Blog

Below is the link to the next article in the installment. This one is pretty hard in my opinion, but it is also pretty short so it should make for a fairly quick exercise. Happy reading!!!

http://www.historytoday.com/fern-riddell/curiouser-and-curiouser-case-lewis-carroll

1) What is the author’s purpose in the passage?

2) What can we infer about the opinion that Karoline Leach and Jenny Wolf have of Carroll’s relationship with children?

3) What does the author imply in her statement about Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst?

4) In context, what does the expression “shoe-horning” (in the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph) most probably mean?

5) In context, what does the word “scant” (last sentence of the article) mean?

6) What is the author implying by saying (in the last paragraph) that, “Popular culture is dangerously good at historical myth making”?

Answers and analysis will follow in the next post….

This is the second post in my series on “Reasons Not to Worry.” Again my motivation here is to try to reduce the level of stress for people since it is really heart-wrenching for me to see some of my students worry obsessively about the test. A little bit of worry is often healthy because it motivates you into action, but when that worry becomes all-consuming it is no longer productive and it makes me very sad to see this sort of thing happen with students.

So, in the previous “Reasons Not to Worry” post I wrote about the fact that “score totals” don’t matter as much as individual section scores and the fact that you can retake the SAT multiple times to try to get better section scores. In this post, I would like to continue that theme of not putting too much emphasis on any one test sitting by discussing two more related points.

First of all, the SAT is only one of the standardized test options – there is always the ACT. All schools now accept both the SAT and ACT without bias. It doesn’t matter which test you take. Here on the East coast most people still take the SAT, but a growing number of students opt for the ACT and a seemingly bigger number opt to take both. In fact, many of the students that I tutor who do very, very well on the SAT end up taking the ACT also, just to give themselves an opportunity to shine on a different exam.

There are 2 significant points to make about the ACT that are relevant to this discussion. First of all, if things are not going that well with the SAT, it might be that you are better off with the ACT, so again there is no reason to get overly stressed or overly upset about the SAT. A second important point is that if you consider that you could take the SAT 3 or 4 or even 5 times and that you could do the same with the ACT, you could theoretically have upwards of 10 chances to shine on these college entrance examinations. To some people that would sound like a nightmare scenario and I don’t mean to imply that that would be ideal – obviously most people want to be done with the SAT/ACT as quickly as possible. I only mean to suggest that one need not get so stressed about how the test is going to go because most students take these exams multiple times and really there is almost no limit to how many chances you have to perform well. I have had many students who have taken both exams 3 times and I have had some who have taken them more. Additionally I have had some students who didn’t really have succesful outings for the first 4 or 5 tries and then finally after taking the SAT 3 times and then the ACT 4 times (or something like that) finally nailed it and achieved the score that they were hoping for. Again the point is that no one sitting of the test matters that much and for many people it takes a handful of tries to either piece together a really good score (through superscoring) or achieve the kind of single test performance that they were looking for.

There is one more point to make. Increasingly schools are choosing not to require the SAT or ACT. Now, most schools still require them and I think that most of the top schools (the Harvards and Yales, etc.) will probably always require them, but there are some excellent schools out there that are now test optional. Some examples include Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Wake Forest and hundreds of others, including many top schools. If you would like to learn more, visit http://www.fairtest.org/ (this is one of the organizations that is spearheading the push to get colleges to demphasize or completely do away with standardized testing). If you want to go right to a list of the top schools that are “test optional” go to http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Schools-in-U.S.News-Top-Tiers.pdf.

So again, these are just some more reasons not to worry. Between the SAT and ACT there is almost no limit to how many times you can take the test in order to achieve a score that you are happy with. And if all else fails, there are many hundreds of schools, even top-ranked ones, that don’t even require any standardized tests at all. There are still more reasons not to get too upset or worried about the SAT/ACT, reasons that I will touch on in future posts, so stay tuned!

This is one of my favorite topics to broach with students in part because most students don’t understand the fundamental issue that I am going to discuss here and in part because it is such a crucial issue on the Critical Reading section of the SAT. Usually when I begin tutoring someone in Reading Comprehension I ask them what percent of the passages on the SAT are fiction? Usually I get an answer like 90% or 75% or something in that range, even from students who have already been preparing for the test for a long time. The actual answer is that there is usually only 1 fiction passage on the test and that everything else is non-fiction.

This is important for several reasons that I have alluded to in previous posts, but before I get to that I want to discuss how to determine whether a passage is fiction or non-fiction. Well it is always crucial to read the little blurb that precedes each passages since it gives you some context for what you are about to read. However, I am always a little surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be at this point) when my students don’t realize that the words “novel” and “short story” in the blurb indicate that the passage is a work of fiction. When I first started tutoring many years ago I took it for granted that students would know what those words implied, but I realized after some time that many students did not in fact know. Well let me state it directly, “novel” and “short story” both indicate that you are dealing with a work of fiction!

Again, this knowledge is important for several reasons.

First of all works of fiction require a slightly different approach than non-fiction passages. In both cases it is crucial to focus on the intention of the author and how his or her reveals that intention, but details are definitely more important on fiction passages as one often has to pick up on the description of the characters or the setting of the scene. And mood is more important on fiction passages than on non-fiction ones. It is honestly hard for me to imagine reading a SAT passage and NOT knowing beforehand whether it is fiction or non-fiction and yet the truth is that most test takers probably don’t even make the distinction!

The other thing to point out is that the fiction passages are often very hard and for many test takers they are the hardest passages on the test. From a time management and strategy perspective, therefore, sometimes it makes sense to skip the fiction passage when it appears and deal with the other passages that appear in that section first. Obviously, however, this strategy is predicated on the ability to actually indentify the fiction passage when it comes along.

Ultimately, although being able to determine which passage is the fiction passage is important, the bigger issue really is that most students believe that everything or nearly everything that appears on Reading Comprehension is actually fiction! This gets to the larger problem that I have written about in other posts that most students are not really exposed to the kind of non-fiction reading that appears on the SAT, which is of course why they have trouble recognizing it when they see it.

Nevertheless, once my students start to learn how to approach the non-fiction passages and learn too that there is usually only one fiction passage on the test, they sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two. So let me state it one more time: always read the blurb that appears before each passage and when you see the words “novel” or “short story” understand that you are about to read a fiction passage!!!