actually drag you in the wrong direction.

Thinking about vocabulary words as variables also eliminates the option that you'll try to answer the question without looking back at the passage -- you might think you know what "suffering" means, but you probably wouldn't dare to guess what "x" meant without checking out the context. Even if you think you remember, you'll be a whole lot more likely to play it safe.

Adverbs and Comma Splices

At first glance, it might seem that adverbs and comma splices don't have all that much to do with one another. On both the SAT Writing section and the ACT English section, however, they're actually quite connected, even if the relationship isn't particular obvious.

For those of you who need a quick review, a comma splice is a nefarious invisible beast that sneaks onto your papers after you've finally gone to bed at 3 a.m. and gobbles up your commas so that you turn in assignments filled with run-on sentences.

No, I'm just kidding (obviously). It's almost as bad, though. It's actually just a comma placed between two full sentences (aka independent clauses), and it can be fixed by replacing the comma with a semicolon.

For example:

Comma Splice: Gandhi rejected violence as a means of political revolt, he advocated peaceful protest instead.

Correct: Gandhi rejected violence as a means of political revolt; he advocated peaceful protest instead.

An adverb is a word that modifies a verb. You may be familiar with them from the infamous "adjective vs. adverb" error that appears in the Error-Identification section (e.g. John and Bob pulled the sled slow up hill, pausing only occasionally to catch their breath). For that section of the test, it's usually enough to know that most adverbs end in "-ly."

Now, most adverbs do in fact end in "-ly," but not all of them do. And it's the ones that don't that tend to cause a lot of trouble when it comes to Fixing Sentences.

So back to comma splices: in order to recognize when a comma is being incorrectly placed between two sentences, you have to first be able to recognize when something is a sentence and when it isn't. For a lot of test-takers, though, this is much harder than it sounds. Most people have no problem recognizing that this is a sentence:

Gandhi advocated peaceful protest.

But stick in an adverb (underlined below), and all of the sudden some people aren't quite so sure:

Gandhi advocated peaceful protest instead.

At this point, a lot of people will look at the sentence and say, "instead of what?" Because the sentence suddenly doesn't make complete sense on its own, they mistakenly believe it can't be a sentence anymore. Actually, though, it can and it is.

It even gets worse: move the adverb to the beginning of the clause, and a lot of people will simply have no idea whatsoever whether or not they're dealing with a sentence:

Instead, Gandhi advocated peaceful protest.

This is still a sentence. It doesn't matter whether it makes any sense out of context, OR whether the adverb comes at the beginning or the end; it's still a stand-alone, grammatically correct sentence. And that means that it can't have a comma before it -- only a semicolon or a period.

Both the SAT and the ACT play with this concept a lot. They know that lots of high school students get confused by syntax and lose their ability to distinguish between sentences and fragments when adverbs are placed at the beginning of a sentences. Furthermore, if my own observations are any indication of things, they also know that this one of the top errors that high school students make in their own writing.
(Actually, it's something I see adults do in their writing sometimes too, and that looks really bad). In this case, learning that placing an adverb at the beginning of a sentence doesn't make it any less of a sentence can go a very long way toward making writing sound clearer and more polished and, well, more like something produced by an adult.

Sometimes It's Ok Just to Tell a Story

So much gets made out of the "right" way to write the SAT essay: plug in a couple of examples about The Great Gatsby or the Civil Rights movement, throw in a bunch of big SAT words whether or not you really know their definitions, make up a quote or two, stick in some transitions, and presto....! You've just written pretty much the same essay as a hundred thousand other people. So don't be shocked when you get an 8.

Even though I frequently remind my students that if they write a paint-by-numbers essay, they're likely to end up with average score, I'm still a little surprised by just how risk-averse they are. On one hand, I of course understand why: it's the SAT, for crying out loud! One false step and you've ruined your chances at the school you've dreamed about going to since you were five and, by extension, the entire rest of your life. But on the other hand, you're not particularly likely to get a stellar store on the essay if you don't step out of your comfort zone and do something a little more interesting. Something that actually holds your reader's interest and gives them a break from the tedium of reading hundreds if not thousands of essays about MLK and Hitler. This does not, however, mean trying to sound like a 50 year-old and overloading your writing with ten dollar words. Simple does not necessarily equal unsophisticated.

