SAT

Below is the link for the article that I introduced in the previous post and below that are the questions and commentary. Please don’t just read the commentary – try to answer the questions for yourself first!!!

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/false-memory-crime?intcid=mod-latest

1) How would you describe the author’s purpose and tone in the passage?

This is a pretty neutral passage where the author is presenting some interesting information, but the author is not really arguing for something. Most of what the author says is through the voice of the experts who he refers to, so that is why I would characterize the tone as fairly neutral, though the author clearly agrees with the position he is presenting and seems disturbed by the evidence (he states, “these are troubling findings.”)

I would probably say that the author’s purpose was to present some troubling findings on the nature of memory as it relates to false confessions. Again, I wouldn’t characterize the purpose as “argue” or anything more emotionally charged because the tone is fairly neutral and the author is not really expressing his opinion explicitly.

2) What kind of evidence does the author use to support his point?

The author refers to historical cases, psychological studies, and some quotations and opinions from psychologists and other experts. This is really the bulk of the article – most of it is devoted to illustrating how it has become increasingly apparent that people can create false memories or be misled into doing so.

3) What does the word malleability mean (in the last paragraph) and what clues does the surrounding context provide in terms of helping you guess the meaning if you didn’t know it?

This is very much like a vocab-in-context question that would appear on the SAT. On a real SAT version of the question, however, there would probably be more concrete contextual clues that would help you determine the meaning than we have here. So its hard in this case to land on an exact understanding of malleability just based on the passage, but there are a few clues. Obviously the author has a negative view of memory and since the author says, “evidence of the inaccuracy and malleability of human memory” we can infer for sure that it is negative like inaccuracy and also that it can’t mean inaccuracy exactly since that would be redundant. The other clue is that the author says that the evidence has compelled some state supreme courts to view eyewitness testimony as “inherently unreliable.” So we know that the inaccuracy and malleability of memory make testimony that is based on it “unreliable.” Malleable means shapeable or bendable (in the way that a soft metal can be shaped or bent) so although you probably couldn’t arrive at that exact definition based on the context, you can get somewhere close.

4) In the last paragraph the cites some authors who question the accuracy of memory more generally. Do you think the author agrees with their assessment and why?

This is an important question because it gets at something that many readers don’t quite understand: if a passage presents other people’s views and says nothing to contradict them, we have to infer that the author probably agrees. In other words, sometimes a passage will be very neutral and the author will generally just be presenting some information or even the views of another expert. If the author doesn’t suggest that he disagrees then just by virtue of the fact that he is presenting the information unopposed allows us to infer that he agrees with that information. If he didn’t, he would have to say so.

So in the last paragraph of this article, the author really does go a bit further and begins to make a more general point about the unreliability of memory (even when false memories are not being implanted). Even though the author never says that he agrees with the experts that he is quoting in the paragraph, it is safe to infer that he does agree, because why else would he give their opinions without saying anything to oppose them?

Stay tuned for the next installment!!!

I am starting another series of posts aimed at helping students worry less about the SAT and ACT. Obviously these tests are important and obviously they are stressful, so I don’t mean to imply that you should not worry at all and some amount of worry is healthy (as a motivating force). But I tutor many students who worry excessively and really put undue and unproductive pressure on themselves. There are a number of reasons not to worry as much about the SAT and ACT so I want to spell out some of those factors in separate posts. Some of what follows here was covered in a previous post on superscoring, but I wanted to reframe this in the context of giving students some tangible reasons to worry less, so this is the first in a series of posts aimed specifically at that.

The first and perhaps most important consideration is that no single administration of the test needs to matter that much for a variety of reasons. Students tend to get fixated on the total score that they want to achieve, but schools really look at the section scores individually and although they have a sense for how high the total is, that is not their main concern. For example, lets say that you are applying for engineering programs. In that case your Math score is probably more important to schools than the Reading and Writing scores. In fact, a higher total score with a lower Math score is probably less advantageous than a slightly lower total score but higher Math score. If you believe that you just need to get a 2000, its probably more important to think about the individual sections and how they end up breaking down. For example, you could have a 2000 with a 600 Math, 700 Reading, and 700 Writing. But if you are applying for an engineering program, you would probably be better off with a 1950 with an 750 Math, 600 Reading, and 600 Writing. So it helps to not be fixated on the total score that you think you need but on the individual section scores.

Secondly and related to the above, many schools (including most private schools) will superscore the SAT, so you don’t need to have a great performance all around on test day. If you go in there and nail the Math section, but perform poorly on the Reading and Writing sections, all is not lost! For many of the schools that you apply to, that Math score is there to stay because even if it comes down on future tests, if the Reading and Writing scores come up they will just cherry-pick the highest section scores from the different tests and that will be your final score. In fact, many schools will never even see those lower scores because it is not likely the case that the admissions officers sit there with all of the score reports and superscore them by themselves. That is probably done by an administrative assistant beforehand or by a computer so in many cases the admissions committee will never even see those scores. There is an interesting blog by the Dean of Admissions at UVA that demonstrates how the process actually happens in their case – basically a computer automatically superscores the applicant’s scores so that although the admissions officer can see that different scores may have come from different test dates, they care neither about the number of times that you took the exam nor the lower scores that you got on those other tries!!! Please click on the above link if you would like to read more about it and see what their admissions officers actually see when they are evaluating applications.

