SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (17 page)

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m fully in favor of having the largest vocabulary possible when it comes to real life. But the value of forced memorization is negligible at best when it comes to building a powerful vocabulary. And a powerful vocabulary isn’t as important on the SAT as most people think, anyway.

(By the way—not that you asked, but the way to develop an advanced vocabulary is to become genuinely interested in advanced stuff (politics, art, philosophy, history, whatever), so that you read about it and seek out other people who are also interested in it. If you do this for any period of time you’ll quickly learn all sorts of new words and phrases, and you won’t even notice it.) (Not that it’ll probably help on the SAT, though.)

After our thorough discussion of some of the major reasons why memorizing vocabulary isn’t the best way to go for most test-takers, you may be wondering how to approach Sentence Completion questions.

The answer is that you approach SAT Sentence Completion questions in much the same way that you would approach Passage-Based Reading questions: the correct answer to a Sentence Completion question will restate a concept from the sentence, just as the correct answer to a Passage-Based Reading question will restate a concept from the text.

So, if you happen to know what all the words in a particular Sentence Completion question mean, answering that question correctly is just a matter of reading carefully and paying attention to details.

But what if you don’t know what all the words mean?

Every single test-taker is going to run into at least one question on test day that involves a word he doesn’t know. Most of us will run into a handful of them. Some will run into even more. For these situations, we have backup strategies that can often (but not always) help us figure out how to answer the questions.

We’ll talk about those back-up strategies in just a moment, but, before we do, I want to lay out the proper way to prioritize all this stuff, from a preparation standpoint.

Now that we know that the entire Critical Reading section on the SAT basically rewards us for choosing answers that restate things directly from the page in front of us, we should focus on making sure that we never miss a question in which we know the meanings of every relevant word. This is basically just a matter of reading carefully, remembering how the test works, and paying attention to details.

So the first order of business, and the most important concern from here on out, is
this:
make sure you grab every possible point from the questions where you know all the relevant words!

After you get to a point where you can correctly answer any SAT Critical Reading qu
estion you come across when vocabulary isn’t a problem, your next priority should be to focus on improving Math and Writing as much as possible.

Finally, after you feel you’ve made all the progress you can make on the Math and Writing stuff, and after you’ve reached a point where you basically never miss a Critical Reading question when you know all the relevant words,
then, and
only
then, would I say it’s a good idea to devote serious consideration to the Sentence Completion questions with difficult words.

So let me reiterate
that, because this is important and most people get it very, very wrong. My list of priorities would be the following:

o
Basically perfecting Passage-Based Reading and Sentence Completion questions in which vocabulary is not a significant issue.

o
Just about anything SAT-related that doesn’t involve worrying about vocabulary (in other words, Math, Writing, et cetera).

o
Worrying about questions that involve difficult vocabulary words placed in positions that cannot be ignored or worked around.

In other words, the thing that many people consider to be the single most important SAT prep task—memorizing vocabulary words—is actually the thing that I would rank as the
single least important in the grand scheme of the test. I place it dead last in my list of SAT priorities because the payoff is relatively small (or even nonexistent) for the amount of effort that it requires. I can’t possibly over-emphasize how important it is to focus on perfecting the process of correctly answering the Critical Reading questions where you know the words before you start spending any time memorizing definitions that are unlikely to help you on test day anyway.

When my students hear me say that I don’t recommend memorizing vocabulary as a strategy for the SAT, they’re often quite surprised. Their surprise quickly turns to doubt, and sometimes even indignation. Sometimes they ask, “Well, if I’m not building my vocabulary, what am I supposed to do when I run into SAT words that I don’t know?”

And this is when I have to break it to them that there will
almost always be words you don’t know on the Critical Reading part of the SAT . . .
no matter how many words you try to memorize beforehand
.

Remember what we said earlier:

o
There are tons and tons of words the College Board can use.

o
They seem to use new ones all the time.

o
The lists people study only reflect the words that have appeared on past tests instead of accurately predicting words that will appear on future tests.

For all of these reasons, it’s impossible to avoid that scary feeling of running into unknown words on the SAT.

On test day, you’re going to run into words you don’t know. It’s going to happen, whether you memorize words or not. Count on it.

So we were going to need strategies for dealing with unknown
words in Sentence Completion questions no matter what.

Since you’ll need
backup strategies for dealing with unknown words anyway, my recommendation is that you just get really, really good at those backup strategies. So we’ll talk about those kinds of strategies in a little bit—but only if you promise me you understand that these strategies are the
least
important part of taking the SAT. Before you worry about this stuff, you should be worrying about picking up all the Critical Reading questions in which vocabulary is not an issue for you.

(You’ll notice that I repeat this idea of de-prioritizing vocabulary a lot. There’s a reason: I’ve tutored tons and tons of people, and many of them have deliberately ignored my advice about not trying to memorize
vocab words for the SAT. They even seem to do well on their practice tests, because most of the words they memorized were taken from the available practice tests. Then they go take the test officially and run into a lot of words they don’t know, and they have a hard time since they haven’t worked on any backup strategies for that situation. Do not be like these people. Take me seriously when I say that memorizing vocabulary should be your last priority, not your first one.)