I was reminded of this by Debbie Stier couple of days ago, when she posted her "6" essay (scroll down) about The Things They Carried over at Perfect Score Project. If you're looking for a great example of a relatively un-formulaic top-scoring essay, I would highly suggest that you read it. The first thing that struck me was how utterly easy it was to go through. I dare say I actually enjoyed it. It drew me in, but not because Debbie was trying to grab her reader in an an obvious way: she simply told a story, tying it back into the prompt just often enough that I never lost focus of what the essay was about. It wasn't a perfect piece of writing, but it held my attention far, far more than most SAT essays ever do -- I actually wanted to finish it. (And trust me when I say that I read *lots* of SAT essays, and I usually try to get through them as fast as possible.) Yes, there were some conventional elements, especially in the beginning, but they never felt particularly forced.

And that's the part that I want to insist on here: the best essays often don't feel forced. They don't even always feel as if they were written for the SAT. They don't scream, "Please give me a high score because see, look how much big vocabulary I used and how sophisticated I tried to sound even though I don't really know what half of these words mean." They just tell a story.

Now in all fairness, I know how hard Debbie worked for that 6. In this case, what feels like an artless piece of writing is actually the result an incredible amount of effort. But I remember telling Debbie months ago that if she stopped writing just what she thought, even subconsciously, that the College Board wanted to hear and started writing about things that she had a genuine emotional connection to, the score would follow. I'm not saying that this will always work; 25 minutes is not a long time, and if you get thrown a question you just don't have great examples for, it's easy to flounder. But in general, if you approach the essay from the standpoint of trying to engage your reader, to interest them, not just to impress them, you might do a lot better than you expected.

A Quick SAT vs. ACT Litmus Test

When I start working with someone early in their junior, the first thing I try to get figured out is whether they're going to take the SAT or the ACT. I'd rather have them go through a couple of weeks of indecision early on than suddenly decide to switch tests after six months of preparation (especially because every year I do get people who've already been prepping for one test for six months, then decide to switch two weeks before the other and want to cram. That's really not fun for me.) Usually I just tell my students that if they can't stomach the thought of taking both a full SAT and a full ACT, they should just do a couple of sections from each test and see which one they like better. 

I've realized recently, however, that at the extreme end, there can be a simpler litmus test, at least on the verbal side of things, and that test involves sentence completions. Interestingly enough, though, it has very little to do with vocabulary per se. The giveaway is how easily you can either 1) plug in your own words, or 2) correctly determine whether the word that goes in a given blank should be positive or negative -- regardless of how many of the words in the answer choices you actually know. If you try a handful of sections and are consistently stumbling over this exercise by the third question or so, that's a pretty good sign that you should seriously consider the ACT. 

Here why: while having a good vocabulary will help you on the SAT, the sentence completion section isn't just a vocabulary test. It actually functions as a microcosm of the Critical Reading section as a whole in that it also tests your ability to perceive relationships between ideas. Vocabulary can be memorized, but if you have difficulty sorting out the basic connections between ideas in a sentence or identify key pieces of information, the unfortunate reality is that you're probably not going to develop that skill in a couple of months. If you can't even figure out what sorts of words go into the blanks on relatively straightforward questions, how are you going to be able to consistently determine nuances between words on vocabulary-in-context questions or  nail the relationship between the authors' ideas on Passage 1/Passage 2? I'm not trying to be harsh, just realistic. 

I'm also not suggesting that this is a fool-proof method, just that it can provide some quick insight into some of the struggles certain students might have down the line. To be fair, it's not that these skills are not tested at all on the ACT -- they are, but they feature less prominently and tend to be tested in a somewhat less circuitous way. There's no sense in making yourself crazy if there's a less headache-inducing option available. 