This leads then to the next reason that you shouldn’t get too stressed about the outcome of a single exam: you can pretty much take the SAT as often as you want!!! There are some people who will disagree with this and say that you should take it a maximum of 3 times, but given that many schools will not even see all of the times that you took it and that a computer or administrative assistant will essentially provide the admissions officers with the highest scores, there is no reason to worry about how many times you take it or about how you perform on any single test. Although I am no expert when it comes to the admissions process itself, I do work with and have relationships with several admissions consultants who do have insider experience in the admissions process and with some of the students who we have been working with together, they have advised that the student take the SAT a 4th or even 5th time to try to improve at least one of the section scores. In these cases the admissions consultants (some with experience on admissions committees) have advised me that it would be to the student’s advantage to take the exam again and that the student should not worry about how many total times he or she will have taken the test.

If you accept that, then there really is much less pressure on any single exam. The way I think about is to use this basketball analogy. One of the most stressful and pressure-filled experiences is having to take a foul shot when the game is on the line: make the shot and your team wins, miss the shot and your team loses. You have only one chance. That is real pressure!!! Well, imagine if you were on the foul line and you could basically take as many shots as you wanted until you made it. Much less pressure!!! Obviously that is not a perfect analogy and you cannot take the SAT 20 times, but I have had students take it 5 times and get into great schools.

One more related thing to point out is that the SAT has score choice, so for most schools you can even suppress scores that you don’t want the schools to see. Some schools ask that you send all scores, but this does not mean that they will look at all of the results and hold the lower scores against you. In many cases they want all of the scores so that they can do what they want with the scores and superscore in the way that they wish. In other words, some students may not send a particular score because of a very low section score, thus preventing the college from using a potentially high section score that occurred on the same exam, and some colleges want to prevent you from doing that. If schools have all the scores, they can do with them as they wish. If you are interested in knowing what the policies are at a particular school, see this College Board document that lists the policies for every school that accepts the SAT (and again remember that “All Scores” does not mean that they will not superscore).

So there are a couple of important takeaways here. First, stop obsessing over the total score that you want or think you need. Think instead about the sections as separate entities and realize that it is unlikely that you will achieve your best section results on a single test and almost certainly not on the first try. In some cases you a lower total score with the right breakdown on the sections scores might be superior to a higher total score. Realize too that there are many opportunities to take the test and no single experience is going to make or break it for you – there are lots of do-overs on the SAT!!! You can retake the test many times and you can even usually suppress unsatisfactory scores. So there really are reasons to not worry as much and not put as much pressure on yourself and this is just the beginning. In the coming weeks I will follow this with additional posts that lay out even more reasons not to worry!

Continuing with my posts aimed at helping students read more critically both on the SAT and beyond, I wanted to address the concept of reading actively. Reading critically is a skill that requires a lot of practice and there are a lot of subtleties to it. It is definitely not something that comes overnight and even though this post is going to get into the issue of reading actively, that skill is too difficult to really do justice to in a single blog post. I would like to describe some of the aspects of reading actively, but this post will not by itself teach you how to read actively. I will write future posts that build on this one and that give more guidance on how to read actively and critically.

First lets describe reading passively. When you read a book for enjoyment, say a Harry Potter book or something like that, you are probably reading passively. You just sit there and read the words and let the book do all the work – you just kind of sit back and enjoy. When you read actively you take an active role in the process – you are generally searching for answers as you read and asking questions such as “why did the author write that” or “what do I expect the purpose of the next paragraph to be?”

A key element in all of this is having an awareness of the author who is behind all of the writing. I was recently tutoring someone and when I explained to her that the passages on the SAT all came from somewhere and that they were not created just for the SAT she was shocked. She had no idea that there were real authors who cared about all of these topics and who actually chose to write about them for a reason. When you read actively, one of the first things that you need to focus on is, “why did the author write this passage?” The SAT will often ask you that directly on many of the passages and even if it doesn’t the answer to that question will be relevant to many of the questions they ask.

Another key awareness that many students lack when they first start working on SAT Critical Reading sections is that most of the passages are non-fiction. The SAT usually has 1 fiction passage and then all of the rest of the passages are non-fiction. This is important because although reading actively and pondering the author’s purpose is important on SAT fiction passages, it is far more important on the non-fiction ones since again these author’s actually chose to write about something that exists in the real world (whether it is about astronomy, gender studies, psychology, or whatever) and they did so for a reason. Whether they wanted to debunk a theory, describe a phenomenon, challenge conventional wisdom, or achieve some other purpose, they chose to write about the topic, they care about it, and they have something that they think is important to say.

There is one more thing to note that makes focusing on the author and his or her intention very difficult on the SAT: often the passages are themselves talking about other people, sometimes authors! This can get very confusing because your focus needs to be on the author who is writing the passage, not the person or perhaps author who is the subject of the passage. So if the author of the passage describes J. R. R. Tolkien as a riveting author, you must view that not as a statement of fact about Tolkien but as an expression of the author’s opinion (the author of the passage, not Tolkien!). It can definitely get confusing!

Again I am not aiming to give this a full treatment here, but one of the basic problems that people have when they read on the SAT (and elsewhere) is they read it as though they are reading a textbook where the goal is generally to convey facts to the reader. On SAT passages and in a lot of the reading that you will do in college the reading is very different. You need to focus less on facts and information that is contained in the writing and more on the motivations of the person who did the writing. This means a greater focus on the big picture, the author’s purpose, and on the purpose of the smaller elements of the passage (and remember that the all of the smaller elements of the passage serve to achieve the larger aim that the author set for himself or herself). There will be future posts that build on this discussion, but for now try to be aware when you are reading SAT passages, especially the non-fiction ones (which means almost every passage on the SAT), that there is an author who sat down to write that particular passage for a reason and that your main goal is not to learn the information that is being conveyed but to understand what the author’s intention and overall purpose was in writing the passage.