SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (62 page)

“
Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.”
- Jean Piaget

The SAT involves a lot of reading, so it poses special challenges for students who aren’t native speakers of American English. There are some things we can do to overcome these challenges to some extent.

Before we start worrying about building up your vocabulary or grammar knowledge, the most important thing—and the easiest—is to focus on eliminating mistakes in the questions that you can understand well enough to answer with confidence. It doesn’t make sense to try to learn a lot of big words if you haven’t reached a point where knowing the words actually helps you to answer a question. So master the strategies in this book as much as you can before you start trying to memorize stuff.

Most non-native speakers try to memorize the same lists of words that native speakers try to memorize—and it’s
just as big of a waste of time. Maybe even bigger.

Instead, focus on the kinds of words that come up often in the actual wording of the questions, rather than on words that seem exotic. For the Math section, learn words like “perimeter,” “vertex,” “quotient,” “median,” and so on. For Critical Reading, learn words like “undermine,” “assert,” “hypothesis,” “argument,” “preclude,” and “contradict”—the kinds of words that actually frame the questions themselves, rather than the words that might show up as answer choices on Sentence Completion questions.

These are the kinds of words that native speakers would normally have no problems with, but that non-native speakers may never have studied specifically. They are absolutely critical if we want to understand what the test is actually asking us—and, most importantly, they are words that you will definitely encounter over and over again as you practice and take the real test, which sets them apart from those 1,000-word lists that people memorize in the vain hope of improving their Sentence Completion performance significantly.

The best way to discover which parts of “testing” vocabulary need your attention is to mark particular words and phrases that you encounter in real practice questions—again, pay particular attention to the stems of the question rather than the answer choices, although “testing” vocabulary words can also appear in the answer choices. In general, you can distinguish “testing” vocabulary words from relatively useless vocabulary words because the “testing” words will tend to be re-used much more frequently within a given section than the kinds of exotic words that appear on commercial vocab lists. If you run into a word like “undermine” in 3 or 4 different
Critical Reading questions and don’t feel like you know what it means, then it’s probably a good idea to go online and look up the translation into your native language.

Notice that I’m specifically advising you to focus on learning
SAT grammar
and
SAT style
, which are guaranteed to differ from the kinds of grammar and style you learned when you studied English in school.

This is an area in which you can actually exceed a lot of native speakers if you put in a little effort, because most American students never study English grammar anymore—they often can’t recognize parts of speech in a sentence. But if you’re a non-native speaker who plans to take the SAT, there’s a very good chance you’ve studied English extensively, so it will probably be easier for you to understand what the SAT rewards and punishes. You’ll have to make small tweaks to your understanding of “textbook” English to answer every Writing question on the SAT, but, again, those should be easy enough to take care of if you’ve been studying English for a while.

(By the way, before you worry too much about SAT grammar and style, you should make sure that your target schools even care about the Writing score in the first place. Some schools don’t think that the Writing part of the SAT is very valuable, and they may not consider it in their admissions decisions. You can often find out whether a school cares about that part of the test by looking at the school’s web site, or by calling the office directly. Also be aware that the school may pay more attention to the Writing scores of non-native English speakers than they would to those of American students. But if you find out that your target schools don’t care about the Writing section, then of course there’s no real point in getting better at that part of the test.)

If the schools that you’re applying to are interested in the Writing score on the SAT, then you need to try to write the best essay you can. Remember that this is mostly a matter of length. But it’s also important to try to avoid too much awkward phrasing—a little bit of awkwardness doesn’t seem to hurt in most cases, but if you have a lot of it you increase the chance that an essay-grader will notice it and feel like he has to penalize your for it.

Also try to avoid using large words for their own sake. Remember that, in spite of the College Board’s essay rubric, the graders don’t care if your vocabulary is advanced. But if you use a lot of large words in a way that sounds forced and unnatural, you run the very real risk of making the grader think that your writing is awkward. So stick with the grammatical structures and the vocabulary that you’re sure of, and focus on getting the length and the organization of the essay right.

After you’ve made sure that you never miss a question when there’s no language barrier, and after you’ve beefed up your “testing” vocab, and after you’ve worked on the Writing section (assuming that your schools care about the Writing section) . . . only then would I
maybe
start trying to expand my vocabulary for Sentence Completion questions if I were you.

I know that it’s frustrating to look at a question and feel like the only reason you’re missing it is that it has words you don’t know, but you have to remember that memorizing words from a list is very unlikely to have a significant positive impact on that situation, for all the reasons that I mentioned when we talked about Sentence Completion questions. If your goal is to get the most points you possibly can—and that really should be your goal, of course—then you have to realize that you’ll probably have the easiest time picking up extra points by prioritizing things the way I’ve laid out here.

