So you've been asked, or perhaps hired, to tutor the SAT or the ACT. Presumably you've scored quite well on the test, but as you may have realized, getting a high score on these tests and teaching someone else to do so are two entirely different skills. Especially when it comes to something like Critical Reading. So if you're wondering how on earth to tutor the SAT or the ACT -- or if you're an experienced tutor looking for some tips -- you've come to the right place.
I realize that the suggestions below are far from the only way to go about tutoring, and I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions you care to give. Refining one's teaching, as I'm sure you know, is an ongoing process, and I'm always happy to hear different points of view. Most of what I suggest here is geared toward longer-term students; I do realize that different scenarios demand different responses, and I hope that I do not come across as overly rigid in my approach.
I remember the first time I picked up an Official Guide after about eight years away from standardized testing. As I read through the Critical Reading questions, exactly one thought crossed my mind: holy s--t, how on earth did I pull a perfect score on this test at the age of seventeen? And, moreover, how on earth I am supposed to teach someone else? I was really lost for the first year or so, and I had to constantly check answers in the Blue Book and hope my students wouldn't think I was a complete idiot. Luckily, fate intervened in the form of WilsonPrep's Laura Wilson, who taught me to teach test-prep reading for real. I am immensely grateful to her and to owe her all of the confidence and much of the success I've had in teaching reading.
Despite the statistics that the College Board regularly trots out showing that tutoring does little to increase students' SAT scores, it is perfectly possible to help a student raise his or her score by hundreds of points. A good deal of the outcome does of course depend on the particular student's willingness to work on his or her own, as well as on the amount of time you have with the student, but there are also a number of steps you can take to maximize your results. So to begin with, here is a list of the most important advice I can offer for how to tutor SAT and ACT Verbal:
1) A student's initial score on either the PSAT, PLAN or a full-length (real) SAT or ACT is frequently unrelated to the student's ultimate score.
I'm generally suspicious of tutors who encourage students to "be realistic" in a way that dismisses improvement potential. Never assume that someone with scores in the low to mid 500s should only aim for the high 500s to low 600s at best -- several of my students who began with scores in that range ultimately ended up close to 700, and others who started in the low-mid 600s ended up close to 800. No, not all kids are capable of pulling their scores up by that much. But for the ones who are, it is doable -- provided that the student is willing to put in a truly immense amount of work.
2) Two students can achieve identical scores for completely different reasons.
In my experience, students fall into two major categories: first, those who already possess the skills necessary to do well on the test but simply have no idea how to take it; and second, those who actually lack the skills necessary to do well on the test.
Your first responsibility is to figure out which category a particular student falls into. Those in the former generally improve quickly and need primarily strategy work; those in the latter require intensive work on fundamentals. In other words, students who are consistently unable to identify the tone and main point of a passage needs to learn how to identify the tone and main point of a passage before they do anything else. Without that ability, all the strategy in the world might not get their score to budge a point. This is, by the way, a very common issue for kids who have been disappointed by major test-prep companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review, which deal with primarily with strategy and pretty much ignore the underlying skills.
3) Use the Official College Board Guide only
While some of the commercially produced guides may come close to the real thing on occasion, on many other occasions they just don't. This is particularly true for Writing; only a handful of the errors that show up on the actual test appear in most guides, and many errors that do not appear on the actual test do show up. In addition, the hard questions tend to be hard for the wrong reasons (this is particularly true for Barron's). The SAT may be tricky, but the answers on the real thing are not arbitrary. The same goes for the ACT; the commercial guides simply don't give an accurate picture of what's on the test.
As for reading, there are two major faults: first, many of the passages are simply too straightforward. Real SAT passages present arguments and count-arguments, not always in the most straightforward manner; "fake" ones tend to have too obvious a focus. The SAT is a reasoning test, not a literature test, and there needs to be a degree of subtlety in order to force students to employee a reasoning process.
Second, there's the copyright issue: real SAT and ACT passages are usually taken from recent non-fiction works (see my post entitled: Where do Critical Reading passages come from anyway? for more information). Most commercial guides don't bother -- or can't afford to -- obtain the rights to reprint these works and so use works whose copyrights have expired, i.e. works written more than 67 years ago. Such works often contain outdated language that, while difficult, is not difficult in precisely the same way as an excerpt from a book preface by, say, Henry Louis Gates. And it's the latter that's going to show up on the real thing. Students who have never encountered the kind of language that professional academics employ are prone to freaking out when they encounter it for the first time, and that needs to happen well before they take the test.
4) The answer is the answer because it's the answer
One of the most dangerous things the test-prep industry has done is to perpetuate the idea that correct answers on standardized tests are somehow unrelated to their questions. In other words, the answer is viewed as something that exists independent of the question itself, a confusing agglomeration of words that's only better than the other answers because the College Board or the ACT happens to say so. And when you conceive of the questions this way, any of the answer could be right. Yes, there are patterns (extreme answers tend to be wrong, right answers will never be offense to women, minorities, etc.), but there are too many exceptions for this to be a totally reliable technique.
