Just got my daughters SSAT scores and am disappointed. She did prep for the tests, but not a ton. She did OK on Math (61%) but horribly on verbal & reading. 32 & 26…!! She said the passages were terrible in this test - old fashioned prose etc… She did pretty poorly on the synonyms, a bit better on analogies.
SO- she will be retaking the test - hopefully in January (school app deadline is 1/15 - hoping she can still take the Jan test and be in time. If not, she’d take it in December. What can we do to help improve her scores? Daily vocab? Buy the SSAT book (We’ve been using Petersons). Is there anything that can be done at this point to improve the reading score? As much as I’ve pushed and forced and chased her around for years, she is alas, not a ‘reader’ (like me). She does read - but generally doesn’t enjoy it. Are there tricks that can be learned to improve the reading score?
We will be working hard on the rest of her app (as that is most important) but would love responses here to focus on how to help us improve verbal and reading scores (I already know the drill on essays etc…)
Thanks for your help!
PS- I think most of the passages in the prep books were awful too… my son has been prepping for the new SAT and those passages are so much more clear and interesting. SSAT seems extremely outdated.
Yes. It is very possible to improve SSAT scores in 2.5 months’ time. Practice tests can be very helpful, especially ones with explanations for the correct answers. Also, simple vocabulary memorization can help with both the verbal and the reading. It is a lot easier to understand the passages when the reader doesn’t have to use context clues for multiple words in a sentence. Take one of the lists of 100 or 200 key words out of the prep book, make notecards and drill them.
Also, don’t know where she is looking, but, just in case those scores do not come up, you may want to include a wide range of schools across a wide geographical range in order to find the right spot for her.
I second @Early’s suggestion-- I know a girl who went from a very low score to a 90, and what she focused on was the vocab cards. She put them on a big key ring and carried them everywhere, going through them whenever she had free time. It really made a difference for her.
My daughter who is really an avid reader since she was very young did not do very well on the reading section. She said it was a wacky poem and nothing like what she had done in the prep tests. And on the prep tests (the SSAT one) she scored perfectly. This was her first time taking the test.
I also wonder if the January sitting is too late for the 1/15 deadline schools? Can anyone else comment?
@MAandMEmom some schools allow January testing (and some even later than Jan) but not all. This is something you need to check on a school-by-school basis. That is, if it not made explicitly clear on school website, call and ask AO.
I don’t doubt that some focused prep could bring up your daughter’s score. But you might want to encourage her to read some “old-fashioned prose.” She will have to be able to understand it in high school.
I’ll second what ProudLoomisDad said. If it’s not a financial hardship for you, I would strongly recommend some one-on-one tutoring. She can do as many practice tests as you want, but they’ll be of limited use in helping her develop strategies on how to do better. A tutor can help her learn how to decipher what type of information the question is really getting at, and some strategies for how to attack common types of questions (like analogies). Tutoring can also be a real boost to confidence, which I think makes a difference. My daughter’s story was like yours, only on the math side instead. She’s actually not bad at math, but she’s always perceived herself as not being a math kid and as not being a good test-taker. That was very much reflected in her math scores on practice tests, all of which were consistently low (like in the 30th percentile). I think she did about 4 or 5 tutoring sessions that focused on math (and 2 more that were more general test taking strategy sessions), and it improved her confidence and strategic thinking immensely. Probably the biggest difference was that the tutor was able to convince her that it was fine that there would be some math questions on the test that she wouldn’t know how to answer, but not to freak out, and to instead stay focused on getting the ones right that she did know how to do. We were amazed when she took the test for real that she was in the 70th percentile for the math section – WAY exceeded what I thought would happen.
I think that if you can afford it, a few sessions with a tutor could be helpful. There are strategies to standardized test-taking which don’t necessarily come naturally (for example, you’re not looking for the one correct answer, you’re trying to eliminate as many of the incorrect answers as possible). Additionally, vocab memorization is very helpful for all of the verbal sections. Your DD can find a good “SSAT Vocab” list on Quizlet, which has an app so it’s easy to study on the bus etc. AND, we took the January test and the timing was OK for every school that DD applied to, but we did call each one in advance just to be sure. A couple of them even said that February would have been fine too.