A few more thoughts about the difficulty of raising critical reading scores

Granted I'm no math expert, but from following some of the debates over just why SAT Math is so difficult, it seems to me that there's a very fundamental difference between that section and Critical Reading -- a difference that accounts for a lot of the trouble many people have in raising their CR score as compared to raising their Math score.

From what I gather (and please correct me if I'm wrong), many of the difficulties that people encounter on the Math section stem from the fact that the SAT requires them to deal with relatively familiar concepts in highly unfamiliar ways, and to combine and apply principles in ways that aren't immediately apparent. The specifics of the test might be different from what they've seen in school and can often be very hard, but the general principles behind them aren't fundamentally new for most people who've gone through a couple of years of algebra and geometry. So even they miss a question because they're used to solving for x instead of (x-y), they've still seen plenty of problems in math class that involve variables and parentheses.

The Critical Reading section is different. For a lot of high school students, it's the verbal equivalent of BC Calculus rather than algebra and geometry. In other words, it tests material of a level and content that they have never actually been exposed to, and it requires them to maneuver with it in ways that they've never encountered in school. Even in AP English.

Consider this: in sophomore and junior English class, the average American high school student probably reads a Shakespeare play or two and a handful of classics such as Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and maybe some Thoreau, Austen, Dickens, or in an advanced class, Joyce. The point is that pretty much all of it is fictional, and it's usually set in an English-speaking country sometime in the past. SAT passages, on the other hand, are largely non-fiction and are drawn from contemporary sources -- books that were published in the last couple of decades and that include subject matter only the most sophisticated independent high school readers will have even a passing familiarity with: art and media criticism, anthropology, cognitive science, and method acting to name a few. The novels that do appear are just as likely to be written by a nineteenth century Russian author as by a twentieth-century American one, and often the cultural milieux and scenarios are wildly unfamiliar.

The other piece of this is the level at which most of the texts are written -- at the risk of sounding reductive, if SAT Math is essentially middle school competition math, as some people have asserted, then Critical Reading is essentially introductory-level college reading. Those texts those passages are taken from are not written specifically to test high school students' reading ability (even though ETS will often edit them to make them somewhat more digestible) -- they're either written by professional academics for other professional academics, or by specialists in a subject for educated adult readers. And they sound like it.

It seems fair to say that most high school students have simply never been asked to deal with a text that reads like the following: "The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky ideas about the nature of art and the situation of its making, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this...Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art." (from Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," featured on the October 2009 SAT.)

The syntax of last part in particular is so unfamiliar that it tends to stop a lot of kids cold: "Basic to question...?" Are you even allowed to start a sentence that way? (Yes, you are.) And that first sentence is really long -- isn't it a run-on? (No, it isn't, it's ok to have a sentence that long.) And why does it have to sound so confusing? (Because that's just how academics write.) The only way you get comfortable dealing with sentences like that is to read lots of them. There's no shortcut, no trick. If you haven't been regularly exposed to people who talk and think and write like that, the reality is that you just can't compensate in a few weeks or even a few months. Most of the major test-prep companies do not even acknowledge the presence of this level/type of passage when they write their own materials, which is part of why people often get shocked by the difficulty of the real test.

The other problem is that most English classes revolve primarily around discussions, which are easily tuned out, and papers, which can be pulled together with minimal effort via a combination of Sparknotes and Wikipedia. The teacher might give a couple of quizzes just to make sure people are doing their reading, but those are easily dealt with.

In terms of rhetoric, figures such as metaphors and personification might be covered, but that's about it. Rarely if never are students asked to study how the text functions at its most basic level: how form and syntax and diction all work together to create meaning. Rather, the meaning itself is taken as the starting point for discussion (What do you think about that? Do you agree? Disagree? How does it relate to your own life?). The notion that a text is a rhetorical construction designed to elicit a particular reaction from the reader never enters into play. So it's no wonder that Critical Reading, whose questions tend to revolve around the relationship between form and meaning, comes as a shock. Besides, if you've always been asked for your own personal interpretation in English class, the idea that your own personal interpretation is totally and utterly irrelevant on the SAT can be hard to stomach.

