All perfect reading scorers do this
By: Mike McGibbon
I’ve been teaching close to 20 years at this point, and I’ve noticed something about perfect reading scorers. Yes, they like to read, and they read quickly, and they have good vocabularies...but they also do something a lot of other readers don’t. They all make what I’d call “decision notes”.
Keep in mind, these readers REALLY do not want to get questions wrong. If I offered them a million dollars as a reward for getting everything right, it would have no positive effect on their performance. They are already doing absolutely every little thing on every question. This includes:
1. Going back to find the exact phrase in the passage that has the answer.
2. Having a good idea of what the answer is before looking at the choices.
3. Finding something specifically wrong with the answers they aren’t picking.
You can almost see their thinking in their notes:
You can see confidence in the notes to #1 – the first answer looked good, something was off about the second, and there was something specifically wrong with the last two. There was no doubt about 6 and 9 (probably already had something similar in mind). But #3 was a potential wrong answer: only one choice is ruled out and D has a squiggly next to it. Question 10 was also tough – the first three are ruled out but maybe J sounded weird somehow.
Why are these notes important? Three reasons: 1) They demonstrate focus on individual tasks. Finding specific info in the passage or specific flaws with answers is very different from just ‘picking the one that sounds right’. 2) They make it much easier to use your extra time. With notes like these, you know exactly where to go (question 3) and what to do (read lines 25-31, look for something that matches C or D). 3) Practicing this way makes you improve more quickly. You can pinpoint exactly where you went wrong with notes like these. Did you not understand the passage? Were you unable to find the evidence that ruled out an answer? Knowing your exact errors helps you decide what to practice in the future.
Every note-taking system is different. You might put stars next to questions, circle whole questions, underline key phrases in the questions. Any style is fine – the key is to focus on the specific details that make an answer right or wrong, and make notes when you do (or don't) find them.
Doing every question from every test every day is obviously not possible. But it’s also not necessary. Here’s what you do…
Further Reading
Your scores can still go up in the week before the test...but improvement is going to come from two main areas: content mastery and performance optimization. You need exercises that help you remember all the stuff you’ve learned while simulating the pressure of a real test.,SAT Writing and Language Exercises
This section is all about content mastery. The same stuff shows up over and over. If you redo your missed problems you’ll recognize 95+% of the questions on your real test.,Exercise: Make a super passage – 15 missed questions from previous tests. Give yourself 12 minutes. Set a target based on the score you want (35+ would be 14/15). If you don’t meet the target, do another one. Make sure you answer the questions on blank copies.,SAT Math Exercises
,Exercise 1: Get 15 missed questions. Give yourself 15 minutes to redo them on blank copies. Set a goal. If you don’t meet the goal, go again with 15 new ones.,Exercise 2: Use the Score Predictor on Mathchops. It covers the full ranges of difficulty and problem types and it’s included in all accounts (free and paid). It usually takes about 10 minutes. If you meet your goal, you’re done. If not, play again.,SAT Reading Exercises
,Exercise 1: Find a test you haven’t taken or one you did badly on. Give yourself 13 minutes to complete it. Set a goal. If you meet it, you’re done. If not, do another one.,Exercise 2: If you have trouble with paired questions on the SAT reading section, try this method on old tests: 1) Read the first question. 2) Come up with some idea of what the 'evidence' lines should be talking about. For example, if they ask about the scientific community's response to an experiment's results, you should be looking for something other scientists were saying after hearing about the experiment. 3) Skip the answers for the first question and go directly to the evidence answers in the second question. Sometimes only one of the sections has anything to do with the initial question. You can almost always narrow it to two. 4) Now return to the answer choices from the first question and see which one matches the evidence you pickec.Read More Your scores can still go up in the week before the test...but improvement is going to come from two main areas: content mastery and performance optimization. You need exercises that help you remember all the stuff you’ve learned while simulating the pressure of a real test.,ACT English Exercises