Simply teaching students to eliminate answers will only get them so far; if you want to produce dramatic score increases, you need to teach them to answer questions for real. In other words, you need to work on their actual reasoning skills. And that means showing them how to go back to the text until they figure out the answer. Better that they should not have time to answer the last question than that they should miss four questions because they didn't work carefully enough. The Reading curves on the both the ACT and SAT are huge, and a student can miss five-seven questions and still pull a 700/30+.
It is therefore absolutely necessary that you impress upon your students is that the right answer is truly the only one that fully responds to the exact question being asked. This may sound obvious, but all too often the SAT is treated like a guessing game. When you're working through a problem and a student gets down to two answers, don't make them guess, make them go back to text and figure it out (if they have no idea and have to guess on the real thing, that's a different story).
One thing I always make sure of is that my students watch me work through questions: I never look at the answers before I've gone back to the reading, reasoned the whole thing out loud, and figured out more or less what I'm looking for. They need to see that process in action to get what it looks like. And usually when they watch me figure out the answer and then see that it really does show up in the choices, they start to see the logic behind the test. Some of them actually start to think it's pretty interesting.
5) Figure out how they work and tailor your approach
The first thing I do with a new student is to simply ask them work through a couple of sections and explain to me -- if they can -- why they're picking the answers they're picking. Doing so will give you immense insight into their skill-level and thought process (or lack thereof). You need to be prepared to work with them at their actual level, not where they -- or their parents -- think they should be. Try not to make assumptions about what they do and don't know, and don't ever berate them for not knowing something you think should be obvious.
In addition, remember that there is no catch-all technique. A particular strategy that works well for one student might backfire with another. Not every kid has the skills to pay attention to what they're reading and look out for transitions simultaneously. Some do far better when they can simply read and absorb, then worry about figuring out the important parts when they go back while they're answering the questions.
The most important thing is that students develop techniques they're comfortable with and use them to feel in control when they take the test.
6) Don't waste time drilling vocabulary
Memorizing words is something they can do on their own; what they usually can't do on their own is figure out how to work through a problem when they don't know the words. It's your job to help them figure that out (this is where emphasizing word relationships and roots comes in handy). Besides, you can only cover a limited number of words with a student, and there's no guarantee that any of them will actually show up. If they don't, you'll appear to have wasted their time.
7) Make them explain everything to you
If you spend too much time lecturing, your students will tune you out. Making them explain their reasoning to you is a surefire way to make sure they stay engaged. It also forces them to examine their process really closely. If they can produce the correct answer on their own -- as opposed to just recognizing it -- they can't mess up. Don't let them get away with thinking that they'll always be able to identify the answer when they see it; trust me, they won't.
You also need to make sure they're getting questions correct for the right reasons. Sometimes they just get lucky, but that doesn't mean they'll get similar questions right in the future. If they don't truly understand the logic behind the question, they'll keep screwing the same things up.
And always, always make them justify their answers. I'm an inveterate watcher of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (it's the only way I can survive going on the treadmill at the gym), and so I always ask my students whether a particular choice is their final answer. It really unnerves them at first, but it ultimately teaches them to be confident. Kids are geniuses at second-guessing themselves on standardized tests and often score lower than they should because they over-think things and change right answers to wrong ones. They need to get used to working carefully, figuring out the answer, and then trusting that it's correct.
8) Make them write everything down
They'll probably groan about it endlessly, but making them write down each rule or step of a question will keep them focused and make them far less likely to forget how to do similar problems in the future.
9) Make it clear that it's safe for them to get things wrong during tutoring
Some kids are under a truly unbelievable amount of pressure to achieve, and they need to know that you won't get mad if they get a question wrong when they're with you. You need to tell them point-blank that it doesn't matter whether they screw up at first. They have to figure out the process before they worry about the results. That comes later.
10) Don't worry about time issues for a while
Unless a student has huge, major time issues, let them master the necessary skills first and get comfortable working through things fully. They can worry about timing when it gets closer to the test. I've always separated the issues like this, and none of my students has ever had a major time problem on the real thing.
11) Discourage them from taking the test until they're truly ready
"But all my friends are taking it in March" is not a good reason to take the SAT or the ACT. For my long-term students, my general rule is that they can't take the real thing until they've already scored in the range they want to score in on a full-length, timed, College Board test. Scores do not usually miraculously shoot up 100 points on the real thing, regardless of what a 16 year-old wants to believe. If that means that they have to wait until June, so be it.
The other reason is that kids who keep taking the test and not scoring well tend to develop a defeatist attitude, the "I just can't do well on this stupid test" syndrome. The more time they've spent reinforcing that attitude, the harder it is to get them to trust themselves. The ones who wait, work calmly and slowly, and take the test when they're ready get it over with in one or two shots and never develop psychological barriers.
So questions? Comments? Please let me know. I'd love to hear from you.
