Cracking the SSAT & ISEE - The Princeton Review 2019

A student’s introduction

WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS BOOK?

You’ve got a hefty amount of paper and information in your hands. How can you work through it thoroughly, without spending eight hours on it the Saturday before the test?

Plan ahead.

Before you start, go online and download the study guide. We’ve broken down the contents of this book into 12 study sessions and suggested a timeline for you to follow. Some of these sessions will take longer than others, depending on your strengths and weaknesses. If any of them takes more than two hours, take a break and try to finish the session the following day. You may want to do one, two, or three sessions a week, but we suggest you give yourself at least a day or two in between to absorb the information you’ve just learned. The one thing you should be doing every day is quizzing yourself on vocabulary and making new flash cards.

If You Want to Start Early

If you have more than ten weeks to prepare, start with vocabulary building and essay writing. These skills only improve with time.

We also caution against thinking that you can work through this book during summer vacation, put it aside in September, and be ready to take the test in December. If you want to start that early, work primarily on vocabulary until about 10 weeks before the test. Then you can start on techniques, and they’ll be fresh in your mind on the day of the test. If you’ve finished your preparation too soon and have nothing to practice on in the weeks before the test, you’re going to get rusty.

If you know you are significantly weaker in one of the subjects covered by the test, you should begin with that subject so you can practice it throughout your preparation.

At Each Session

At each practice session, make sure you have sharpened pencils, blank index cards, and a dictionary. Each chapter is interactive; to fully understand the techniques we present, you need to be ready to try them out.

Get Your Pencil Moving

You’ll get the most out of this book by trying out techniques as you read about them.

As you read each chapter, practice the techniques and do all the exercises. Check your answers in the Answer Key as you do each set of problems, and try to figure out what types of errors you made so you can correct them. Review all of the techniques that give you trouble.

As you begin each session, review the chapter you completed during the previous session before moving on to a new chapter.

The SSATB and the ERB consider their Score Reports proprietary information and we can’t reproduce them for our practice tests. You can get an idea of how you did by marking off how many you got right in the answer key after each test. Then go to your (free) Student Tools to get explanations. Keep the learning going!

When You Take a Practice Test

We recommend some specific times to take practice tests in the following session outlines. Here are some guidelines for taking these tests.

·  Time yourself strictly. Use a timer, watch, or stopwatch that will ring, and do not allow yourself to go over the allotted time for any section. If you try to do so on the real test, your scores will probably be canceled.

·  Take a practice test in one sitting, allowing yourself breaks of no more than two minutes between sections. You need to build up your endurance for the real test, and you also need an accurate picture of how you will do.

·  Always take a practice test using an answer sheet with bubbles to fill in, just as you will do for the real test. For the practice tests in this book, use the attached answer sheets. You need to be comfortable transferring answers to the separate sheet because you might end up skipping around a bit.

·  Thoroughly fill in each bubble you choose, and make no other marks in the answer area.

·  As you fill in the bubble for a question, check to be sure you are on the correct number on the answer sheet. If you fill in the wrong bubble on the answer sheet, it won’t matter if you’ve worked out the problem correctly in your test booklet. All that matters to the machine scoring your test is the No. 2 pencil mark.

The Day of the Exam

·  Wake up refreshed from at least eight hours of sleep the night before.

·  Eat a good breakfast.

·  Arrive at the test center about a half hour early.

·  Have with you all the necessary paperwork that shows you have registered for the test, four No. 2 pencils with erasers, and a working black pen. You may also want to take juice or water and a small snack like a granola bar. The test center may not allow you to take food or beverages into the room, but you can leave them in the hall, in case you have a chance to get them during a short break. Do not take a cell phone or any books, papers, or calculators.

·  Remind yourself that you do not have to work out every question on the test to get a good score. Don’t let yourself become rushed. Pace yourself.

And bring a sweater! You never know how cold the room might be.

GENERAL TEST-TAKING TECHNIQUES FOR THE SSAT & ISEE

Pacing

Most people believe that to do well on a test, it is important to answer every question. While this is true of most of the tests you take in school, it is not true of many standardized tests, including the SSAT and ISEE. On this test, it is very possible to score well without attempting all of the questions; in fact, many students can improve their scores by answering fewer questions.

On the ISEE, it is best to answer all questions because there is no guessing penalty.

“Wait a second. I can get a better score by attempting fewer questions?” Yes. On the SSAT you are penalized only for the questions you answer incorrectly, not for the questions you skip. Because all of the questions are worth the same amount of points, it’s just as good to answer a question you understand than waste time with one you don’t. So for the most part, you’ll give your attention to problems you think you can answer, and decide which questions are too thorny to waste time on. This test-taking approach is just as important to score improvement as your knowledge of vocabulary and math rules!

In general, all math and verbal questions on the SSAT and ISEE gradually increase in difficulty from first to last. (The one exception is the Reading section, where question difficulty is mixed.) This means that for most students, the longest and more complicated problems are at the end of each section. For this reason, all students should focus the majority of their attention on the questions they know they can answer. Why rush through these and make careless errors, when you could spend time and get all of them right? Attempt the ones you find more challenging last—if you have time.

Points are not deducted for wrong answers on the SSAT Elementary Level test. Thus, do not leave any answers blank. Even so, pace yourself wisely to increase your accuracy on questions you know or think you know the answers to. This is also true for all levels of the ISEE.

