[01:12.030 --> 01:13.630]  Keep your energy high.
[01:14.730 --> 01:15.950]  Keep your energy high.
[01:16.130 --> 01:18.170]  We got a few more hours left on Sunday.
[01:18.310 --> 01:20.630]  This is the third day of A New HOPE.
[01:20.930 --> 01:23.170]  It's a new event at a new venue.
[01:23.370 --> 01:25.070]  Some of the same old, some of the new.
[01:25.230 --> 01:26.090]  It's been fantastic.
[01:26.430 --> 01:32.190]  If you have input, you have thoughts, email them to feedback at hope.net.
[01:32.330 --> 01:33.930]  We'd love to hear about your experience.
[01:34.730 --> 01:37.150]  The organizing committee does track this stuff.
[01:37.290 --> 01:41.390]  We also route it and share it with people that might need to know the good, the bad, the ugly.
[01:41.410 --> 01:43.050]  The suggestions, anything like that.
[01:43.290 --> 01:45.010]  So we do value all that input.
[01:45.710 --> 01:47.130]  Some people might have heard already.
[01:47.270 --> 01:48.430]  Just I'll repeat a little bit.
[01:48.530 --> 01:51.890]  We do have a change from the printed program schedule.
[01:51.890 --> 01:56.070]  If you're interested in the simulcast closing ceremonies, we're not going to do that here.
[01:56.070 --> 01:57.630]  We'll do it in room 206.
[01:57.730 --> 02:01.250]  That just helps, you know, focus on D'Angelo for the end of the day.
[02:01.410 --> 02:02.230]  So that's at 6 p.m.
[02:02.350 --> 02:03.210]  closing ceremonies.
[02:03.710 --> 02:12.570]  After the closing ceremonies, there's going to be a band, a salsa, Brazilian salsa band of some sort, start up right outside closing ceremonies.
[02:12.790 --> 02:16.830]  They'll do sort of a procession through the building, end up out front of D'Angelo building.
[02:16.950 --> 02:19.970]  It'll be a little bit of a, you know, street party type of atmosphere, I think.
[02:20.070 --> 02:20.950]  So that sounds pretty cool.
[02:21.090 --> 02:25.090]  So if you were thinking of leaving early, maybe you should consider changing your plans.
[02:25.210 --> 02:26.890]  Stick around a little bit longer.
[02:27.030 --> 02:38.670]  And if you want to stick around even longer, we really need and value volunteers, excuse me, volunteers for packing up and helping load those trucks, cleaning up the venue, things like that.
[02:38.670 --> 02:45.990]  And that work tends to be somewhat heavy, but there's also a lot of work that's not so heavy, like just, you know, cleaning up signs and straightening up a couple of things.
[02:46.150 --> 02:48.290]  So please do stick around if you can for cleanup.
[02:48.570 --> 02:50.730]  That usually goes all the way until midnight or so.
[02:51.510 --> 02:53.730]  And it doesn't require any particular skills.
[02:53.970 --> 02:58.090]  So that's partially in this room, but mostly it's up in D'Angelo.
[02:58.650 --> 03:03.990]  And last thing about that, volunteers, is we also have to load up a bunch of trucks tomorrow morning.
[03:03.990 --> 03:13.330]  So if you happen to still be on campus, right around 9 o'clock or so in the morning, or if you can come back to campus, sometime between 9 and 12 is when those trucks pick up.
[03:13.730 --> 03:15.710]  Otherwise, it's a hot day today again.
[03:15.850 --> 03:17.090]  So don't forget to drink.
[03:17.090 --> 03:22.890]  Just because you've done well on hydration all the way till now, it doesn't mean that, you know, that you're tanked up for Sunday.
[03:23.110 --> 03:24.690]  So a lot of, a lot of liquids.
[03:25.230 --> 03:26.070]  That's it from me.
[03:26.250 --> 03:28.830]  Let's turn it over to Rob Cohen and hear all about hacking.
[03:28.990 --> 03:29.610]  Yes, AT.
[03:29.810 --> 03:30.370]  Welcome, Rob.
[03:30.370 --> 03:30.450]  Rob.
[03:36.850 --> 03:37.690]  Thank you.
[03:38.530 --> 03:41.030]  I do see some younger people out there.
[03:41.190 --> 03:46.690]  So this isn't just a passing curiosity, maybe, and some practical applications.
[03:46.990 --> 03:52.110]  So I am Rob Cohen, and I will be talking about hacking the SAT.
[03:52.670 --> 03:52.950]  All right.
[03:54.990 --> 03:58.190]  Did I get unplugged from the...
[04:04.530 --> 04:05.810]  It was there, yeah.
[04:06.850 --> 04:09.510]  Maybe just unplug it and re-plug it?
[04:47.730 --> 04:48.530]  All right.
[04:49.570 --> 04:50.410]  Go figure.
[04:51.170 --> 04:53.990]  Suffering from technology at a conference full of techies.
[04:54.070 --> 04:54.470]  Here we go.
[04:54.650 --> 04:55.530]  Let's try this again.
[04:55.690 --> 04:58.470]  So yes, my name is Rob Cohen, hacking the SAT.
[04:58.690 --> 04:59.310]  Here we go.
[04:59.690 --> 05:15.230]  So I'll start with just who I am, what the meat of the talk will be about, kind of backdoor methods and exploiting various vulnerabilities that exist in multiple choice tests in general.
[05:15.410 --> 05:18.910]  I'll be using the SAT specifically to talk about that.
[05:19.430 --> 05:28.210]  And I'll provide some context for where the SAT is at regarding college admissions in the future.
[05:28.470 --> 05:32.290]  And if I can get through that in time, hopefully some questions from you guys.
[05:33.750 --> 05:35.830]  Without further ado, so who am I?
[05:35.950 --> 05:42.330]  My little disclaimer at the beginning here is I don't like these tests, okay?
[05:42.410 --> 05:43.630]  I didn't like them as a student.
[05:43.630 --> 05:45.010]  I don't like them as an educator.
[05:45.010 --> 05:56.050]  I feel there's not a perfect Venn diagram fit between a standardized test assessment and the knowledge that it's purporting to cover.
[05:56.950 --> 06:00.670]  So I'm not here to apologize or cheerlead for these tests in any way.
[06:00.810 --> 06:03.350]  So how did I get into this space in the first place?
[06:04.150 --> 06:19.830]  My path to education, I graduated from a small liberal arts school with a math and music degree and was interested in coming to New York City to pursue a possible career as a musician.
[06:19.830 --> 06:32.650]  and found an organization called Math for America that was seeking to recruit people with high-level knowledge of mathematics that weren't necessarily heading into the educational space to get them into public schools in New York City.
[06:33.430 --> 06:40.390]  I got my master's in math education at NYU through that program and taught at a music and arts school in Brooklyn.
[06:40.390 --> 06:53.170]  and realized that the dream of being some sort of non-rock star, because I play weird music, was getting further in the distance and I wanted to focus on that.
[06:53.290 --> 07:01.890]  So I left the classroom to focus on music and needed some way to keep the lights on other than, like I said, the esoteric music that wasn't doing that.
[07:01.890 --> 07:16.910]  So I started tutoring, and as a math tutor, I quickly found myself in a situation where I'd be working with a high school age student and the parents would like the work I was doing and say, hey, they're taking the SATs this fall, can you help with the math section of that?
[07:17.290 --> 07:27.470]  So I kind of got into that space and quickly realized, okay, this is another service I can offer, but people don't necessarily want to hire half of an SAT tutor.