Finally, most high school students are never introduced to the notion that different kinds of texts require different kinds of reading. Because they are only exposed to literary fiction in English class, they develop the idea that "real" reading involves carefully underlining and annotating and note-taking and "analyzing" (although a lot of these supposedly careful readers display a remarkably weak grasp of what the passages as well as the questions are actually saying). As a matter of fact, it isn't uncommon for students to take offense when I ask them to try reading for the main ideas and skimming over everything else; they consider it a betrayal of everything they've been taught and take it as further evidence of the stupidity of standardized testing.

And if the test is so stupid, why would you waste your time studying for it anyway?

Write Yourself Notes - It Helps

I'm the first person to admit that I have a terrible short-term memory. Terrible. I think it used to be halfway decent, but then my senior year of college hit, and that was that. Now it isn't uncommon for me to get halfway through a sentence and drift off halfway through, unable to recall the point I was attempting to make.

This happens with alarming frequency when I'm tutoring, at which point I typically ask my student what I was saying. What really disturbs me, however, is that most of the time my student can't remember what I was saying either. I'm sorry, but you just shouldn't be losing your memory at sixteen. You have the entire rest of your life for that to happen. Besides, you need to have something to look forward to in middle age!

Given how much stress most high school juniors seems to be under, though, I can't say that this is entirely shocking. (As a matter of fact, looking back on my junior year of high school, it's kind of amazing that I managed to hang onto my own memory as long as I did.) Which brings me to the point of this post: when you're taking the SAT/ACT/other random test, you shouldn't assume that your memory will automatically work any better than it was last night when you were trying to recall what that English/Physics/Spanish assignment was and had to ask your friend.

Catherine Johnson over at Kitchen Table Math has written extensively about the issue of working memory and the effects of trying to perform under pressure on the SAT. While some parts of the SAT (e.g. Math and Writing) are more directly focused on memorization-based skills, the truth is that it's easy to forget crucial steps just about anywhere on the test. Everyone has particular things that they forget when the pressure gets ramped up -- it might be a particular formula or grammatical rule, but it might also be a matter of approach.

The truth is that that weak spot could be anything, and for practical purposes, it doesn't really matter what it is. What matters is that you become 1) aware of it, and 2) willing to write yourself a note about it.

So, for example, if you consistently forget to plug your own words into sentence completion blanks (assuming that helps you), you can write something like: PLUG IN WORDS! at the top of your page. Or, if you always second-guess yourself and change your answers from right to wrong, you can write: DON'T SECOND GUESS YOURSELF!

Trust me, it's more than worth spending the extra five seconds to write yourself the reminder -- and you do have to physically write it, not just think it. The reason is that halfway through a section, right at the point when you start to go into total panic mode, your memory is probably not functioning optimally (to put it mildly). You need something concrete to look at that will tell you to "LOOK OUT FOR DANGLING MODIFIERS!" Otherwise, it's too easy to give into the fear and freeze up, overlooking specific steps you can take to get yourself working and thinking again. You might also discover that you were looking right past something that was staring you in the face the whole time.

Critical Reading Tutoring as Remediation: the Limits of Test Prep

A couple of years ago, I tutored a pair of best friends for the SAT. Although one of them was considerably more motivated than the other, both were smart, intellectually curious, and lots of fun to work with. Neither, however, was what you would call a natural standardized test-taker when it came to Critical Reading: in their junior year, both had PSAT Reading scores of about 500.

I worked with them regularly starting in the fall of junior year, and fortunately they both managed to pull up their scores quite a bit: by the spring of their junior year, they were both reliably scoring more than 100 points higher, and both ultimately attained scores in the high 600s.