This section is all about content mastery. The same stuff shows up over and over. If you redo your missed problems you’ll recognize 95+% of the questions on your real test.,Exercise: Make a super passage – 15 missed questions from previous tests. Give yourself 9 minutes. Set a target based on the score you want (32+ would be 14/15). If you don’t meet the target, do another one. Make sure you answer the questions on blank copies.,ACT Math Exercises
,Exercise 1: Get 15 missed questions. Give yourself 15 minutes to redo them on blank copies. Set a goal. If you don’t meet the goal, go again with 15 new ones.,Exercise 2: Use the Score Predictor on Mathchops. It covers the full ranges of difficulty and problem types and it’s included in all accounts (free and paid). It usually takes about 10 minutes. If you meet your goal, you’re done. If not, play again.,ACT Reading Exercises
This section is all about technique and time management. Think of your time like it’s money – what tasks do you want to spend it on? Don’t forget to make decision notes.,Exercise: Find a test you haven’t taken or one you did badly on. Give yourself 8 minutes 45 seconds to complete it. Set a goal. If you meet it, you’re done. If not, do another one.,ACT Science Exercises
,Exercise 1: Find a passage from an old test, or one that went really poorly a while ago. Give yourself one minute less than the number of questions. If you get 100%, you’re done for the day. If not, do another one. Note that you should give yourself one minute per question for the ‘all-reading’ passage.,Exercise 2: Review the experiments from previous tests that confused you. Do a bit of googling if you haven’t learned about the underlying concepts. This should be untimed – the point is to feel comfortable if a similar experiment shows up on your test.Read More Official tests are very valuable – lots of things could have shown up on the real test but these are the things that actually did. You can save yourself a lot of work if you use these tests the right way. Here are a few tips: 1) Take them like real tests. Ideally, you’d take them all at once at 9am, but if this isn’t possible, at least make sure they are strictly timed. 2) Keep a spreadsheet with all of the questions you missed or guessed on. The titles of the columns should be “Test Form #”, “Section”, “Question #”, “redo 1”, etc. 3) Redo the questions you guessed on or missed on a blank copy. Do not look at your original work because it may give you hints. 4) For the hardest problems, seek out other problems that are like them. For example, if you have trouble finding quadratic roots, you may want to look for other quadratic root problems in your textbook or another standardized test. If you use the tests this way, you’ll create your own special flashcard set of the questions that are most likely to improve your score. Read More Sometimes the best students don’t get the best test scores. Here are the most common reasons I’ve noticed: ,1. They waste time by not moving on from hard questions. Good students are generally very persistent, which is a great quality in life and school. However, on a timed test you can’t be spending more than one minute on a problem – you’ll probably get it wrong anyway and it will take time away from questions you could get. You’re better off giving it one good chance, then answering something and moving on.,2. They put too much emphasis on studying obscure/difficult questions. For example, a student might miss a ‘line of best fit’ question and then go do 20 of them in a textbook. They actually would have been better off doing the last 20 questions in a practice test: that ‘line of best fit’ question only shows up once every 4 or 5 tests.,3. They focus on large concepts instead of individual problem types. Sometimes students will say, “I have trouble with parabolas – I’m going to do 100 parabola questions.” Again this is a great thing in life (and school) but it’s not a very efficient way to practice. The problem is that only very specific parabola questions actually show up on the test. So you’re studying a bunch of things that will not help you. It’s better to take a bunch of tests, look at the ones you miss, and *then* work on the questions by category. But you still only focus on the exact questions that you missed, or obviously related questions. Like if there’s a horizontal quadratic shift you should probably know about vertical quadratic shifts also, but you wouldn’t dive into the directrix or focus because it never shows up.Read More Some kids get time-and-a-half or double-time, based on a psychological evaluation. In order to get extra time, you have to go to a specialist and take a bunch of psychological tests. If the specialist thinks you have a learning disability, he'll put that in his evaluation, which you will use in your application for extra time. If you can get the extra time, you should. It is almost always a huge help. But please note that it is a lengthy (and expensive) process--you can't just decide the week before the test that you'd like extra time.Read More 