[07:27.470 --> 07:39.290]  So I looked at the verbal half and kind of re-rent through a bunch of tests and disassembled what was going on there to a place where I felt like I could understand it and communicate.
[07:39.650 --> 07:51.790]  So fast-forward, I was leaving the music space to enter more of this tutoring company that I'd built up from the ground, and now I'm hiring and training other tutors as well.
[07:52.970 --> 08:14.270]  And I just want to share quickly, before we get into some of the specific techniques that I've come to over the years, a bit of an epiphany I had in SAT tutoring, where I was working with a student that was not particularly, say, adept at math fundamentals.
[08:14.270 --> 08:36.530]  I was coming to him as a math tutor, and I knew his foundations were weak, and we were getting into SAT tutoring, and we were about to get into this problem, which I quickly realized would take the end... it would take us through the end of the lesson for me to get into the concept that was involved in this particular question.
[08:36.990 --> 08:46.950]  Not only that, it occurred to me that it was pretty unlikely that that understanding would get to a place where the student would be able to use it again in any sort of repeatable way.
[08:47.590 --> 08:50.590]  And time's a premium when you're in this test prep space.
[08:50.590 --> 08:52.890]  I'm usually seeing a student for one hour a week.
[08:52.890 --> 08:57.310]  So, the light bulb moment was, well, wait a second.
[08:57.810 --> 09:05.510]  This particular question, you don't need to understand the concept at all because there's this other way of looking at it.
[09:05.630 --> 09:22.430]  And that sort of blew my mind open to thinking about the test questions for what they were and that the path to get to the right answer was irrelevant as long as you ended up at the destination, which is B, C, or D, right?
[09:23.750 --> 09:31.250]  And I let go my pride as a math teacher of kind of wanting my students to understand some of this material.
[09:31.550 --> 09:34.410]  And like, okay, that's fine if I'm working with them as a math tutor.
[09:34.570 --> 09:37.250]  That deeper understanding probably is important.
[09:37.250 --> 09:42.290]  But as an SAT student, it's just a score that they're trying to hit.
[09:42.290 --> 09:56.630]  And I was able to open my mind to various approaches that would allow the students' abilities to dictate where they were headed in terms of finding the answer.
[09:57.170 --> 10:00.610]  And just before we start, some brief notes about the presentation.
[10:01.750 --> 10:07.470]  Like I said, most of you are not young people for whom this test is relevant.
[10:07.810 --> 10:13.710]  But the SAT can be used as a proxy for any sort of multiple choice standardized test in general.
[10:13.830 --> 10:18.030]  There's plenty of professional exams and, you know, if you're entering the graduate student place.
[10:18.190 --> 10:23.770]  So we live in a world where standardized testing is somewhat ubiquitous.
[10:26.270 --> 10:36.090]  And when I was originally preparing for this talk, I wanted to provide some history and context for where the SAT came from and how it evolved over the years.
[10:36.390 --> 10:40.030]  And parallel to that, the test prep industry.
[10:40.370 --> 10:51.130]  And my first kind of rehearsal of this talk involved just one slide full of notes that I've come to and found that I was like over 30, 40 minutes and I hadn't gotten to any of the hacks yet.
[10:51.130 --> 10:56.850]  So I can get to some of that history in the Q&A or after the talk if anyone's interested.
[10:57.030 --> 11:10.630]  But all I'll say for now that's totally relevant to the talk is for those older members of the audience that took the test, say, before 2016, the SAT today is a much different test than the one you're familiar with.
[11:11.790 --> 11:16.890]  The verbal half of the test still includes reading comprehension, which I'm sure most of you remember.
[11:16.890 --> 11:19.190]  You read a passage and then answer some questions on it.
[11:19.870 --> 11:27.950]  There used to be sort of vocabulary-driven logic games, sentence completion analogies and whatnot.
[11:28.170 --> 11:33.230]  That's all gone and has been replaced by sort of grammar and usage questions.
[11:34.670 --> 11:39.030]  Understanding how a given phrase or a sentence serves a text.
[11:39.630 --> 11:42.630]  The math, there's still half of the test that's math.
[11:43.850 --> 11:52.490]  Again, before 2016, the math content was more on the ends of pre-algebra, algebra one, and some geometry.
[11:52.810 --> 11:54.070]  That's all still there.
[11:54.550 --> 12:04.790]  But there's, I would say, less geometry covered on the current version of the test and a lot more emphasis on more advanced algebra, algebra beyond algebra one.
[12:04.790 --> 12:09.970]  So knowledge of quadratics and things that you would find in algebra two and pre-calculus now creeping in the test.
[12:10.810 --> 12:20.850]  In previous incarnations of the test, you could be very clever and not necessarily have paid a lot of attention in math class and do pretty well on the math section.
[12:21.350 --> 12:25.510]  Now you kind of have to be clever and have paid somewhat attention in math class.
[12:26.850 --> 12:35.250]  All the examples that you're going to see on the slides come from the College Board's official practice tests that are available online for anybody to see.
[12:35.510 --> 12:37.650]  And please hold questions to the end.
[12:37.710 --> 12:38.550]  Let's get started.
[12:39.030 --> 12:49.670]  So the first hack is not a hack so much as just knowing what the test is comprised of and having that dictate your study.
[12:51.810 --> 12:57.910]  So what I did is I looked at, like I mentioned, the College Board has released a bunch of practice tests.
[12:58.090 --> 13:14.590]  But not only that, there's some laws specifically in New York State and California around 1980 called truth and testing laws that required standardized tests operating in those states to release questions so that people could see what was on the test.
[13:14.590 --> 13:26.550]  The result of that is that periodically throughout the year, tests like the SAT and the ACT are forced to kind of share with the people that pay for these tests their actual copies.
[13:26.550 --> 13:29.670]  So you get your answer sheet and the actual test book.
[13:29.850 --> 13:41.910]  We live in this information age and invariably copies of those tests end up online and anybody in the test prep space knows how to access them and that's kind of what informs our study.
[13:41.910 --> 13:53.090]  So what I did is I built out a spreadsheet that would analyze... I started with the math and I'm still kind of working my way through this.
[13:53.250 --> 14:00.070]  But question by question, what was on a given problem in terms of its category type?
[14:00.070 --> 14:17.330]  So I'll just show you a screenshot of this tool and I'm hoping to work with my brother-in-law to build this out into an app that I can just kind of release online as a study tool for students where they can kind of pinpoint and prioritize their study based on,
[14:17.490 --> 14:18.410]  you know, what's important.
[14:18.410 --> 14:26.590]  What are they likely to see on the test and focus on just the high likelihood categories first.
[14:26.830 --> 14:30.390]  And then, you know, for top scorers, of course, you're trying to get everything you can.
[14:30.510 --> 14:37.230]  Then you can worry about some of these like less than likely or almost never likely to occur questions.
[14:37.250 --> 14:45.890]  So I want to give just two examples of how knowing a specific content area can just unlock a question.
[14:45.890 --> 14:49.170]  So there's there's certain examples of content that's just it's so easy.
[14:49.310 --> 14:51.370]  It's a few minute conversation with a student.
[14:51.570 --> 14:52.590]  You know this rule.
[14:52.770 --> 14:56.090]  It will translate to a question that you're guaranteed to see on the test.
[14:56.690 --> 14:59.610]  I'm going to give a verbal example and a math example.
[14:59.870 --> 15:04.330]  So the verbal example relates to dangling modifiers.
[15:04.430 --> 15:08.790]  Excuse me while I put this little Michael Jackson glove on here to work my writing tablet.
[15:10.950 --> 15:16.490]  If you're not familiar with what a dangling modifier is, it basically boils down to this.
