xitammarg

I've been following Xiggi's posts as well, and I'd also like to chime in.

Here's my background. I started out teaching the SAT and PSAT for Kaplan in college; I stopped pretty quickly as I discovered that I didn't agree with their methods. I've since written an SAT guide (for sale on the internet) that has been through a few versions in the last couple of years. I also have guides for the GRE and LSAT, and I'm working on guides for the GMAT and MAT. I occasionally teach one-day classes in my approach to the SAT, and I used to tutor students one-on-one in my approach. I don't really have time to train people live any more, so I don't teach or tutor in person as much as I used to. I do still tutor my online customers through email and instant messaging, though, so I'm still very in touch with the needs of high school students as they prepare for the SAT.

As I've noted in the other forums, my purpose is not to push my product here. But since we're having a discussion about the best way to approach preparation, and Xiggi asked for input from professionals, here I am.

Like Pete and Godot, I agree in large part with what Xiggi has written so far. His approach is simple and makes sense, and the underlying philosophy works in any situation where you have to prepare for something: you make the preparation as much like the real event as you can, introducing variations that will help you emphasize different skills you'll need (ie, taking tests open book versus closed, un-timed versus timed, et cetera). Then you just keep practicing, reviewing your mistakes, and refining things. You consider advice from those who have gone before you, accepting what works and rejecting what fails. If you do this, you really can't fail unless you give up. As I said, this approach works in preparation for anything--or, at least, it's worked for everything I've ever prepared before.

I do disagree with Pete and Godot on other points, most of which are minor, but as I've noted elsewhere, if another approach gets good results then I'm very hesitant to say it's "wrong;" I'd rather just illuminate the differences. I'll outline a couple of them now.

1. Why Kaplan is bad

I think most people who have worked with Kaplan and its ilk will agree with what Pete and Godot have said so far, which is that you could very well be wasting your money if you go with them. But Pete and Godot both seem to say (forgive me if I'm misreading) that the main problem with PR or K is that the quality of teaching varies widely from center to center. To me, that's only part of the problem; the much larger problem for me is that Kaplan's approach is fundamentally different from the approach that I used (unwittingly) in high school, and that almost every high-scorer I know has followed. So even if you had a great teacher *who taught exactly what Kaplan prescribed*, I think you'd still be at a disadvantage.

I don't want to get into too many specifics, but, among other things, when I taught for Kaplan I had to teach people the Kaplan guessing strategy, the Kaplan philosophy on order of difficulty, et cetera. These things were, as I said, totally at odds with how I had actually taken the test when I was in high school. I pointed this out to the manager of the center I worked at while I was still in training--I was ridiculously naive then, and thought he'd be able to do something about it--and he told me to get over it and stick to the K manual. I tried but couldn't, and ultimately I decided to stop working there.

One experience I had while teaching a PSAT class is instructive. In the class was a student who was re-taking the class because his first attempt hadn't been successful (which should tell you something); he had recently moved from somewhere else (can't remember where) and had taken the other class in his former hometown. We were working on identifying sentence errors. I was getting completely frustrated by the Kaplan explanation for a particular question--they explained the error, but they were leaving out that this type of error occurred with startling regularity. So I jumped "off-book" for a minute and explained that this sort of mistake occurred many times throughout the test, and showed them how to recognize it. The student who was taking the class for the second time looked up from his book and, totally interrupting me, said something like, "That's the first useful thing I've ever learned from Kaplan that I didn't already know." The other students seemed to be mostly in agreement with him. That was the last class I taught for Kaplan.


2. The idea of score-range-specific advice

One criticism that I often hear about my advice is similar to what was said about Xiggi's method--that it probably only works well for students in the low-to-average score ranges, and it probably isn't enough to close the gap to a perfect 800 in a section.

I can counter that assertion in two ways. The first is by providing plenty of examples of student improvement that has ranged all over the place. Like Xiggi, I've used my approach to help people from every scoring range. I get emails from students crediting my approach with helping them finally get above 1500 (on the old 1600 test) and finally helping them get over 1000 (again, on the old test). My younger brother used my advice to get a perfect SAT score; one of his friends took the same one-day class and went from an 1190 to a 1460.

But the second way to counter it is much stronger: SAT advice should empower the student to answer every single question that can appear on a real SAT, as simply and easily as possible. If an approach does this, then it can be useful and meaningful to anyone without a perfect score. The reason is simple--if you're not getting a perfect score, then there are flaws in your approach, and the closer you can come to an approach that correctly answers every SAT question, the higher your score will go. A complete approach doesn't need to be altered to suit an individual student. (I'm NOT saying that every student should be taught the same way--I'm saying that the fundamental approach can always be the same, though there are as many ways of leading a student to that fundamental approach as there are students.)

I think part of the reason that the Xiggi method and my method might not seem to be aimed at the higher-end student is that they are relatively simple. But, to paraphrase Bruce Lee, mastery of a subject runs to simplicity. The simplicity of an approach does not necessarily mean it's flawed.


3. Vocabulary

This is a big point of contention between me and most of the rest of the world, and I know that. But I still believe that pointed memorization of vocabulary for the SAT is, in many instances, a waste of a student's time and a source of more frustration than assistance. Please allow me to explain why.

First, I'm absolutely not saying that having a good vocabulary is something to be avoided. Every word you can learn to use properly is helpful, of course.

I'm only saying that, for SAT-purposes, trying to add words to a student's vocabulary with the expectations that (1)the student will remember them correctly, (2)the words will appear on the test when the student takes it, and (3)the student will be able to answer a question by resorting to the memorized definition is, in my experience, futile.

Here's why I think that:

First, my undergraduate degree was in Linguistics, and one of the things I was always interested in was vocabulary acquisition. No study has ever been done that suggests that deliberately memorizing advanced vocabulary words in a person's native language has any benefit. Further, anecdotal evidence suggests that this sort of approach to vocabulary only leads to misuse of the target words, if anything--witness the TV preacher who boasts of his "photogenic memory," or the Kaplan advice I read once about tackling " the most arduous vocabulary." (The preacher meant to say he had a photographic memory. Kaplan was correctly using the most basic meaning of the word "arduous," which is "hard," but few competent native speakers who know the word would pair it with "vocabulary;" "arduous" belongs with words like "task," "undertaking," "day," et cetera--more abstract words that seem to denote a thing with a beginning and an ending. Using "arduous" to describe a set of data, like a vocabulary, rings false to people who are familiar with the word.)

The best way to learn a word is, of course, to acquire it unintentionally. Ideally, students would use words like "indefatigable" (which, come to think of it, I don't ever remember seeing on the SAT, but you get the point) as readily as they used words like "chair." The most effective way to make this happen is to read constantly from high-quality sources, but I haven't found that most students can make significant changes this way in a period of months. A student who has been reading forever can acquire new vocabulary after seeing it only once in an article, because that part of her mind is very active and robust; a student who has read nothing but comic books and teen magazines from the time she was 9 will not have the same propensity, at least not as quickly.