My
daughter Allison has always been a bad test taker on standardized tests -- she
never did well on her ERB’s. She
messed up on the SSAT and now on the PSAT. She’s so anxious about the SAT! I think her fear is making it worse. She just doesn’t get
it, I don’t get it and neither do her teachers. Ally gets “A’s” on all her class tests, but on the PSAT she
got a 520. What can she do? she’s
about to give up!
Barbara O., Parent
Barbara says that Ally “has always been a bad test
taker” just the way she might say “Ally has freckles,” as though test taking
ability were unchangeable. It’s
not. Ally has spent eleven
years in school learning to take tests, but she’s learned habits that are wrong
for standardized tests.
Class tests and SAT’s have quite different purposes,
content, methods, and design. The
purpose of her classroom test is to determine whether Ally knows the
vocabulary, facts, concepts, and skills related to the course, US History, for
example. The purpose of SAT’s is
sorting--separating students who are likely to succeed in college from those
who aren’t.
The content of Ally’s class is limited to US
history; the skills emphasized are low level: understanding, remembering, and
recognizing facts and ideas about US history. The SAT, however, emphasizes
high-level reasoning skills such as applying and inferring, analyzing and
synthesizing, evaluating and judging.
In US History, Ally learns in a variety of
ways. The teacher outlines “the
consequences of Reconstruction” on the board or facilitates a class
discussion. Ally takes notes. The textbook lists new terms and
provides italics, bolds, pictures and marginal comments. The teacher gives Ally
as many avenues to remember as possible.
Ally has had to pick up the skills for the SAT, however, on her own,
randomly, from various educational experiences; those SAT skills have not been
taught explicitly.
Ally’s class tests are designed as achievement
tests. Her teacher wants her to score well so the teacher has provided Ally
with many cues to help her remember. Maybe during the test Ally connects a
question to a drawing in her notes, the movie she saw, Gone with the Wind,
or a class debate with her best friend.
The SAT, however, is
created by strangers who want some people to score higher than others. The content is college level; the
reading passages are often unfamiliar in writing style and content. Cues to the answers are
intentionally removed; the questions themselves present logical challenges. All
Ally has for the SAT is the text in front of her.
So what should Ally do?
1.
Stop relying on her
“class-test” habits for the SAT. Ironically, those thinking habits which helped her on
class tests actually hurt her on the SAT.
2.
View the SAT as a truly
new intellectual venture. Her goals are quite different:
to answer questions, not to learn or to remember concepts. When she uses her prep book or
goes to her tutor, she should consciously focus on her own thought processes,
the critical thinking skills which will enable her to answer the questions.
3.
Remind herself, during the
actual SAT, not to let her nervousness cause her to revert to old class-test
habits. She should make up a ten-second speech
for each section to remind herself how to think before she answers the
questions in that section.
4.
Feel confident. She already knows most of
what she needs. The SAT is about
thinking skills, not about test tricks or content. It’s certainly useful to know when to guess and how to
recognize obvious false answers, but those “tricks” can be learned in twenty
minutes. Ally already knows most
of the English and math content necessary. In math and vocabulary, she may need to learn a little, but
very little. The test emphasizes
critical thinking more than facts or computation. She has undoubtedly used
those critical thinking skills in the past; she just needs to practice them
explicitly and consistently for the SAT.
5.
Ally should start small--pick one thinking skill
in English or math and practice it over and over. Finding the main idea and skimming the details quickly in
every reading passage, or example, would instantly improve her reading score;
25% of the questions relate to main idea.
6.
She should think of the
SAT as an opportunity. With her newly-honed
standardized test skills, she will also be prepared for the next set of standardized
tests: the GRE, the MCAT, or the LSAT.
Barbara
should help Ally stop thinking she’s a bad test
taker. Class
test grades just don’t necessarily correlate with standardized test grades:
they test different areas of learning.
However, for Ally, they could correlate in the future -- and they
should. After all, if she
can learn to make “A’s” on class tests, she can learn to score as well on the
SAT.
Best,
Joan Barickman, Tutor for Tests, Study Skills, and
Academic Class Work
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