[15:16.610 --> 15:28.370]  If you start a sentence with a descriptive phrase that is left hanging in that it doesn't mention what it's referring to, the next word after the comma needs to be the noun or the person that it describes.
[15:28.570 --> 15:32.650]  So this is the kind of boilerplate example I give to all my students when I'm doing this.
[15:34.730 --> 15:48.110]  Having forgotten to study, comma, you would think since I'm a teacher that better handwriting, but alas, the test was impossible.
[15:49.230 --> 15:49.550]  All right.
[15:49.790 --> 15:56.810]  So the problem with this mistake is that it doesn't sound like a mistake unless you're familiar with the rule.
[15:56.810 --> 16:04.430]  A lot of grammar conventions kind of sound awkward, at least if you've been on the planet and speaking and reading and writing for long enough.
[16:04.690 --> 16:09.930]  This sounds somewhat natural, again, if you don't know that this is something you're supposed to avoid.
[16:09.930 --> 16:14.690]  It's a mistake, you know, people make quite commonly in email correspondence.
[16:14.690 --> 16:19.970]  So we have having forgotten to study this descriptive phrase at the beginning.
[16:20.250 --> 16:22.270]  Again, it's describing something or someone.
[16:22.730 --> 16:24.670]  Well, did the test forget to study for the test?
[16:24.790 --> 16:25.190]  Of course not.
[16:25.350 --> 16:25.830]  Somebody did.
[16:25.990 --> 16:27.470]  So let's say that somebody is John.
[16:28.530 --> 16:31.450]  His name would be the very next word after that.
[16:31.570 --> 16:35.550]  And I would need to kind of tweak the sentence some more to go and make it make sense.
[16:35.950 --> 16:39.950]  John maybe, you know, found the test to be impossible.
[16:40.370 --> 16:40.930]  All right.
[16:41.070 --> 16:44.290]  So let's look at an example of this from an actual test.
[16:45.530 --> 16:46.350]  Clear that.
[16:49.330 --> 16:52.650]  So the format is a little confusing if you haven't seen the new SAT.
[16:52.830 --> 17:02.030]  You have a kind of passage worth of writing going down the left-hand column and then you have the questions with these number boxes that refer to parts of the text as you go.
[17:02.130 --> 17:05.810]  So I highlighted the sentence which contains the problem we're looking at.
[17:05.950 --> 17:06.990]  So we can see the sentence.
[17:07.490 --> 17:13.810]  Believing the home stories to be lowbrow work, comma, instead, well, who or what believed that?
[17:13.810 --> 17:15.850]  A person kind of needed to believe something, right?
[17:16.050 --> 17:17.330]  So did a focus believe that?
[17:17.450 --> 17:17.610]  No.
[17:17.770 --> 17:19.150]  We can cross out A.
[17:19.390 --> 17:21.510]  Did a focusing believe that?
[17:21.550 --> 17:22.250]  That doesn't make sense.
[17:22.390 --> 17:23.310]  Did writing believe that?
[17:23.350 --> 17:23.570]  No.
[17:23.730 --> 17:24.890]  He had to believe that.
[17:25.030 --> 17:35.710]  So the power to knowing this particular strategy is that this can otherwise seem like waiting through an arbitrary selection of text, but it's just, do you know this rule or not?
[17:37.690 --> 17:40.590]  A math example to take you back to math class.
[17:41.050 --> 17:48.690]  So this is a formula that's beaten over the heads of most people that survive middle school and high school math.
[17:49.390 --> 17:50.350]  Linear equations.
[17:50.350 --> 18:07.310]  Now, unlike other tests that might just say, can you manipulate and show that you know how to operate this equation, the SAT in its current version, at least, test this in interpretation terms.
[18:07.430 --> 18:15.350]  So they'll give you a word problem that involves a linear equation and then see if you can understand how it models something.
[18:15.350 --> 18:23.970]  So, again, most of my students coming to me, even very weak math students, know this formula, if not know how to use it.
[18:24.250 --> 18:30.090]  And they're familiar with the fact that B is the y-intercept and M is the slope.
[18:30.370 --> 18:33.590]  And the slope formula is another thing they're beating over the head with.
[18:33.750 --> 18:36.830]  They're taught that slope is rise over run.
[18:39.750 --> 18:42.750]  Or rate of change in y over x.
[18:43.550 --> 18:44.350]  More sophisticated.
[18:44.650 --> 18:46.470]  Some just know the words and then don't know the formula.
[18:46.850 --> 18:58.750]  But if they do know that it's the difference of y over difference of x, then we can get to, okay, well, how do you interpret the y-intercept in the slope if it comes up in a word problem that involves a linear equation?
[18:58.750 --> 19:10.450]  So, the y-intercept, again, which they're kind of sight trained to recognize in a formula, is going to be the starting condition for whatever y is.
[19:11.850 --> 19:21.750]  And the slope in terms of interpreting it as a number and, like, linguistic concept, we have this change in y over change of x.
[19:21.870 --> 19:37.610]  Well, it's not too much of a stretch, once you know that it's y over x, to say that it would be kind of the change in units of y over one unit change of x.
[19:37.610 --> 19:45.770]  So, I'll show you a quick problem that relates to just you see the linear equation and you can just immediately pick out the answer.
[19:46.210 --> 19:46.410]  All right.
[19:50.250 --> 19:56.530]  Again, for those of you who took older versions of this test, the math section is a lot wordier than it used to be.
[19:57.690 --> 19:58.990]  There's reading comprehension.
[19:58.990 --> 20:08.730]  So, I've worked with strong math students that are weak readers that just get dinged on questions because they can't follow the, like, you know, again, the semantic end of things.
[20:08.730 --> 20:09.350]  All right.
[20:09.650 --> 20:14.770]  So, we see something that we can recognize as linear.
[20:15.110 --> 20:21.770]  We have this y equals mx plus b format with different letters and then numbers for m and b.
[20:21.970 --> 20:25.970]  They're saying, what does 1.88 mean in this context?
[20:25.970 --> 20:28.250]  Well, that's the slope.
[20:28.330 --> 20:29.170]  And what did we say?
[20:29.250 --> 20:33.230]  The slope is kind of units of y per one unit of x.
[20:33.230 --> 20:41.950]  So, if we just go down the answers, we just need to remember that y is represented by h in this equation and x by l.
[20:42.130 --> 20:46.230]  So, we're looking for something that says kind of 1.88...
[20:47.230 --> 20:48.590]  Well, what does h stand for?
[20:48.590 --> 20:50.510]  Or it's the height of an adult male.
[20:50.730 --> 20:59.130]  So, 1.8 inches of somebody's height, a male's height, per one inch of what is l represent, the femur length.
[20:59.670 --> 21:01.450]  So, one inch of femur length.
[21:03.630 --> 21:15.410]  Again, the strength of kind of knowing how these questions work is that we don't need to, like, wrap ourselves in logical loops here and go on endless searches and try and get confused.
[21:15.410 --> 21:17.090]  Like, we're looking for this.
[21:17.250 --> 21:22.010]  Okay, the 32.01 is irrelevant to this discussion, so those are gone.
[21:22.010 --> 21:26.770]  And now, we see c, the approximate increase in a femur length.
[21:27.150 --> 21:28.550]  Well, that's upside down, right?
[21:28.650 --> 21:32.330]  We want the increase in height per femur length.
[21:32.490 --> 21:34.210]  So, c is kind of trying to trick us.
[21:34.530 --> 21:35.630]  And there we go.
[21:35.790 --> 21:39.070]  The approximate increase in a man's height for each one inch increase.