I wish that I could say that their experiences were typical, but unfortunately they were the exception rather than the rule. Critical Reading scores, unlike Writing and Math scores, are notoriously difficult to raise. While I've had many students who did manage to raise their CR scores by 100+ points, I've had others whose scores I simply could not get to budge, no matter how many different approaches I tried. (As I explained to their parents, I may be very good at what I do, but I do not actually possess magical powers when it comes to the SAT.)

So here I want to discuss the difference between these two groups: the ones who start out low but make huge gains relatively quickly, and the ones who start low and remain stuck below a certain point (usually 600). Their divergent experiences illustrate the distinction between actual test-prep tutoring (that is, tutoring geared almost exclusively to managing the kinds of questions that appear on the SAT) and remediation tutoring (tutoring geared primarily toward developing comprehension strategies).

Despite their initial low scores, both of the boys I worked with a couple of years ago had some major things going for them: they came from upper middle-class families and had highly educated, intellectually-oriented parents who were willing to spend substantial amounts of time drilling them on vocabulary, whether they wanted to study it or not; access to a challenging curriculum that regularly exposed them to the level of text found on the SAT; a high degree of intellectual curiosity, including an interest in relatively sophisticated subjects (e.g. seventeenth century Dutch art); and little trouble understanding or identifying the main point of most Critical Reading passages.

In other words, they had all of the fundamentals pretty much down -- they just needed to learn to apply them to the SAT.

I think that the assumption underlying a lot of test-prep is that most students fall into this general category. The problem is that most of them don't.

One of the first things I learned about teaching Critical Reading was that students had to begin by identifying the main point and tone of a passage; it was simply a given that said students would understand what they were reading well enough to identify those elements with relatively little effort and  then be able to apply them in order to answer the questions. What I rapidly discovered, however, was that a lot of students got stuck way before they got to the questions themselves. They couldn't even figure out the main point because they didn't actually understand what they were reading. Sometimes, they were so thrown by the sheer unfamiliarity of the language that they couldn't even tell what the topic was, never mind how to look for important information about it.

These students form the second category, the ones for whom strategy-based test prep tends to be largely ineffective. Because they can't really understand what they're reading, they can't figure out what's important and thus can't skim efficiently; consequently, they often spend too much time reading passages and simply trying to make some sense out of them. Because their vocabulary skills are weak, they often can't follow general rules such as "eliminate extreme answers" or make fine distinctions between answer choices. And because they can't identify main points effectively, Passage 1/Passage 2 relationship questions are often a complete mystery to them and tend to be disastrous for their scores.

If their families can afford it, these tend to be the kids who go through Kaplan and Princeton Review without gaining a single point.

The more students I work with in this category, the more I also notice some specific weaknesses that they seem to share: first, they tend to have trouble understanding word relationships. Even if they memorize vocabulary, they often get thrown by words used in unusual ways, and they have difficulty separating negative and positive ideas from negative and positive words (e.g. a sentence that contains a positive idea and a negation may require a negative word).

They also tend to have a lot of trouble reading sequentially: instead of starting at the beginning of a sentence and reading word by word until the end, they often skip around internally, focusing on individual words without considering their context. As a result, they sometimes not only fail to understand what an author is saying but also end up with an interpretation that is exactly the opposite of the intended meaning! Likewise, they have considerable difficulty reading answer choices in order. They'll often skip from A to D to B, seizing on particular words but failing to consider what the answers as a whole are actually saying; and when they see a word or phrase in an answer choice that matches a word or phrase they've seen in the passage, they'll often jump to pick it without considering whether it means something different in the passage.

