The SAT Prep Black Book(22)
This is why there are so many people who do so well in advanced classes in high school but have a relatively hard time with the SAT: the SAT tests simpler stuff in a stranger way. It basically requires a totally different skill-set from high school or college. (You may be wondering why some students do well on both the SAT and school. These people are just good at both skill-sets. It’s a bit like being good at both football and wrestling: there’s enough of an overlap that some people are naturally good at both, but enough of a difference that many people struggle with one or the other. Or both.)
Now that you know the SAT’s big secret, the rest of this book—and the SAT itself—will probably make a lot more sense to you. This book is basically a road map to all the weird things the SAT does. It will teach you how to navigate the SAT’s bizarre design, and how to exploit the many weaknesses inherent in that design.
SAT Passage-Based Reading
“Education . . . has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
- G. M. Trevelyan
Overview and Important Reminders for SAT Passage-Based Reading
Students often tell me that Passage-Based Reading questions are their least favorite questions on the SAT. A lot of people think these questions are too subjective to be part of a standardized test—they think that questions about an author’s intentions can be answered in more than one way, so it’s unfair to write multiple-choice tests about them.
Fortunately, this isn’t the case. The answer to an SAT Passage-Based Reading question is every bit as clear and definite as the answer to an SAT Math question. In this section, I’ll show you how natural test-takers identify those answers.
But first, I want to say that again, because it’s really important. I’ll put it in caps, too. And center it, even:
THE ANSWER TO A READING QUESTION IS ALWAYS AS CLEAR AND DEFINITE AND
OBJECTIVELY PREDICTABLE AS THE ANSWER TO A MATH QUESTION.
If the reading questions required arbitrary interpretation, the SAT and PSAT would produce meaningless results, because there would be no objective basis for rewarding one answer choice and punishing the others. If the results from the SAT were meaningless, then colleges would stop using them. (For more on the role of standardized tests in the admissions process and the implications of that role for us test-takers, check out the article on the purpose of standardized testing at my blog, www.TestingIsEasy.com.)
You see, the main problem with SAT reading is that it requires you to look at a passage in a way that’s totally different from the approach you would use in an English class. In the typical English class, you’re rewarded for coming up with as many interpretations of a passage as you possibly can; every single interpretation that doesn’t directly contradict the reading is welcomed with open arms.
But that approach clearly won’t work for a multiple-choice question with only one correct answer. So on the SAT, you have to read everything as literally as you possibly can, without adding any of your own interpretation at all. (We’ll get into this in a lot more detail below.)
After taking my class, most of my students change their minds about Passage-Based Reading questions. Actually, they often end up thinking that the Passage-Based Reading questions are the easiest ones on the entire test, and I tend to agree with them.
The Big Secret Of SAT Passage-Based Reading
In order for the College Board to develop Passage-Based Reading questions that would function properly on a multiple-choice test, it had to overcome a pretty big problem: it needed a way to ask questions about literature that weren’t subjective, so that each question would only have one legitimate, objective answer.
So the College Board had to find a way to eliminate interpretation from the process of answering questions about a text. That way, they could write questions that would ask students to talk about a text while still using the multiple choice format in a valid, meaningful way.
If you think about it, there’s only way you can possibly talk about a text without interpreting it—and this one way of talking about a text is the big secret of the SAT Critical Reading section. It applies to both the Passage-Based Reading questions and the Sentence Completion questions, as we’ll see later on.
The only way to talk about a text without interpreting it is to restate it without changing the meaning. (I put that in italics because it’s really important.)
In other words, believe it or not, we’ll find that the correct answer to every single question on the Critical Reading section of the SAT is spelled out somewhere on the page.
Yes, really.
(At this point, if you’ve ever taken the SAT before, or ever had any kind of traditional SAT preparation, you’re probably shaking your head angrily and cursing me for lying to you about the test. But trust me on this: the correct answers to SAT Critical Reading questions always function by restating relevant ideas from the text, and the incorrect answers are always wrong because they fail to restate ideas from the text.)