Having been an SAT tutor for the better part of a decade, I have taught numberless dozens of students, and the one thing they have all had in common, almost without exception, is that they have hated the SAT Reading Comprehension section.
And why shouldn't they? The Reading Comprehension makes up the bulk of an already painful test. It consists of dull, leaden passages about things like obscure species of lunkfish, or the instruments of the Indonesian gamelan. Any trace of fun or humor has been ruthlessly erased. And then, after slogging through the godawful passage, the student is asked two pages' worth of questions, every one of which seems to feature five perfectly right answers, of which the student is supposed to pick the “most right.”
This last leads me to the first Thing Every Student Should Know About:
There is only ever ONE right answer.
Does this seem obvious? It is. And yet it is something every student needs to hear, and to be told strongly and explicitly. Or rather, they need to be told that there is always a clear, articulatable reason why four of those five answers are categorically wrong. When you look at a set of answer choices, you should think to yourself, “Boy, four of these answers are wrong, wrong, wrong.” Your task is to use your reading of the passage, a reading that should be so thorough that it results in a passage that is just covered in margin notes, not just to find the right answer, but also to systematically eliminate the wrong ones designed to seduce and destroy you.
Which brings me to the second Thing:
Write in the passage margins.
Write like crazy Details, names, dates, and above all main ideas of each paragraph. If it seems remotely important, write it down. Use shorthand. But the most important thing to write down, as clearly and completely as you can, is the full thesis of the passage—its main idea. It may seem like it wastes time by slowing down the reading process, but the truth it saves you time on the questions, because you don't have to waste time rereading as much. Moreover, it enables you to make accurate predictions of the answers, which is the best strategy for eliminating wrong answers: if they don't jibe with your prediction, they are almost certainly wrong.
And this brings me to my final Thing:
The answer is always in the passage. Always.
There is one simple way of separating pure sweet truth from diabolic fiction: of every answer choice, ask yourself, “is this in the passage?” Often, in tutoring sessions, a confused, uncertain student will make a half-hearted stab at an answer, and land wide of the mark. In such (frequent) moments, I invariably ask, “where is this in the passage?” And the answer, almost invariably is, “I can't find it.” The purpose of writing in the margins is to make it super-easy to locate details in the passage—and to make you much more certain about what isn't in the passage. If it's not there, it's not the answer—even if it is true in real life. Sometimes, students know more about the subject than the passage asks for. In these instance, all that matters is the same old question: “is it in the passage?” If not, it can't be the answer.
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