Up Your Score (57 page)

Just when you thought it was safe
to go back into the testing hall . . .

One day, soon after his self-inauguration as Supreme Commander of the High School, the ETS woke up in his comfortable and slimy bed and realized that he was dissatisfied with the SAT. Apparently, his torturous questions didn’t always fool students. Scores were
much
higher than he wanted them to be. He felt very sad, as well as lugubrious, melancholic, despondent, downcast, doleful, woebegone, and disconsolate.

So, later that afternoon, he decided to pay a visit to one of his testing halls to see what the problem was. He actually overheard a student say, “Gee, this SAT really isn’t that difficult.” The Serpent felt his scales quiver in humiliation. Drastic action was necessary. The flaw in his SAT had to be discovered and corrected, and fast.

The Serpent decided to include among the answer choices the wrong answers a student would be most likely to come up with.

The ETS knew he had made the questions as mean and nasty as possible. But after weeks of rereading Slimy and Atrocious Torture and eavesdropping on students taking it, he realized what the matter was. Sometimes students would get math problems wrong and find that
their wrong answer
wasn’t one of the choices. So they tried the problem again and got it right the second time. At other times, when they couldn’t do one of the cruel math or critical reading questions, they would guess randomly and, out of sheer luck, get it right. This sort of thing just wouldn’t do. But how could he possibly correct this flaw?

Then the Serpent had a brilliant idea that was also sagacious, discerning, perspicacious, and acute. He decided to put, in the list of answer choices, the wrong answers that students would be most likely to come up with if they made an error in figuring out the question or if they had to guess. That way, if a student made a mistake or had to guess, the student would choose one of the Serpent’s wrong answers.

The ETS decided to call these tricky wrong answer choices Impostors. With this concept incorporated throughout the
SAT, students would once again live in fear. The Evil Testing Serpent chuckled hideously and its scales shone with proud energy because it knew that its delicious years of tyranny would continue . . . forever.

Okay, don’t get frightened. We didn’t mean to scare anybody. Actually, the plain truth is that the Evil Testing Serpent didn’t plan on
Up Your Score
. We’ve psyched out his system of Impostors and discovered that, if you use them properly, they actually make the SAT easier. In this section we illustrate several techniques that we have developed to recognize Impostors, to avoid them, and to trick the Serpent by using them to help you find the right answer.

Impostors are used in both the critical reading and math sections. They are the tempting answers that look right but aren’t.

For an example of a type of critical reading Impostor, look at this sentence completion question:

Although supporters hailed the Prime Minister as_____, others argued that he was too slow in recognizing problems.

(A) autocratic

(B) visionary

(C) perspicacious

(D) diplomatic

(E) pusillanimous

This is the seventh question out of ten in a subsection, one that some people would get right but many may get wrong. Notice that the Serpent put two Impostors in there for people who don’t know what the word
perspicacious
means. Since the sentence is talking about the Prime Minister, someone who doesn’t know
perspicacious
might be tempted to choose either choice (A) or (D), since they both have to do with politics. In this case, however, we’re talking about the Prime Minister’s personal qualities, and the word
although
clues us in to the fact that supporters think he is not “too slow in recognizing problems.” If you knew that
perspicacious
means
“perceptive,” you would have chosen (C). (Remember: This question was at the end of the section, so the obvious choices are wrong; for questions at the beginning of a section sometimes the obvious answer is right. For more on this, see Rule 2 on
page 285
).

Here’s another example, this time from a reading passage:

“He is often lauded for pursuing a philosophy that is progressive in spirit and yet practical in application.”

In line 15 (cited above), the word “spirit” means

(A) apparition

(B) psyche

(C) vigor

(D) disposition

(E) sentiment

To get this one right, you have to realize that the “spirit” of the philosophy is the essential disposition behind it. The correct answer is choice (D). But do you see how somebody who didn’t like the passage could be misled? The Serpent deliberately put three Impostors in there—choices (A), (B), and (E). Some students might look at the word
spirit
and immediately connect it to ghosts, character, or emotions. So the three Impostors try to lure people into answer choices that relate to the kind of “spirit” that’s in their heads.