My daughter has been doing 25 words a day on vocabulary.com - using the words she doesn’t know from the “SSAT Prep” app on her iphone. I hope the app is accurately showing common SSAT words… I don’t think its an ‘official’ SSAT app. Has anyone else used this app and like it? Its here:
Vocabulary.com is EXCELLENT for learning the words. Great drills, repetition, testing etc…She adds the words to her ‘list’ and goes back and tests them on other days.
I feel like I can answer this best since I just took the test on the 17th, and I did fairly well on vocab and alright on reading.(96% and 80%) I had a similar problem with vocab where you just don’t know the words. I highly reccomend the Princeton review SSAT book. Also, for reading, I would suggest using those SAT reading books you have. They are much longer than the SSAT sections, but they’ll help you more in the end understanding what the passage is saying and finding the main idea faster. All in all, both those sections are quite hard, and the poems and archaic language can be brutal. On test day, your daughter just has to learn to guess a few of them. The last tip I have is to not answer questions that you don’t even know where to start. You lose a quarter point per wrong answer, and that can add up fast. If she gets 20 wrong on vocab, then they’ll subtract 24 points. Just remember, 1 question can be equal to 10% because this is on a bell curve, so going from 20% to 50% shouldn’t be too difficult.
I want to add by saying that Quizlet is a very useful app. It’s basically note cards without the hassle of carrying around a bulky stack of paper. But in addition to making your own quiz sets (there are games to help you memorize), you can also access vocabulary quiz sets that other people have made.
Don’t waste time on studying vocabulary, instead work on reading comprehension and becoming familiar with latin roots.
Also many of the excerpts from the reading section are “awful” on purpose to get an accurate sense of the students close reading ability. Make sure that your DD makes annotations as she reads and writes a summary of each paragraph in the margins.
I do think that studying vocab helps with reading comprehension (and when I say vocal, I’m including Latin/Greek roots). In addition, just practice annotating while you read, and get used to picking up on relevant points quickly while reading. This was just a matter of doing the reading comp sections in practice tests over and over, using numerous books.
The Official Guide from SSAT and other books mention that the reading questions focus on
Determining the main idea - what’s main idea? what is the best title?
Locating details - identify specific things in text, determining key terms
Drawing inferences -
Identifying tone or mood
It helps to identify each question by one of the above type, and expect the possible answer before looking at the answer choices and then cross out wrong answer choices, etc while doing many many practice tests.
Understanding what the tests ask for and how to answer them can be learned only by practice.
I just wanted to follow up on this thread. My daughter improved substantially in Verbal (increase of 44 % points to 76%) and also in Math (increased from 61% to 75%), however, there was no improvement in Reading. She actually did a little worse in reading (!). She was obviously extremely behind in vocabulary - and was overwhelmed during the first sitting. After doing a lot of vocab and practice tests, giving her a good result in verbal. The tricky reading passages continue to elude her, although she did much better in practice tests, but not on the real thing. We are sticking with this score and not retaking it again.
We are going to make sure she reads more over the next few years and work with her on comprehension as best we can, so we don’t have a repeat come SAT time in 3 years. Her literature and English grades always As- she is a good writer. I just don’t think she is good at interpreting the questions being asked and that those deeper tone and more nuanced questions. We should have had her do more practice reading questions during prep. She could not get past the boring passage themes and the poem was tough for her.
Yes, diverse reading will definitely help. But if the score is really low, that means she is missing basic big picture questions not just hard inference ones. I would try some diagnostic tests (just for yourself not for school) to see if what areas are the weakest and plan help. (Is it finding main idea? lacking vocabulary? drawing inference? - for SAT, rhetorical devices? grammar? ) maybe undiagnosed dyslexia? or does her mind wander off at the boring passages?
Some kids find the SAT/ACT passages so boring that they literally fall asleep while reading them. Unfortunately they need to get used to reading long boring passages for this huddle.
Some books (like Erica Meltzer) treat the reading test like math test. Divide and conquer each area. Locating correct answers are fomulaic in her approach. Reading questions can be formulaic and if you tackle them logically and follow rules, the scores do improve.
She has trouble with inference, tone, and boredom! She can’t get passed the boring topics and zones out after the first paragraph. We will work on this. My son just did PSAT and I found that the practice test passages for that were more interesting. I’m going to have her try that.
That said, she does fine in lit class, essays, and reading comp at school (A-, B+)… Perhaps because they dive deep in the discussions and the books are more interesting and she’s not good with the short boring passages.