I hope you’ve found these tips useful. Remember that the SAT is a very unique test, but it’s also a very repetitive test, and even a very basic one in a lot of ways. By focusing on the issues I’ve pointed out above, you should hopefully be able to maximize your score without wasting your time on things that won’t really help you.

“The ‘paradox’
is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be.’”
- Richard Feynman

I’ve helped a lot of people with a lot of standardized tests, and in a lot of formats. This means I’ve also gotten a lot of questions from a very wide variety of test-takers. Most of the time those questions are very polite and sincere, but sometimes they’re downright accusatory—something along the lines of “You said I could use a certain strategy on this kind of question, but it didn’t work and my score went down. What are you, some kind of idiot?”

So I wanted to close this book with some words of advice and encouragement for students who are still struggling with some area of the SAT.

First, the advice: In literally every single instance that I can recall in which a student has become frustrated with an idea in this
Black Book, the underlying issue has always—ALWAYS—been that the student has overlooked or misunderstood at least one important detail.

Let me
say that again.

When you try to apply the ideas in this book to real SAT questions from the College Board and get frustrated by your inability to determine the correct answer reliably, the reason is
just about always that you’ve misread or misunderstood some important detail somewhere.

So when you’re having a hard time with a question, whether during practice or on the actual day of the test, you must always, always, always assume that you’ve made a mistake somewhere, and then set out to find and correct that mistake. You need to develop an instinctive faith in the standardization of the test, and an assumption that, if something has gone wrong, it’s gone wrong in your own head, and you can fix it.

Let me also say, very clearly, that all of us—myself included—will run into situations in which we are completely certain that the test has finally made a mistake. No matter how convinced we may be that this is the case, we must remember that we’re actually the ones who’ve made the mistake, and we must go back and re-evaluate our decisions until we can figure out where we went wrong.

The most common type of mistake that I see students make is the general mistake of misreading something. Sometimes a question asks us to compare Passage 1 to Passage 2, but we choose the answer that compares Passage 2 to Passage 1 instead. Sometimes the question asks for the area and we find the perimeter. Sometimes we miss the word “not” in a Sentence Completion question and choose the antonym of the correct answer. Sometimes we overlook the word “positive” in a math question that describes a set of numbers. And so on.

At other times, we may think we know something that actually turns out to be wrong. Yesterday I was talking to a student who incorrectly thought that “taciturn” meant “peaceful” (this is the kind of misunderstanding that often comes from memorizing lists of vocabulary words, by the way). Until a couple of months ago, I though “pied” meant something like “famous” or “skillful,” because of the story
The Pied Piper
. But it turns out that “pied” just refers to clothing that’s made out of lots of different pieces of cloth stitched together, and I was completely wrong. Or a student might incorrectly think that zero is a prime number. These kinds of mistakes are harder to figure out during the actual moment of taking the test, because it’s usually not possible to realize that something you believe isn’t actually correct until after you’ve chosen the wrong answer and found out it’s wrong.

No matter what the mistake, though, it ultimately comes down to some specific detail (or details) of the question that you have gotten wrong in some way. When you get stuck, your first instinct must always be to re-read the question (and the relevant part of the passage or diagram, if there is one), taking absolutely nothing for granted and expecting that you’ll find out something is different from what you previously supposed. If you re-read a few times and still can’t identify your mistake, you have to be ready for the possibility that some definition that you think you know (whether it’s a word like “taciturn” or a word like “prime”) might actually be wrong. And you have to consider skipping the question altogether.

Now that I’ve finished with the advice, let me offer some encouragement. I know how hard it is to stare at a question and feel defeated. I know the frustration you feel when you’re sure you’ve answered a question correctly and you find out later that you were wrong. And I know that it’s tempting, in those moments, to reject what you’ve learned here and assume that the SAT really is unbeatable, like everybody says.

But I’m here to tell you that those moments of frustration are also the moments that offer the most opportunity for progress. When you’ve wrestled with a question for a while and then you finally figure out how it works and where you went wrong, you learn a tremendous lesson about the test, and about how you’ve been approaching it.
And your score improves.

When you truly figure out a challenging question, you learn something that you’ll be able to apply on future questions, because the SAT is standardized. You also develop a stronger trust in the design of the test, which will help you in the future. More importantly, though, you can learn something about your own problem-solving process, because you can start to figure out what parts of the question kept you from understanding it correctly in the first place, and you can start to reflect on the process you used to uncover and correct that mistake, so that you can make that process much smoother in the future.