The big secret of Sentence Completion questions is essentially identical to the big secret of the Passage-Based Reading questions: correct answer choices will restate ideas from the sentence.

In other words, we are not simply looking for words that make okay-sounding sentences when inserted in the blanks. On many questions, you will find more than one answer choice that makes a decent-sounding sentence. We want the only answer choice that specifically restates an idea from the sentence.

For some questions (often, but not always, the first
ones in a set), the way that the correct answer restates a part of the sentence is pretty clear. The grammar of these kinds of sentences is straightforward, and the correct answer choices for these kinds of questions involve fairly normal words.

For other questions, the words in the question may be fairly easy words for most test-takers, but the grammar of the sentence may be so complicated that some test-takers lose track of
its meaning and aren’t sure which ideas should be restated in the blanks.

Finally, there are other questions where the words are very challenging, and you might not really have much of an idea what the sentence or the words mean when you read the question for the first time. (As I’ve said many times by now, these types of questions are the ones that make people feel like they should memorize a lot of vocabulary. But that isn’t the best way to
handle them. We’ll get to that later.)

We said before that there are basically two kinds of Sentence Completion questions, from the College Board’s standpoint: questions with one blank, and questions with two blanks. B
ut it would also be true to say that, from a test-taker’s standpoint, there’s a more important way to divide up the Sentence Completion questions: there are questions where we know enough of the words to be sure which answer choice restates part of the sentence, and questions where we don’t know enough words to be sure.

This fairly simple process will let you answer Sentence Completion questions with total accuracy as long as you follow it faithfully
.

1.
Read the sentence and the answer choices with an open mind.
Many SAT-prep tutors, authors, and courses recommend “pre-forming” your answer, but I don’t like that advice. “Pre-forming” is exactly what it sounds like: you read the sentence without looking at the answer choices, decide what you think the answer should be on your own, and then look for that answer. The problem with this is that you might misread or misunderstand the sentence, and then talk yourself into a wrong answer. Instead, I prefer to read the sentence and the answer choices, and then think about both the sentence and the answer choices as part of a system. (To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the pre-forming approach. If you could execute that approach flawlessly, you would answer every single question correctly. In my experience as a tutor, the problem with pre-forming is that it makes it more likely that test-takers will make mistakes, and less likely that they’ll be able to catch those mistakes after they make them.) So read the sentence and the answer choices without trying to jump the gun.

2.
Look for an answer choice that restates the key elements of the sentence.

Again, just like with the Passage-Based Reading questions, the whole key to the Sentence-Completion questions is to find an answer choice that restates an idea in the text. If you know enough of the words in the sentence and you know the meaning of the correct answer choice, this part sh
ould be fairly straightforward. (If you don’t, then you’re reading the wrong thing right now—this is the process for situations where you know the words. We’ll talk about what to do when you don’t know enough of the words later on.)

3.
Make sure you’re absolutely certain that the answer choice you like restates an idea from the sentence.

This is where most test-takers make mistakes. Remember, again, that this whole section of the SAT is all about restating ideas that are on the page. In order for the correct answer to be valid, it must mean
exactly
what the phrase from the sentence means. A lot of students aren’t precise enough with this, though, and they end up losing points when they don’t need to. As one example, I had a student who recently chose the word “elaborate” to restate the word “instructive.” She explained that a lot of things that are instructive are also complicated, which is true; the problem is that the two words aren’t synonyms, even if many things are both instructive and elaborate. It’s possible to be instructive without being elaborate, and it’s possible to be elaborate without being instructive, so “elaborate” was the wrong answer to restate “instructive.” Note that this student absolutely knew the meanings of “elaborate” and “instructive,” and still talked herself into a wrong answer anyway because she ignored the unwritten rules of the test when she should have known better. This is the kind of thing you have to keep yourself from doing if you want to score high. It’s way more important than memorizing words—no matter how big your vocabulary is, you’ll run into trouble if you don’t force yourself to be very precise with the meanings of the words you know.

4.
Re-read the sentence, substituting the answer choice you like for the blank (or blanks).

This is a very important part of the process, and one that a lot of people overlook. The correct answer must fit exactly into the sentence, in a way that is grammatically acceptable. If it sounds awkward, it’s not right, and you’ve misread or misunderstood something somewhere along the way. If it’s a two-blank question, the words in the answer choices for both blanks have to fit exactly. If one fits great but the other one doesn’t, then the whole answer is wrong.

Like I said, the process is pretty straightforward if we really know enough of the words. Basically, as long as you read carefully and force yourself to be very precise when you think about what the words mean, you can’t go wrong.

The real difficulty can arise when we don’t know enough of the words to be sure of the correct answer right away. Let’s talk about some strategies we may find helpful in those situations.