Tutoring For All Ages

When I was in college, I was introduced to the 90-minute lecture. From my perspective as a student, any single lecture started out as usual, with me taking notes and thinking about the material in equal measures. But, by the end of the lecture, it was a struggle just to pay enough attention to take useful notes (which I hoped I’d be able to understand later).

Unless, that is, the professor was kind enough to give us a break in the middle of class. That made all the difference: I retained far more information from and did better in those classes. It was in those classes that I really experienced the importance of taking breaks.

One of my professors justified the break schedule by explaining that the human attention span was 45 minutes. (These days it seems like it’s much shorter.) That made us all feel better. It wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t stay focused — it was a physiological response, built into our brains.

Given that an adolescent brain has a hard time paying attention to anything for even 20 or 30 minutes straight, it seems silly that so many tests are so much longer than that. The SAT breaks its test up into sections no more than 25 minutes long, but even that is too long for a lot of students at that age (and that’s completely normal). And, what about other tests? How do you combat mental fatigue when you’re on the hour-long ACT math section, or when you’re taking an in-class final exam?

Simple: take your own breaks.

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Having just written an article discussing skipping strategies in terms of how different standardized tests are curved, it seems like a good time to go into more detail on a generalized strategy for skipping vs. guessing.

First things first: it’s important to note the difference between a wrong-answer penalty and a guessing penalty. Most students (and many tutors) use them interchangeably, but I think of them as being somewhat different.

The wrong-answer penalty is the penalty that a test assesses for each wrong answer you submit. The guessing penalty is the overall amount by which your score will drop if you employ a random-guessing strategy on the whole test.

Most tests that do have a wrong-answer penalty don’t have a guessing penalty. The test-makers arrange the wrong-answer penalty so that randomly guessing on the test will neither help you nor hurt you.

Here’s an illustration of what I mean (note that I’ve also discussed this on the Abacus podcast): (more…)

It’s every student’s nightmare: you’ve got a few minutes left in your test section, and you go to bubble in the answer to question 25, only to find that your answer to 24 is on the line for #25. Trying to squelch the rising feelings of panic, you scan your answer sheet only to find a blank line at question 11 — but you know you answered number 11. You’ve just mis-bubbled more than half your section.

So, what do you do? Start hysterically crying? Fake a fainting spell? Scream and throw a tantrum?

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Every year, we take on plenty of students who are about to take a particular standardized test for the first time. In our first lesson with a new Testing student, the “guessing question” usually comes up within the first 20 minutes. Most people have talked through the issue with their friends and/or teachers, but they still want to hear it from us.

So, for all our honorary students who just don’t happen to be in the same zip code as we are, we will try to answer the general question with a few tips: (more…)

What does it mean to get the right answer on a math question?

Some may give the quick answer and say that a right answer is one that earns you full credit. But that answer, while necessary, is not sufficient. For any given problem, there’s usually more than one way to get to the right answer, even if you’re not taking a multiple-choice test, where you know the right answer is staring back at you before you even start the question. There are textbook right answers, there are clever right answers, there are inefficient right answers, and there are lucky right answers. Of course you always want to get the answer right, but you want to do it in the best way possible.

It’s worth examining some of the different paths to the right answer:

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