[21:39.290 --> 21:45.470]  And again, it's easy to be a strong math student, know how linear equations work and still get a question like this wrong.
[21:45.470 --> 21:52.130]  So, two examples of just, you know this content, boom, you're getting 10, 20 points on the test from that alone.
[21:52.670 --> 21:52.850]  All right.
[21:53.210 --> 21:56.090]  Second hack relates to plugging in.
[21:56.330 --> 22:00.150]  Now, there's two areas in which this is applicable.
[22:00.270 --> 22:04.230]  Guess and check and something I'm going to more specifically call plugging in.
[22:04.430 --> 22:08.430]  I'm sure anybody that's ever taken a standardized test is familiar with guess and check.
[22:08.590 --> 22:12.130]  Like, if you're kind of in doubt or something, just go through the answers.
[22:12.130 --> 22:14.670]  If it's solving equations, see which one works, right?
[22:14.670 --> 22:18.250]  So, that one's barely self-explanatory.
[22:19.190 --> 22:26.170]  Plugging in was something that I kind of realized the power of only within the past, like, few years.
[22:26.290 --> 22:28.250]  I've been doing this for almost 15 years now.
[22:28.390 --> 22:31.970]  But I realized just how powerful it was as a tool.
[22:32.190 --> 22:39.670]  So, essentially what this does is it deals with math problem types that are asking about relationships.
[22:39.670 --> 22:49.590]  Those could be algebraic relationships, geometric relationships, and maybe, okay, if we change these quantities in such a way, what is the result of that behavior?
[22:50.090 --> 22:56.030]  And if this works in a general case, it works for the specifics.
[22:56.210 --> 23:03.870]  So, all you need to do to answer these sort of abstract questions is just pin them down to the easiest specific case.
[23:03.870 --> 23:06.730]  And if it works in that case, it works for all the cases.
[23:07.430 --> 23:13.690]  So, you can, for example, turn what would be a difficult algebra problem into an easy arithmetic problem.
[23:14.050 --> 23:16.790]  So, first let's look at guess and check.
[23:16.790 --> 23:25.070]  We'll very quickly just kind of see how we can, again, not math to solve an equation, but just see what works.
[23:25.230 --> 23:29.750]  So, the up and down lines on each side of the n minus 1 absolute value makes everything positive.
[23:30.090 --> 23:33.630]  We would just go through the motions and see which one works.
[23:34.090 --> 23:35.970]  So, does that equal 0?
[23:36.230 --> 23:37.170]  Well, that's negative 1.
[23:37.290 --> 23:38.990]  The absolute value of negative 1 is 1.
[23:39.110 --> 23:40.370]  1 plus 1 does not equal 0.
[23:40.570 --> 23:41.130]  So, that's gone.
[23:41.570 --> 23:45.190]  Does 1 minus 1 plus 1?
[23:45.190 --> 23:46.410]  Well, that's 0 plus 1.
[23:46.570 --> 23:47.470]  That doesn't equal 0.
[23:47.850 --> 23:50.670]  Does 2 minus 1 equal 0?
[23:51.010 --> 23:52.230]  No, that's 1 plus 1 equals 2.
[23:52.630 --> 24:02.010]  So, something else to mention from this technique is for multiple choice questions, you don't need to know why the answer works.
[24:02.110 --> 24:04.210]  Like, I don't need to know that there was no value.
[24:04.330 --> 24:06.030]  I just know that A, B, and C didn't work.
[24:06.170 --> 24:06.990]  That's all I need to know.
[24:07.110 --> 24:10.330]  If I can eliminate three answers and there's four choices, I've gotten the answer.
[24:10.490 --> 24:12.050]  I don't need to understand anything.
[24:12.130 --> 24:13.470]  I don't need to explain my work.
[24:14.570 --> 24:20.230]  You can sometimes use guess and check on word problems, even.
[24:20.590 --> 24:24.230]  So, there are some math questions that aren't multiple choice on the test.
[24:24.370 --> 24:29.630]  And if we look at this one here, Doug and Laura spent a combined 250 hours in the tutoring lab.
[24:29.810 --> 24:35.250]  If Doug spent 40 hours more in the lab than Laura did, how many hours did Laura spend in the lab?
[24:35.250 --> 24:42.530]  Well, one way to approach a problem like this is just kind of deal with certain constraints and then tweak it from there.
[24:42.530 --> 24:47.050]  So, we have Doug and Laura, and let's say we're tracking the difference in their time.
[24:47.410 --> 24:56.650]  So, one way to just approach this with guess and check, say, again, if you're not a strong algebra student and that's not your bag, you could say, well, let me just split it in half.
[24:57.150 --> 24:59.930]  125, 125, 125, that's no difference.
[25:00.170 --> 25:01.810]  And I know I'm dealing with 250 hours.
[25:02.470 --> 25:03.570]  So, that's my starting condition.
[25:03.770 --> 25:07.690]  I need this to be 40, not zero.
[25:07.690 --> 25:10.110]  So, I can just say, well, Doug spent more time.
[25:10.230 --> 25:12.730]  Let me just find increments and add till I get there.
[25:12.950 --> 25:13.870]  Let's try adding five.
[25:14.150 --> 25:17.670]  So, that's 130 and 120 for a difference of 10.
[25:17.790 --> 25:19.250]  Well, I'm getting somewhere, right?
[25:19.990 --> 25:21.350]  I could try 10 now.
[25:22.190 --> 25:27.190]  140 and then 10 off, 110, and that's a difference of 30.
[25:27.590 --> 25:27.870]  All right?
[25:28.050 --> 25:31.390]  So, I mean, again, you don't need to be a math genius to get there.
[25:31.510 --> 25:33.530]  I'll just jump to the answer here.
[25:33.530 --> 25:37.790]  So, 145, 105 for a difference of 40.
[25:38.150 --> 25:45.030]  But again, a weaker math student could kind of plod through that at a slower pace and end up with 105 hours for Laura.
[25:46.470 --> 25:47.190]  Plugging in.
[25:49.890 --> 25:53.950]  So, this particular problem, in terms of placement, comes from a test.
[25:54.090 --> 26:00.730]  This would have been the last multiple choice question on the no calculator portion of the exam.
[26:00.730 --> 26:09.050]  So, traditionally, the last two or three questions are what the college board is going to consider the more difficult, the most difficult multiple choice problems.
[26:09.230 --> 26:16.570]  The particular content that this question is testing is polynomial division, which there's other, you know, shortcuts for.
[26:16.710 --> 26:19.270]  There's synthetic division or a number of things.
[26:19.290 --> 26:29.230]  But again, what we're being asked is here, here's an expression, this rational expression, and it's equivalent, meaning the same as one of these below.
[26:29.550 --> 26:43.970]  So, the hallmark of these problems is when you're looking at ABCD, if you see that they are at least partially, if not all, expressions, that's usually a sign that you can just fix a value to the variable in the expression.
[26:44.810 --> 26:50.430]  I know how to do this the quote-unquote right way, and I would still do it the way I'm about to show you.
[26:50.430 --> 26:59.570]  So, let's take the easiest possible number we can think of, the easiest one I can think of is zero, and then this becomes zero minus two over zero plus three.
[26:59.730 --> 27:01.470]  So, we get negative two-thirds.
[27:01.770 --> 27:07.250]  The correct answer, when we plug in zero below, will also say negative two-thirds.
[27:07.390 --> 27:13.090]  We can see A and B don't even relate to X, and five minus two is three over three.
[27:13.230 --> 27:14.630]  Well, that's not negative two-thirds.
[27:15.130 --> 27:24.850]  Five minus two-thirds, so I do work with plenty of students that have, like, fraction phobia, but I think most of them realize that five minus two-thirds is not negative two-thirds.
[27:25.490 --> 27:25.990]  That's gone.
[27:26.570 --> 27:28.790]  And then this is also five minus two-thirds.
[27:29.050 --> 27:29.470]  That's gone.
[27:29.670 --> 27:41.090]  Again, we don't need to know and have the fraction expertise to recognize that five minus seventeen-thirds is, in fact, negative two-thirds, because we've eliminated everything else.
[27:41.850 --> 27:42.070]  All right.
[27:43.850 --> 27:52.810]  And just one note on that strategy relating to algebraic content and word problems and so many different types.
[27:52.970 --> 28:11.470]  So, like, where I'm at with that sort of spreadsheet analysis of question types right now, we're looking at, like, over fifteen percent of all math questions on the SAT can be just straight-up gamed with that level of plugging in thinking of simple examples.
[28:11.650 --> 28:14.210]  If it's a percentage problem, deal with a hundred.
[28:14.490 --> 28:14.810]  Right?
[28:14.970 --> 28:17.350]  If it's an algebra problem, zero, one, two.
[28:17.530 --> 28:19.710]  Like, whatever is easiest for the circumstance there.
[28:19.890 --> 28:24.530]  That's one in six to one in seven questions that you don't need to know whatever they're asking.
[28:24.530 --> 28:31.170]  Maybe plugging in is longer than knowing the quote-unquote right way, but it'll get you there.
[28:32.490 --> 28:44.390]  So, the next hack, just so I don't completely neglect the reading comprehension portion of the exam, is one type of question that's on the newer version of the test that wasn't there initially.
[28:45.330 --> 28:48.090]  And that looks like this below.
[28:48.370 --> 28:53.510]  So, we can see question thirty-seven says, which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
[28:53.510 --> 28:54.210]  All right.
[28:54.410 --> 28:57.370]  Well, this is like a package deal, right?
[28:57.470 --> 29:04.890]  If I get thirty-six wrong, I'm more than likely to get thirty-seven wrong, because now I'm providing evidence for something that was incorrect.
[29:05.770 --> 29:07.990]  So, I'll bring up the text here.
[29:08.990 --> 29:13.050]  We see a passage from Virginia Woolf, 1938.
[29:13.190 --> 29:16.430]  So, this is a type of text.
[29:16.690 --> 29:22.310]  The SAT will throw one, at least, passage of somewhat antiquated English.
[29:22.310 --> 29:24.810]  So, we're dealing with a text that's almost a hundred years old.
[29:25.130 --> 29:30.950]  This would be difficult for most of my students to just follow the thread of and understand English of this nature.
[29:31.290 --> 29:33.590]  So, that's a chore in of itself.
[29:35.130 --> 29:40.050]  I've highlighted the answer choices and the lines that they go with.
[29:40.050 --> 29:50.670]  So, the question that we're trying to support in this particular example, Woolf indicates that the procession she describes in the passage, well, does one of these things, A, B, C, D, and we're trying to support it below.
[29:51.990 --> 29:55.230]  So, I'm just going to read from the last sentence here.
[29:55.230 --> 29:57.110]  Now, we are here to consider facts.
[29:57.250 --> 30:01.450]  Now, we must fix our eyes upon the procession, the procession of the sons of educated men.
[30:01.750 --> 30:02.070]  All right.
[30:02.210 --> 30:04.370]  So, she mentions this procession.
[30:04.590 --> 30:09.250]  And then, the answer choice, again, is going to be supported by one of these lines.
[30:09.390 --> 30:13.050]  So, let's start with A, the first one, because we'll get context as we go.
[30:13.410 --> 30:19.110]  And if we can rule out where the answer isn't, it'll make it easier to select the answer in 36.
[30:19.110 --> 30:23.090]  Some questions lend themselves better to this technique than others.
[30:23.490 --> 30:24.390]  There they go.
[30:24.590 --> 30:35.590]  Our brothers who have been educated at public schools and universities, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching, administering justice, practicing medicine, transacting business, making money.
[30:36.050 --> 30:36.270]  Okay.
[30:36.590 --> 30:44.070]  So, does that indicate that this procession has come to have more of a practical influence in recent years?
[30:44.290 --> 30:45.110]  Not really.
[30:45.890 --> 30:49.790]  Does it indicate that the procession has become a celebrated feature of English public life?
[30:49.970 --> 30:51.770]  That also seems somewhat irrelevant.
[30:52.030 --> 30:54.190]  It's like talking about people going to work.
[30:55.330 --> 30:58.510]  Does it include all of the richest and most powerful men in England?
[30:58.650 --> 31:02.710]  Now, I've had plenty of students, when I'm going through this example with them, tell me, yes, it does.
[31:02.810 --> 31:06.310]  Because they see, okay, administering justice, practicing medicine.
[31:06.850 --> 31:10.010]  Yeah, judges, lawyers, doctors, they're pretty rich and powerful, right?
[31:10.410 --> 31:13.570]  Well, there's two problems with that.
[31:13.570 --> 31:18.590]  The first problem is, it includes all of the richest and most powerful men in England.
[31:18.770 --> 31:21.610]  So, there's plenty of rich and powerful people that aren't doctors and lawyers.
[31:22.350 --> 31:34.530]  Another thing about that word, all, unrelated to this type of problem, is that in reading comprehension problems, I always direct my students to be very wary of any absolute language.
[31:34.870 --> 31:36.350]  All, never, always.
[31:36.950 --> 31:39.010]  These are almost always hallmarks...
[31:39.010 --> 31:40.870]  No, did I say almost always?
[31:41.070 --> 31:44.250]  Almost always hallmarks of incorrect trap answers.
[31:45.990 --> 31:52.630]  The nature of thought and expression is such that it's very hard to say anything in absolute certainty.
[31:52.790 --> 32:00.770]  And so, absolute certainty is something that the test makers rely on to undermine what otherwise would be a correct answer.
[32:00.970 --> 32:07.490]  So, we can kind of get rid of this answer choice without even thinking about the other lines and the connections.
[32:07.490 --> 32:17.210]  But another problem is, there are other professions mentioned in this set of lines that aren't doctors and lawyers, and we're talking about, say, teachers.
[32:17.370 --> 32:23.150]  Well, I came from the teaching profession, and I don't know anyone that would describe teachers as rich and powerful in this society.
[32:25.450 --> 32:30.010]  So, we've gotten A, B, C out, and then let's look at D.
[32:30.250 --> 32:33.510]  Again, does A support this as the kind of game we're playing?
[32:33.730 --> 32:35.550]  And forgive me if I'm going a little fast.
[32:36.590 --> 32:40.910]  So, has this procession become less exclusionary in its membership in recent years?
[32:41.270 --> 32:43.590]  That line doesn't seem to indicate any of those.
[32:43.690 --> 32:49.730]  So, now A is out, and I'm focusing and getting a narrow view on where the answer could possibly be.
[32:49.730 --> 32:51.730]  B is pretty brief.
[32:51.950 --> 32:55.670]  It is a solemn sight, always a procession, like a caravan RC crossing in desert.
[32:55.990 --> 33:04.610]  Well, I now have these answer choices for 36 fresh in my mind, and that brief little sentence doesn't really seem to have anything to do with any of them.
[33:04.810 --> 33:12.490]  So, we can, generally speaking, get rid of one bad answer in a test question, at least, without too much knowledge.
[33:12.690 --> 33:17.410]  So, that's just, you know, probably not too many people picking B on 37 there.
[33:18.290 --> 33:20.450]  Now, we notice this little gap here.
[33:20.990 --> 33:25.250]  And sometimes these evidence support questions are kind of sprinkled throughout.
[33:25.410 --> 33:26.890]  Sometimes they're closely clustered together.
[33:27.470 --> 33:39.650]  One thing I tell my students in these sort of scavenger hunt approaches to these problems is, a given line item that is a support to a question can carry echoes of preceding text.
[33:39.650 --> 33:42.030]  So, we shouldn't just skip over.
[33:42.370 --> 33:46.150]  Again, if we're doing this, we probably read the passage already, the whole thing.
[33:46.290 --> 33:48.670]  But for now, yeah, I'm just kind of going line by line.
[33:49.750 --> 33:52.990]  But there could be echoes of what was just said that's important.
[33:53.390 --> 33:57.270]  So, it makes this kind of tricky until you're used to that sort of thing.
[33:57.850 --> 34:01.710]  But now, for the past 20 years or so, it is no longer a sight, again, that procession.
[34:02.470 --> 34:08.110]  A photograph or fresco scrawled upon the walls of time at which we can look at with merely an aesthetic appreciation.
[34:08.110 --> 34:12.450]  For there, traipsing along at the tail end of the procession, we go ourselves.
[34:12.450 --> 34:21.590]  Well, you need to kind of understand the context of who is Virginia Woolf addressing here.
[34:22.010 --> 34:24.950]  And the test was nice enough to tell us that.
[34:25.150 --> 34:27.650]  She's talking to the women in English society.
[34:27.870 --> 34:30.190]  So, what is this procession again?
[34:30.310 --> 34:32.930]  The sons of educated men are going to work, essentially.
[34:33.190 --> 34:34.510]  And now we go ourselves.
[34:34.510 --> 34:37.030]  So, let's see if that line supports one of these.
[34:37.210 --> 34:41.970]  Well, that procession has come to have more practical influence, still seems irrelevant.
[34:41.970 --> 34:45.150]  A celebrated feature still seems irrelevant.
[34:45.470 --> 34:48.330]  All the rich and powerful men, that's just gone as we addressed.
[34:48.610 --> 34:53.650]  And then has become less exclusionary in its membership over recent years.
[34:53.870 --> 35:01.450]  So, now women are entering educated spaces and getting these professional jobs that at once were only available to men.
[35:01.550 --> 35:04.690]  So, we have C supporting D and we kind of answer them as a pair.
[35:05.830 --> 35:10.810]  Whenever my students are doing reading comprehension, I always tell them, glance at the next question.
[35:10.810 --> 35:14.990]  Don't be caught off guard that this is going to ask you to support the next one.
[35:15.170 --> 35:17.630]  Because you can deal with them in pairs like we just did.
[35:18.890 --> 35:19.290]  All right.
[35:20.190 --> 35:20.630]  Onwards.
[35:21.350 --> 35:24.610]  The next hack relates to graphing calculators.
[35:24.610 --> 35:37.870]  So, before we get to that, again, the older members of my audience here, you know, like me, when we took the test, we were allowed a four-function calculator or maybe a scientific calculator.
[35:40.010 --> 35:44.570]  Scientific calculators can do log, sine, cosine, tangent, but almost none of that was on the test anyway.
[35:44.630 --> 35:45.710]  So, that was kind of irrelevant.
[35:46.570 --> 35:50.650]  Students today can use graphing calculators on the current version of the test.
[35:52.270 --> 35:53.130]  They're expensive.
[35:53.390 --> 35:57.530]  They cost a hundred, two hundred dollars and, you know, not everybody can afford to get them.
[35:57.730 --> 36:04.830]  And even if a student does have them, maybe they're in a school district where their math teacher doesn't have a set for the class.
[36:04.870 --> 36:11.390]  Or even if they do, they haven't been trained in how to, you know, talk about how to use the graphing calculator.
[36:11.390 --> 36:12.930]  Graphing calculator is a computer.
[36:13.230 --> 36:17.050]  So, you know, at a place like this, you should appreciate the power of that.
[36:17.210 --> 36:25.130]  I'll just show you kind of one stock thing that I show most of my students that they're unaware of these things can do.
[36:25.330 --> 36:30.530]  You know, they might be kind of limitedly aware of the graphing functionality of the calculator.
[36:30.630 --> 36:37.150]  But say a student is weak in fractions, you can just input numbers as fractions.
[36:37.150 --> 36:41.250]  You don't need to rely on division or anything like that.
[36:41.250 --> 36:46.930]  So I can just kind of deal with one half as a number and not have to worry about my order of operations.
[36:47.090 --> 36:48.690]  The calculator will take care of all of that.
[36:49.050 --> 36:53.930]  Another useful feature is using the store function.
[36:54.650 --> 37:00.750]  So I can just kind of assign one half to the variable button, this X button up here.
[37:00.850 --> 37:02.830]  Or I could just use the alphabet and use any letter.
[37:02.890 --> 37:04.170]  I can have any number of variables.
[37:04.170 --> 37:05.630]  But let's just say I do it here.
[37:06.290 --> 37:13.450]  And now I have whenever I, in this screen, type with X, the calculator is going to know to treat it as one half.
[37:13.690 --> 37:20.810]  So if we're doing one of those plug-in problems that we looked at before, let me just copy an expression here.
[37:20.810 --> 37:30.170]  So let's say our test case for some reason needed to involve one half or it was just as simple as what is F of one half and we're plugging it into this expression.
[37:30.770 --> 37:36.130]  Well, now when I hit enter, the calculator will just do the computation as if X was one half.
[37:37.170 --> 37:52.750]  Something else to say about the calculator portion and using the calculator to hack the test is in the college board's sort of calculator use policy, there are no restrictions on supplemental software, which kind of blew my mind.
[37:54.750 --> 37:59.450]  You know, it doesn't take too much imagination to think what you could put on a graphing calculator.
[37:59.450 --> 38:03.510]  When I was a student, I mainly used it to play Tetris and ignore my math teacher.
[38:03.670 --> 38:12.410]  But you can put equation solvers and just records of any equations or formulas that you might need to reference throughout the test.
[38:12.550 --> 38:15.570]  Like, there are no restrictions and only imagination can dictate.
[38:16.730 --> 38:22.150]  There's communities online where kids discuss what stuff to put on your calculator.
[38:22.450 --> 38:28.470]  A publisher of a book that I use makes a suite and just disseminates it to people that buy it.
[38:28.470 --> 38:33.790]  So if we look at just this quick example program, here's Panda SAT.
[38:34.850 --> 38:40.630]  And we quickly see just like, again, some equation solvers and ways of dealing with various things.
[38:40.710 --> 38:43.790]  So it's kind of mind-blowing that they're allowed.
[38:45.650 --> 38:47.250]  So let's keep going.
[38:48.410 --> 38:48.950]  All right.
[38:50.610 --> 38:54.130]  Back to the next hack, which involves guessing.
[38:54.350 --> 39:01.870]  So every year I have at least one student, if not all of them, that asks me, okay, let's assume that I have no idea.
[39:02.030 --> 39:04.630]  We've just kind of exhausted everything that I know.
[39:04.790 --> 39:05.430]  All the little tricks.
[39:05.650 --> 39:07.070]  And I have no idea what to do with this problem.
[39:07.270 --> 39:08.610]  What's the right letter to guess, Rob?
[39:08.770 --> 39:09.290]  Should I guess C?
[39:10.970 --> 39:21.950]  And of course, before we even get to answering that question, like I was saying, with very superficial knowledge, we can generally eliminate an answer choice or two.
[39:22.330 --> 39:26.870]  And so a one out of three or a one out of two guess is much better than a one out of four, right?
[39:27.010 --> 39:30.670]  Your probability of guessing right is greater.
[39:30.970 --> 39:32.630]  So that's the first thing.
[39:32.730 --> 39:41.830]  The second thing is, just to stay on math, sometimes we can eliminate wrong answers by just kind of looking at what the answers look like.
[39:41.830 --> 39:48.270]  Now, again, I wouldn't recommend the strategies I'm getting into now, if you had the vaguest idea of what you were doing.
[39:48.450 --> 39:50.750]  These are just kind of if you're going in blind and confused.
[39:51.090 --> 39:55.430]  So one thing I tell my students, if they're looking at a question, they have no idea.
[39:55.690 --> 39:56.890]  It's multiple choice.
[39:57.050 --> 40:00.150]  And let's say B and C kind of look alike.
[40:00.330 --> 40:03.450]  Maybe one is the reciprocal of the other or something like that.
[40:03.630 --> 40:09.230]  Well, the test makers tend to want to trap you with commonly made mistakes.
[40:09.230 --> 40:11.370]  And there might be a wrong answer.
[40:11.490 --> 40:14.170]  That's sort of the red herring to get you to select that.
[40:14.330 --> 40:19.450]  So if I see B and C look alike and A and D kind of look different, I would say cross out A and D.
[40:19.650 --> 40:21.490]  Now it's a coin flip instead of a one out of four.
[40:21.710 --> 40:23.410]  That could not get you anywhere.
[40:23.610 --> 40:27.150]  But again, this is assuming you had no idea what you were doing in the first place.
[40:28.710 --> 40:40.730]  Another kind of just general math trick for eliminating answers is like, if you see 120 as a coefficient in a given problem, and 120 is also an answer choice, eh, probably not the answer.
[40:40.890 --> 40:42.930]  They're probably just like, oh, that felt familiar.
[40:42.930 --> 40:43.670]  Let me go with that.
[40:44.810 --> 40:46.790]  Again, that could just as easily be wrong.
[40:46.950 --> 40:49.790]  We're only relying on these when we have no idea what we're doing.
[40:50.390 --> 40:51.810]  Okay, so back to the question, right?
[40:51.990 --> 40:52.810]  Should I guess C?
[40:52.890 --> 40:58.830]  For whatever reason, that seems to be the commonly agreed upon answer of what's the right thing to guess.
[41:00.450 --> 41:05.330]  So my initial response when I was pressed on this by students was that it doesn't matter.
[41:05.490 --> 41:07.210]  There's a random distribution of answer choices.
[41:09.390 --> 41:15.050]  But one student and his mother both were kind of like really hard pressing me on it one year.
[41:15.350 --> 41:19.150]  And she was like, well, see, he guessed C on these questions.
[41:19.150 --> 41:21.730]  He ran out of time and he didn't get any of them right.
[41:21.730 --> 41:26.470]  I was like, okay, unlikely things can happen with probability.
[41:26.710 --> 41:42.430]  But I thought about it a little more and I had one insight where maybe it wasn't totally random in the sense that the questions they were running out of time on were the hard math questions.
[41:42.690 --> 41:44.990]  Again, the test kind of gets progressively more difficult.
[41:45.210 --> 41:47.490]  So they were running out of time towards the end.
[41:47.990 --> 41:51.370]  Maybe there was something less than random.
[41:51.370 --> 42:02.050]  So I kind of, again, using all the tests that are available, just looked at, say, the last five multiple choice answers to see if there was something possibly less than random going on.
[42:02.910 --> 42:05.770]  And I noticed something that was a little interesting.
[42:05.770 --> 42:12.050]  First of all, that C was the least common answer choice in the 30 or so tests I analyzed.
[42:13.050 --> 42:14.010]  About 16%.
[42:14.010 --> 42:18.170]  So if we're guessing one out of four, we would expect 25% for all of them.
[42:18.170 --> 42:24.050]  And then I saw D was more than twice as likely than C at 37%.
[42:24.050 --> 42:29.530]  Again, this isn't a statistical case for anything that we've proven.
[42:29.990 --> 42:31.930]  It's just a little curiosity.
[42:32.190 --> 42:38.310]  And so maybe the test makers are aware that more students are guessing C than others.
[42:38.310 --> 42:42.530]  So, yeah, for my harder questions, I'm not going to make C the answer.
[42:43.230 --> 42:44.410]  That could be happening.
[42:45.210 --> 42:49.290]  I have, you know, no hard evidence to suspect that, but it's possible.
[42:50.250 --> 43:07.490]  And another kind of, again, from the test makers perspective, reason why D might be the more likely one is that if I'm just kind of going through these sort of brute force techniques, and D is the last stop on my journey, then by, you know, putting the correct answer D,
[43:07.670 --> 43:09.830]  maybe they've slowed me down or something like that.
[43:10.930 --> 43:18.090]  The last thing I'm going to discuss is a hack related to the environment in which the test is given.
[43:18.530 --> 43:20.490]  So this is a timed test.
[43:21.010 --> 43:27.350]  And certain students, because of accommodations, get extra time on these tests.
[43:27.350 --> 43:31.330]  Maybe you're dyslexic or have ADHD or executive functioning issues.
[43:31.530 --> 43:46.390]  Any number of things that warranted a diagnosis at one point, either by your school, the special education program, or a neuroscientist or something that says, okay, as far as the college board is considered, you get extra time on this test.
[43:46.610 --> 43:49.930]  Well, that's unfair for a couple of reasons.
[43:50.130 --> 43:58.050]  So the time limits themselves are necessarily unfair because they're just arbitrary gauntlets that penalize certain thinkers over others.
[43:58.230 --> 44:03.850]  There's certain slow methodical thinkers that will struggle with time limit and others that don't.
[44:04.350 --> 44:17.050]  And in the kind of who is given the extra time, well, again, we're dealing with diagnosing neuropsychological behavioral things that are a little fuzzy inherently.
[44:17.150 --> 44:23.390]  And so the people that get the extra time, you know, might not necessarily need it as much as some others.
[44:23.390 --> 44:27.350]  So it's not a great system.
[44:27.350 --> 44:33.830]  And I do sympathize with parents that, you know, kind of guarantee that their kid has some diagnosis.
[44:33.990 --> 44:40.730]  But I am in no way, like, you know, advocating fraud and lying to get testing accommodations.
[44:41.010 --> 44:58.850]  And, you know, I'm just putting a word of caution out there because the Varsity Blue scandal a few years back, I don't know if you remember that, the FBI staying on sort of college admissions, kind of bogus tutors, not really tutors, but just people connected to coaches and things,
[44:59.610 --> 45:02.690]  getting people that were otherwise unqualified to get exams.
[45:02.930 --> 45:12.890]  A part of that scandal, which I was unfamiliar with until researching for this talk, actually one of these guys was counseling his students.
[45:13.070 --> 45:17.270]  Yeah, like, you know, pay this neuroscientist $15,000 and you'll get the diagnosis.
[45:17.550 --> 45:21.830]  Make sure you get the extra time so that they'll have a little leg up on the SAT or ACT.
[45:24.150 --> 45:25.930]  So it's not a great system.
[45:26.890 --> 45:31.850]  And the last thing I'll get into is the test and where it's at.
[45:31.850 --> 45:47.810]  So before COVID, which upended life as we know it, also this test, there was this trend in university college admissions towards test optional, test flexible, test blind.
[45:47.990 --> 45:50.810]  Let me just kind of quickly delineate what they are.