With the SAT, as with most areas of life, we make the most progress when we’re confronted with a difficult situation that we eventually overcome. Good luck!

I’ve enjoyed sharing my SAT strategies with you, and I hope you’ve enjoyed learning how to beat the test, and that you’re seeing good results with your practice sessions. It means a lot to me that so many students over the years have trusted me to help them at such an important time in their lives.

If
this book has helped you understand the SAT better, I would really appreciate it if you could tell your friends about it, or even go on Amazon and leave an honest review. Here’s the link to this book’s Amazon page, if you’d like to do that: [INSERT LINK]

The multiple-choice questions on the SAT Writing section test a surprisingly limited number of concepts over and over again, and these concepts can be learned pretty quickly. Still, many SAT-takers are intimidated by these questions because very few of them have ever studied grammar, usage, or writing style in school.

Before we can talk about the hidden rules and patterns of the SAT Writing Section—before we can talk about real strategy, in other words—we have to lay down some basic ideas that will form the foundation for a successful approach to this part of the SAT.

Even if you think you have a good grasp of grammar and usage, you should probably read through this section at least twice. It will only take a few minutes, and you might find that you were misinformed about something.

The grammar principles we’re about to discuss are NOT necessarily the same as what you might have learned in school! It’s only enough information to get you through every real SAT Writing question. If something seems a little strange at first, just go with it—you’ll see that this simplified approach allows you to prepare quickly and easily.

The concepts you need to know for the SAT Writing section can be divided into two main groups: underlying grammatical ideas that do NOT appear on the test, and the higher-level concepts built on those ideas.

For this discussion, we’ll start with the underlying ideas and move on to the higher-level concepts quickly. (I would much rather skip the underlying ideas altogether, since they don’t actually appear on the SAT, but many of the higher-level concepts won’t make sense without them.)

These basic ideas explain the essential foundation of written English as it appears on the SAT writing section. You’ll probably find that you’re familiar with most of this material, but there’s a good chance you’ll find some things you didn’t know in here.

Written English has nouns, verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions, among other things. Knowing how to identify these parts of speech, and knowing how they interact with each other, will make it possible to understand the concepts that are tested on the SAT writing section.

Nouns are the first parts of speech that babies learn, because nouns are the things you can point to. A baby can point to its mother and say, “
mommy,” because the word
mommy
describes an actual, physical thing. The most basic nouns are things you can point at like a baby would.

Examples:

desk
,
computer
,
pillow
,
food
, and
airplane
are all nouns like this.

But there are other types of nouns as well
. Some nouns represent ideas, like
happiness
or
fatalism
. These nouns are things that you can’t point at. But don’t worry—you can usually recognize them by their endings.

Examples:

If a word ends in
-ness
,
-ism
,
-hood
,
-ology
, or anything similar, it’s probably a noun.

Nouns can be either singular or plural. The plural form of a noun is usually formed with the suffix
-s
or the suffix
-es
, but there are some special nouns that form their plurals differently.

Examples:

shoe, box,
and
mouse
are all singular nouns, and
shoes, boxes,
and
mice
are the plural forms of those nouns.

Pronouns are a special sub-set of nouns. A pronoun is a word that shows us we’re dealing with a noun we’ve already talked about. Usually, pronouns take the place of the nouns they refer to.

Examples:

I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, you, him, her, us, them, one, which,
and
that
are all pronouns. When we have a sentence like
Thomas wants to know why he has to do the dishes
, the
he
lets us know that we’re still talking about the same person. It would sound strange to say
Thomas wants to know why Thomas has to do the dishes
, so we use the pronoun
he
in place of the second
Thomas
.

On the SAT Writing Section, a pronoun must always be used in a way that clearly indicates which noun (or nouns) it replaces.

Example:

This is a good sentence on the SAT:

Amy and Elizabeth were playing cards with Billy when Amy became angry with him.

o
him is a pronoun that clearly refers to the noun Billy, which appears earlier in the sentence.

This is a bad sentence on the SAT:

*Amy and Elizabeth were playing cards with Billy when she became angry at him.

o
she is a pronoun that could refer either to the noun Amy or to the noun Elizabeth.

On the SAT Writing Section, you can use either
one
or
you
as a pronoun that refers to an unspecified person, but the use must be consistent within a sentence.

Examples:

These are okay sentences on the SAT:

One should take care to mind one’s manners.

You should take care to mind your manners.

o
One and you can both act as pronouns that refer generally to an unspecified person as long as they don’t appear in the same sentence together.