The reason that this approach to pacing can actually increase scores is that skipped questions gain you zero points, whereas each incorrect answer reduces your raw score by a quarter-point. Because your raw score will decrease only if you answer a question incorrectly, skipping is the best strategy for a problem that has you completely stumped. Ideally, you will either get a question right or skip it (with some exceptions when you can guess intelligently and aggressively).

Skipping will be a major tool mostly the questions you find most troublesome. Guessing will be part of the whole test, so let’s look at how guessing and skipping work together. Again, ISEE students should answer every question.

Guessing

When should you guess? Whenever you can eliminate even one wrong answer with certainty. Yes, really. We’ll get to why in a minute. Eliminate the wrong answers and you’ll have the right answer by Process of Elimination (we’ll explain more about this later). So eliminate the answers that are clearly wrong and guess! Be aggressive.

Over the course of the whole test, this strategy will increase your score. How? Well, let’s look again at how SSAT questions are scored, right answers are rewarded, and wrong answers are penalized.

Correct answers: +1 point

Wrong answers: — point

Blank answers: 0 points

Suppose we asked you to place a bet on five flips of a coin. There’s only one chance in five that it will come up heads, but if it does, you get a dollar. There’s a four in five chance of tails; when it’s tails, you pay us 25¢. Would you do it? Maybe yes, maybe no. If it came up heads once and tails four times, you’d get a dollar and then pay 25¢ four times, ending up with nothing. You wouldn’t lose money, but you wouldn’t win any, either. Similarly, there are five choices on every SSAT question, but only one right answer. So if you just guess randomly without eliminating anything first, you will be right about one time and wrong about four times for every five questions you do. That means that the one time you were right, you would get one full raw point (yay!), but you would lose a quarter-point four times (boo!). All of this would bring you right back to where you started.

1 — 4() = 0

So random guessing will pretty much keep your score flat. Here is where our guessing strategy comes in. What if, instead of a one-in-five chance of getting heads, the odds were one in four? This time, if four flips usually turned up one head ($1 for you) and three tails (pay out 75¢), you’d make a little money and come out on top. On an SSAT question, if you can eliminate one choice out of the five, you’re in the same situation. You now have only four possible answers, and you will be right about once for every three times you are wrong. Now the penalty for wrong answers will have less impact. If you narrow it down to three choices, you’ll get about one right for every two times you’re wrong. Good odds? You bet. That’s like making a dollar and losing 50¢. If you can do this throughout the test, you will gradually increase your score. That’s why it pays to spend time eliminating the wrong answers and then guessing aggressively.

1 — 3() =

Want to use what you’ve just learned to improve your score? You’ve come to the right place. Guessing well is one of the most important skills this book can teach you. Strategic guessing and skipping, as simple as they seem, are very powerful score-boosters on standardized tests like the SSAT. Now, let’s discuss one more major test-taking approach that should be a part of your game plan.

Process of Elimination

Here’s a question you will not see on the SSAT or ISEE, but which will show you how powerful Process of Elimination (POE) can be.

What is the capital of Malawi?

(A)New York

(B)Paris

(C)London

(D)Lilongwe

(E)Washington, D.C.

Should I Guess?

Random guessing will not improve your Upper or Middle Level SSAT score. Educated guessing, however, is always a good idea.

There are two ways to get this question right. First, you can know that the capital of Malawi is Lilongwe. If you do, good for you! The second is to know that the capital of Malawi is not New York, Paris, London, or Washington, D.C. You don’t get more points for knowing the right answer from the start, so one way is just as good as the other. Try to get in the habit of looking at a question and asking, “What are the wrong answers?” instead of “What is the right answer?”

By using POE this way, you will eliminate wrong answers and have fewer answers from which to choose. The result is that you will pick right answers more often. In the example above, you’re not even really guessing. You know that the other four answers are wrong (or three answers, if you’re taking the ISEE), and that’s as good as knowing the right answer. In fact, now you do know the capital of Malawi. That’s the great thing about guessing on a standardized test like the SSAT or ISEE—when you have trouble finding the correct answer, you can often eliminate the wrong ones and come out on top. Now let’s look at the same idea in practice in another problem.

Which of the following cities is the capital of Samoa?

(A)Vila

(B)Boston

(C)Apia

(D)Chicago

(E)Los Angeles

You may not know the right answer off the top of your head, but which cities are not the capital of Samoa? You probably know enough about the locations of (B), (D), and (E) to know that Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles are not the capital of Samoa.

So, what’s a good answer to this question? (A) or (C).

What’s the right answer? That is not the right question here. The better question is this: should I guess? And the answer is absolutely yes. Yes, yes, yes. You’ve done a great job of narrowing the answer down to just two choices. On any question where you’ve done this, you’ll have a fifty-fifty chance. In other words, on average you’ll get these questions right about half the time (+1 point) and wrong the other half (—point). Even though you’ll get some (about half) of these wrong, your score will go up overall, by about 1 point for every 3 questions, and that can make all the difference. Always use POE and guess aggressively. Remember that you should skip the question if you can’t eliminate anything at all.

A QUICK SUMMARY

These points about the SSAT and ISEE are important enough that we want to mention them again. Make sure you understand them before you go any farther in this book.

·  You do not have to answer every question on the test. Slow down!

·  You will not immediately know the correct answer to every question. Instead, look for wrong answers that you can eliminate.

·  Random guessing will not improve your score on the SSAT (although it might help with the ISEE). However, educated guessing, which means that you eliminate two or (better) three of the five choices, is a good thing and will improve your score. As a general rule of thumb, if you invest enough time to read and think about the answer to a question, you should be able to eliminate at least one choice and make a good guess!