In the math section, the ETS includes Impostors that are the answers students would get if they used the wrong method to solve a problem. The Serpent makes sure that if you screw up in the way he hopes you will, the wrong answer you get is one of the answer choices. For instance, the first question on one SAT math section reads:

If
x
+
y
= 2, then
x
+
y
– 4 = ?
(A) – 2 (B) 0 (C) 2 (D) 4 (E) 6

The correct answer is (A), but the Serpent made sure that (C) was one of the choices in case some airhead left the minus sign out of the answer. He also made sure that (E) was there just in case some pasta brain added the 4 instead of subtracting
it. He also made sure that (B) was there in case some goo-head decided that
x
and
y
were each equal to 2. So, in this example, the Impostors are (B), (C), and (E).

After the following dramatic interlude on the value of guessing in general, we will show you how to use Impostors to your advantage.

Cast

A sagacious guru who has read
Up Your Score

His naive disciple, who has not

Disciple:
To guess or not to guess? That is the question.

Guru:
Guess, my child, guess.

Disciple:
But they take off a fraction of a point for each wrong answer, whereas they don’t take off any points if I just leave it blank. So if I guess wrong, it’s going to hurt my score.

Guru:
Ah, silly child, how foolish you are. Even if you guess completely randomly, you should get a fifth of the questions correct just by the laws of chance (in the sections where there are five choices). So, the quarter of a point that the ETS takes off for each wrong answer is canceled out on the average by the number of lucky guesses you make.

Disciple:
I’m so confused. Give me an example.

Guru:
I would be honored. Imagine that there are 100 questions on the test and five answer choices for each question. If you guess randomly you should get 20 questions correct by the laws of chance. But then the cruel SAT graders take off a quarter of a point for each of the remaining 80 questions that you missed. In other words, they’ll subtract (¼) × 80, or 20, points from the number of correct answers that you have. You have 20 correct answers, so you have a final score of 20 – 20 = 0, which is exactly what you should get if you don’t know anything and were guessing randomly. It is also exactly what you would have gotten if you left everything blank. So, my child, you see that guessing didn’t hurt you.

Disciple:
Yeah, but it didn’t help me, either.

Guru:
Right you are. But you were guessing randomly. If you can make educated guesses, or eliminate even one of the answer choices, then the odds will be decidedly in your favor and guessing can significantly increase your score.

Disciple:
What about the grid-in questions in the math section? Should I guess there?

Guru:
That is a different situation, my child. There is no penalty for wrong answers on those questions. However, that does not mean that you should automatically guess on every one. On the other questions there are only four or five answer possibilities, but on the grid-ins there are around 14,000. Therefore, you will probably be wrong if you guess randomly, and you will have wasted valuable time filling in all those circles. On these questions, guess if you have the slightest idea of what the answer is. Then, if you have plenty of time at the end, go back and fill in the blank ones with a number between 1 and 10, where the answer’s most likely to be.

Disciple:
Are there any secrets to being a sagacious guesser like you?

Guru:
It’s a good thing you asked. I can recommend an invaluable book that has an incredible section about guessing. It’s called
Up Your Score
. It’s a masterpiece, really. Buy some copies for your friends and family.

So, ignoring that pathetic excuse for a play, just how valuable is this guessing stuff, anyway?

Incredibly valuable. We did two experiments on the old SAT to prove that guessing really works. First, we took the test by only looking at the answer choices without reading any of the questions. We got an average combined score of 660. Although that’s not going to get anyone into Harvard, it was 260 more points than would be expected from someone with no knowledge of the questions. In our second experiment, we had ten kids take the test and leave blank all the questions they couldn’t do. Next, we had them read this chapter and then guess on all the ones they had left blank. Their scores were increased by an average of 35 points, and they guessed correctly
on 40 percent of the questions that they had left blank.
Ay caramba!
Pretty good improvement for a simple application of the six basic guessing rules, which we’ll now discuss.

On the grid-ins there are around 14,000 possible answers, so if you guess randomly, you’ll probably be wrong.

Rule 1: One of these things is most like the others.

If you have no idea what the correct answer is, choose the one that looks the most like all the other answers. This works because the Evil Testing Serpent is going to make his Impostors look as much as possible like the correct answer. Use the Impostors to show you the path to the correct answer.

For example, if the answer choices are