This is not an okay sentence on the SAT:

*One should take care to mind your manners.

o
One cannot be used interchangeably with you—the usage must be consistent for each sentence.

The common subject pronouns—pronoun forms which can appear as the subjects of verbs—are
I, you, he, she, it, we, they,
and
who
. These are the only pronoun forms that can be used as subjects, and, except for
you
, they can ONLY be used as subjects.

Examples:

This is a bad sentence on the SAT:

*He gave the present to she.

o
He is a correctly-used subject pronoun, and its verb is gave.

o
she is a subject pronoun that is NOT being used as the subject of any verb.

This is an acceptable sentence on the SAT:

He gave the present to her.

o
her is not a subject pronoun and is not the subject of a verb.

The SAT will often try to use subject pronouns where they don’t belong!

When a pronoun takes the place of a noun that indicates a person, it has to be a personal pronoun.

Examples:

This is a bad sentence on the SAT:

*I gave the report to the supervisor which asked me for it.

o
supervisor is a noun that indicates a person—supervisors are people.

o
which is not a personal pronoun, even though it refers to the personal noun supervisor.

This is a good sentence on the SAT:

I gave the report to the supervisor who asked me for it.

o
who is a personal pronoun that refers to the personal noun supervisor.

Verbs are the second-most basic class of words. A verb is an action. Verbs are things you can do—the word
do
is a verb itself. Here’s a test for identifying English verbs: if you can create a sentence that puts a word after word
cannot
, then that word can be a verb.

Examples:

jog
,
eat
,
initiate
, and
go
can all be verbs in English; you can test this by creating sentences like
Judy cannot go to the movies
, where the word
go
is able to appear after the word
cannot
.

A verb takes different forms, called “conjugations,” depending on the time period of the action the verb describes. For the purposes of the SAT, we only care about two aspects of a conjugation:

o
whether a verb-form is singular or plural (the verb’s “number”), and

o
whether a verb’s action takes place in the present, past, or future (the verb’s “tense”)

Like nouns, verbs have singular and plural forms. Plural forms of verbs often end in
–s
.

Examples:

In the sentence

Today we hike for the summit.

o
we is a plural pronoun that requires a plural verb, and hike is a plural verb-form.

In the sentence

Today Joe hikes for the summit.

o
Joe is a singular noun that requires a singular verb, and hikes is a singular verb-form.

In many cases, the singular and plural forms of a verb are identical.

Examples:

In the sentence

I like hiking.

o
Like is a singular verb-form that correctly agrees with the singular pronoun I.

In the sentence

We like hiking.

o
We is a plural pronoun correctly modified by the plural verb-form like.

A verb must always agree in number with the noun or nouns that it modifies.

Examples:

This is a correct sentence:

Monica and Alex enjoy the theater.

o
Monica and Alex are each singular nouns.

o
enjoy is a plural verb-form that modifies two nouns.

This sentence is incorrect:

*Monica and Alex enjoys the theater.

o
enjoys is a singular verb-form that might seem, at first, like it correctly modifies the noun Alex. But in this sentence it has to modify the phrase Monica and Alex, which consists of two singular nouns and requires a plural verb-form.

Mixing singular verbs with plural nouns, and plural nouns with singular verbs, is a common error on the SAT Writing Section
. Always check to see which noun a verb is supposed to agree with!

As we discussed before, verbs describe actions. These actions are either going on right now, already over, or about to happen later on. We have three basic tenses to describe when the action of a verb takes place: past, present, and future.

Examples:

In this sentence,

I love my grandmother.

o
love is a present-tense verb-form, which indicates that the action of loving my grandmother is going on right now.

In this sentence,

I will love my children very much when I have them.

o
will love is a future verb-form that indicates that the loving has not started yet.

In this sentence,

I loved my pet goldfish.

o
loved is a past-tense verb-form, indicating that the act of loving has already finished.

There are other verb-forms that we have to be able to recognize on the SAT Writing Section, as well. It isn’t necessary to know the names of these forms, but it is necessary to know whether they indicate action in the past or present. These verb-forms are the ones that use the “helping verbs”
to have
and
to be
.

For the purposes of the SAT Writing Section, all verb-forms that use any form of the helping verb
to have
indicate actions in the past.

Example:

In this sentence,

I had not improved my SAT score before I stopped guessing, but I have improved it since then.

o
had not improved indicates an action in the past, because had is a form of the helping verb to have.

o
stopped indicates an action in the past.

o
have improved indicates an action in the past, because have is a form of the helping verb to have.

For the purpose of the SAT Writing Section, all verb-forms that use a past-tense form of the verb
to be
indicate actions in the past.

Example: