xitammarg

Plus, as I'll discuss below, there are easier ways (in my opinion) to get around the SAT.

Another big-test-company anecdote: The assistant professor who taught my intro survey course in Linguistics told us that she used to teach for PR, and a student came to her and asked how he could improve his vocabulary in time for the SAT. She told him, in a moment of poor judgment, to go back in time to when he was four and start reading every day. She says PR let her go after this, which she regretted, but she still stood by the advice.

Before I get off this sub-topic, I want to point out that I think one hidden reason that some students might be scoring lower on the essays than they expected to is that their vocabularies aren't as good as they thought they were. Knowing, for example, that "arduous" roughly means "hard" might (I emphasize *might*) be enough to squeeze out an SC answer, but writing something like "I struggled over the arduous question" in an essay might (again, *might*) betray a lacking knowledge of proper English usage and result in a lower score.

The second problem with memorizing vocab is, as Pete and Xiggi both noted, that it's a very hit-or-miss proposition. If you don't know the words that appear on the test, then it's unlikely to matter what other words you *do* know, which means that the time you spent on memorizing vocab might have been used inefficiently. And that leads me to the third reason I don't like memorizing vocabulary . . .

No matter how much vocab you memorize, there will probably still be times when you come to a question and don't know one or two key words. When this happens, you need a backup strategy to attack the question. I give my students several backup strategies that can be combined to attack SC questions with unknown words, and tell them that spending time mastering these strategies is more efficient than memorizing vocabulary--if you'll need these strategies in any event, why not just get very good at them and then apply them whenever you don't know words? At least, that's my approach.

I should add that I never studied vocabulary to take the SAT or any other test, with the exception of vocabulary tests in language classes. I've never spent a minute teaching an SAT student vocabulary. I have received many emails from students saying that after reading my guide for the old SAT they were eventually able to answer almost all SAT analogies correctly without studying vocabulary, even when they didn't know what the words meant. I should also add that, in many cases, I have been wrong about what words mean on the SAT but still been able to answer questions featuring those words correctly.

And again, I'm not suggesting that a good vocabulary is a bad thing. It's a very good thing. But I don't think it plays as big a role in your SAT score as some seem to believe.

Of course, I recognize that Pete and Godot and many others run successful businesses teaching their students vocabulary to some degree. So there must be something to that approach too--I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying that I prefer another approach.


3. Length of preparation time

This is another area where I seem to disagree with Godot, Pete, and, to a lesser extent Xiggi. I don't think that very long or intensive preparation is always necessary or desirable, though I'm certainly not suggesting that it's NEVER called for. I think each student is in a unique situation with respect to the amount of time necessary for SAT preparation. I have known students who had to work fairly hard before things started "clicking" for them, and I've known two students who went up 120 points (old test) after sitting with me for an hour. Certainly a student should keep working until he's consistently getting the score he wants, but I don't think this necessarily has to translate to hours spent every night or every week on the SAT.

My own class is only 9 hours long, which sounds very short to a lot of people. I follow this class up with individual support afterwards, but most students don't ever get in touch with me after the class and still do well. The class is so short because my approach to the SAT is relatively simple. For example, I can usually teach students to answer CR questions in about half an hour; my general approach to math question can be taught in about an hour and a half. Of course, student questions and examples take up additional time, and no two classes are ever the same, but when an approach is relatively simple it doesn't take much time to teach it. Xiggi's approach, too, has been largely articulated in this thread, and certainly wouldn't take more than an hour to learn. (I'm talking about the approach to preparation itself; the actual preparation with the Xiggi method would take considerably longer, considering that each timed sample test will be more than one hour in duration.)

I teach the class in such a compressed time for a variety of reasons. One is that competitive high school students these days have pretty much zero free time, and it's usually easier for my students to clear off one Saturday than it is to show up a few hours a night for a few nights a week for a few weeks. Another reason is that I find one mega-dose of SAT prep often proves beneficial--it seems that, because they focus on the test for an entire day and go over it so thoroughly, when the day is finished they feel like they're "over it."

In my mind, successful SAT prep is more about figuring out the rules and patterns that inform the test's design; once you have a handle on these, the test becomes immeasurably easier. This goes for all standardized tests I've ever seen, by the way, though many (for graduate-level work or professional certification) also involve large amounts of material that has to be mastered as well. Some students figure out how to exploit the test's design on their own, some get it pretty quickly once you show them a few examples, and some need to work at it for a while before it become second-nature. For this reason, I don't feel that a longer course format is necessary, though, again, that's the model espoused by most test prep companies with apparent success, so I won't say that it's a "wrong" approach.


4. Self-studying versus professional help

This is a place where I agree wholeheartedly with Xiggi--in my opinion, self-studying can absolutely help any dedicated and motivated student get any score she wants. (By "self-studying" I mean following the Xiggi method as closely as possible.)

I disagree that qualified expert or professional help is always needed or, indeed, helpful. To respond to some of Godot's points, while expert/professional help can often be helpful, some levels of performance require this help and some do not. If Tiger Woods were only trying to golf well enough to ace a standardized golfing test, I doubt he'd need a coach; he needs a coach, in my opinion, because he's trying to be the best golfer ever (or he was, at any rate), and he needs an external motivator to keep pushing him to improve himself. In addition, some pieces of advice may be popular while still being useless. I would never take the average doctor's advice on my diet; the standard advice you'd get these days is, if not demonstrably wrong, at least wholly at odds with the type of eating that has kept human beings alive and dominant for millennia, as well as with the diets of most athletes and centenarians. Of course, if I thought I might have appendicitis, I'd go to a doctor right away, because I do believe that any doctor knows a lot more about removing my appendix than I could ever teach myself in time. These are silly examples, but my point is simply this: professional advice may or may not be useful. Like Feynman said, the value of advice lies in its truth and applicability, not in its source. Being an expert or professional really only means that people pay you for your opinion; professionals are proven wrong just as often as everybody else is.

Now, of course, some students need to have a person stand over them and make them take a practice test, or need to be reminded to study every day at 5pm. Professional assistance might be called for in these cases, but that still doesn't change my conviction that a motivated student doesn't necessarily need any professional assistance.

This, of course, begs the question of why I would set myself up as a professional. The answer is simply that my SAT advice consists of the sort of patterns and rules of the test's design that I uncovered through my own "self-study" and analysis of the test. By using my materials, a student can save herself the time and trouble of figuring those things out by herself. This doesn't mean, of course, that, given enough time, she couldn't come to these observations on her own. She could. But I can probably save her a decent amount of time--or, at any rate, that's the goal.