The final piece is that they often lack context. Because they do not read SAT-level material on their own and often lack even basic familiarity with the topics that appear on the test, they have no way of using their prior knowledge to bootstrap themselves into a basic understanding of what they read (note: this is *very* different from using outside knowledge to pick answers while neglecting the passage itself). They also tend to come from families that spend more time watching television or playing sports than discussing books or current events (not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'd be lying if I said I couldn't predict a student's general CR score just by knowing how many books their family owned). A student who lacks even a passing knowledge of the Italian Renaissance will find a passage about the Mona Lisa's identity infinitely more difficult than will a student who has at least a general awareness of that time period.

So what this boils down to is that while students in this situation can benefit from some strategizing (knowing what questions to skip and which ones to go for; doing the questions as they read the passage to save time), there is no way to get past the fundamental weakness in their skills without a huge amount of work.

The SAT is designed to ruthlessly detect gaps in comprehension, and it does so with a remarkable degree of effectiveness. Below a certain level of understanding, there is no real way to "beat" the test. The College Board makes certain of that. Dramatically improving the score of a student who is missing some of the basics involves a lot more than SAT prep -- it involves solidifying skills that most test-prep programs take for granted. Unless a student is willing to devote an extraordinary amount of time to reading independently, there is no short-term solution. A couple of sessions won't do it. Neither will a couple of months. Given a year, I might be able to do something, but even then it isn't a guarantee.

I honestly find myself at a loss when I encounter a student in this situation. No one wants to hear that they (or their child) is missing fundamental skills and that there's no quick fix. Particularly if they believe that doing well on the SAT is just a matter of learning the right tricks (or worse, getting familiar with the test), it can be very hard to tell them otherwise. Sometimes I can get their score from the low 500s to the high 500s, but rarely can I get it to 650 or even to 600 -- and that's what they want. Those are the times I wish that I did have a magic wand, but alas, such an object is nowhere to be found.

Why marking line references can be a huge waste of time

I find that it can sometimes help to think of the SAT as the standardized-testing equivalent of a parlor trick. Questions that appear at first glance to be exceedingly complicated can often be solved quickly and simply, and answers that would initially seem to be located in a particular place may be located somewhere else entirely. One of the places where this gap is most striking involves the line references that accompany most Critical Reading questions.

On one hand, it's rather generous of ETS to at least be willing to tell you where to look -- unlike, for example, the writers of the ACT, who basically leave you to fend for yourself in terms of figuring out where information is located. On the other hand, however, line references are not always quite the gift that they appear to be. As a matter of fact, in some cases they can be downright misleading.

In order to understand why, it helps to understand just what the SAT is and is not doing when a specific line reference appears. Take, for example, the following:

The author's attitude toward the "subfield" (line 65) is best characterized as one of:

(A) approval
(B) curiosity
(C) uncertainty
(D) surprise
(E) dismay

A question that is phrased this way is giving us exactly one piece of information: that the word "subfield" appears in line 65.

The question is not, however, telling us that the information necessary to answer the question -- information that will reveal the author's attitude about the subfield -- is in line 65.

Now, the answer will most likely be in the general vicinity of line 65, but we don't know where. It might come before, but it also might come after.  In other words, it may be in line 63. Or 61. Or 68. It might even be in line 59 or line 70.

This is because the question is not asking us about the subfield itself. It is only concerned with the subfield insofar as it relates to the author's opinion of it. Establishing the author's tone is what counts; without it, there is no effective way to answer the question.

What this means, practically speaking, is that if you've spent your time carefully marking line 65 and the answer comes five lines earlier, you're out of luck. Especially if you're the sort of person who starts at a particular line and keeps on reading without bothering to consider that the answer might have might have preceded the line in question.

I'm not suggesting that marking line references is completely worthless, just that it shouldn't be overestimated as a strategy. It's fine to tell yourself to read carefully around a particular area, but if you're just reading carefully without really knowing what you're reading carefully for, you might end up wasting a huge amount of time.

Yes, some question can be answered by looking at the lines cited in the questions, but just as many, if not more, cannot. On the SAT, it's the big picture -- the relationship between detail and context -- that generally counts. And marking line references just for the sake of marking line references will not give you that relationship; you still have to take the time to figure it out on your own.