[45:51.230 --> 45:56.170]  Test optional is I can apply to a college and it's up to me to submit a score or not.
[45:56.750 --> 45:59.430]  Again, schools were doing that before COVID.
[45:59.430 --> 46:04.030]  They were all forced to during COVID because testing centers would be locked out.
[46:04.150 --> 46:05.910]  State lockdowns rolling throughout the country.
[46:06.350 --> 46:08.630]  Certain students just didn't have an opportunity to take the test.
[46:08.850 --> 46:11.990]  But take a competitive school like the University of Chicago.
[46:11.990 --> 46:14.810]  It announced it was test optional before COVID.
[46:15.410 --> 46:16.270]  What does that mean?
[46:16.470 --> 46:18.610]  Does that mean it's easier to get in the University of Chicago now?
[46:18.690 --> 46:19.090]  Of course not.
[46:19.510 --> 46:24.930]  It just means if you're not going to submit test scores, you better be excellent in the things that you are submitting.
[46:25.670 --> 46:30.050]  Test flexible means it's up to you what kind of test to submit.
[46:30.210 --> 46:37.070]  You could submit an SAT or an ACT, but you could also submit, say, an SAC subject test or an AP subject test.
[46:37.610 --> 46:39.190]  A la carte, kind of up to you.
[46:39.450 --> 46:45.310]  Test blind is student can't even have the opportunity to submit scores.
[46:45.630 --> 46:47.290]  You know, they won't look at them.
[46:48.450 --> 47:01.310]  And an interesting development in the past couple of years, kind of, again, indicating where the country may be headed, is that the California, the UC system, the biggest state college network in the country, is now test blind.
[47:01.510 --> 47:06.690]  Like, you cannot submit scores to UC, you know, pick Berkeley, Santa Barbara, whatever.
[47:07.790 --> 47:10.030]  So, that's pretty significant.
[47:11.110 --> 47:18.130]  The College Board, last year, announced another complete rehaul of its test, being rolled out 2023.
[47:19.570 --> 47:21.530]  Internationally, a digital SAT.
[47:21.910 --> 47:24.250]  So, this talk is hacking the SAT.
[47:24.490 --> 47:27.350]  Imagine literally hacking a digital SAT.
[47:27.770 --> 47:31.570]  They're alleging that it'll be greater security, but I'm skeptical.
[47:31.890 --> 47:33.610]  We'll see what that looks like.
[47:34.110 --> 47:35.710]  And that's kind of where we're headed.
[47:35.710 --> 47:40.190]  So, I think I do have a few minutes for questions, if there are any from the audience.
[47:40.410 --> 47:42.010]  And I'll be milling around in the back later.
[47:43.030 --> 47:43.870]  But, thank you.
[47:52.170 --> 47:52.570]  Hi.
[47:52.830 --> 47:56.050]  This talk was great and a little bit triggering for, like, high school memories.
[47:57.630 --> 48:09.670]  I'm curious, like, if you've seen, you know, like, the College Board and other, like, test writers reacting to these hacks, and, like, changing their strategies, like, a little more than the, like, D is the more popular answer than C.
[48:09.670 --> 48:09.690]  Absolutely.
[48:12.070 --> 48:25.870]  So, we're in a space now where there's, like, you know, I'm doing this with my little boutique testing company, and there's a thousand other companies where they're gonna have their own hacks and maybe even publishing books and things like that.
[48:25.870 --> 48:40.770]  And so, I think the only way in which the College Board is responding, if they are, is by just reinventing the test periodically and just, like, throwing away the whole thing and just, like, okay, well, now try this.
[48:40.770 --> 48:43.090]  And then it's always just kind of this game.
[48:43.270 --> 48:44.430]  They reinvent the test.
[48:44.750 --> 48:49.570]  The test makers and the test prep people kind of disassemble it and figure it out.
[48:49.670 --> 48:51.870]  And then they throw it out again and start over again.
[48:52.070 --> 48:54.930]  Like, it might get to the point where the test is thrown out completely.
[48:55.970 --> 48:57.190]  That would be great.
[48:57.390 --> 48:59.450]  I know I profit from it, but I hate this thing.
[48:59.610 --> 49:00.550]  So, good riddance, you know?
[49:01.430 --> 49:01.950]  Thanks.
[49:02.270 --> 49:02.370]  Yeah.
[49:07.160 --> 49:08.280]  I was curious.
[49:08.320 --> 49:13.100]  So, you mentioned something at the beginning about the history of SATs.
[49:13.880 --> 49:22.680]  What kind of, like, what kind of sparked the, like, the need for SATs?
[49:22.780 --> 49:25.180]  Like, what, why were they made?
[49:25.180 --> 49:36.920]  So, the origin story is the College Board, which now includes pretty much every college and university and, like, accredited colleges, at least, in the country.
[49:37.040 --> 49:44.800]  It was originally formed by, like, 12 colleges, like, 12 elite colleges, some ivies, some non-ivies, like, East Coast schools.
[49:44.800 --> 50:00.780]  And this is the early 1900s where, unfortunately, like, eugenics was fashionable and intelligence tests were just lifting off the ground, sort of, kind of, related to that interest.
[50:00.780 --> 50:17.580]  And the, I believe, the original author of the SAT that they were hired was a eugenicist, but it was, like, kind of, the reason they had it was to, like, sort of cull the applicant pool.
[50:17.580 --> 50:44.000]  And then it kind of evolved to a place that was at least supposed to be the opposite of that in terms of creating a more meritocracy base for college admissions where, okay, this is an objective score that we can lean on and, you know, access and things like that and relationships among rich people don't matter as much necessarily.
[50:44.960 --> 50:47.720]  And then it's taken a long winding path from there.
[50:49.260 --> 50:50.580]  Hope I answered that.
[50:53.480 --> 50:53.900]  Hi.
[50:54.160 --> 50:54.460]  Hi.
[50:54.520 --> 50:55.380]  Excellent presentation.
[50:55.960 --> 51:05.220]  I Was You 20 years ago had, I guess, what you're calling a boutique SAT prep program probably from 2005 to about 2015 before I retired.
[51:05.900 --> 51:08.740]  It's really great work you're doing, but I do think your days are numbered.
[51:08.980 --> 51:12.100]  I think that at a certain point they're going to phase out the test and bring something else in.
[51:12.100 --> 51:14.620]  But a specific question to you.
[51:15.960 --> 51:20.120]  What do you think of the SAT subject tests, which you only spoke of at the very end?
[51:20.640 --> 51:22.480]  Do you think that they carry any weight?
[51:22.620 --> 51:27.420]  Do you think that it's worth students putting time and effort in to take those tests?
[51:28.320 --> 51:34.300]  Yeah, I mean, so certainly schools, you know, require them, require one or two subject tests.
[51:34.300 --> 51:36.900]  So, you know, yeah.
[51:37.200 --> 51:39.960]  And they are multiple choice and format.
[51:40.180 --> 51:48.360]  Like, they're maybe a little less susceptible to outright just, you know, bypassing content than the SAT, which is a broader test.
[51:48.940 --> 51:53.680]  But any multiple choice test has some degree of this vulnerability.
[51:54.920 --> 52:02.640]  I'm right now working with a teacher, a math teacher, that needs to take the Praxis test, this professional exam, demonstrating content knowledge.
[52:02.780 --> 52:04.340]  And I'm going through some of these tricks with him.
[52:04.340 --> 52:11.840]  So, you know, ETS is the nonprofit that the College Board kind of farms out the design of these tests.
[52:12.020 --> 52:14.120]  They make the SAT subject test.
[52:14.200 --> 52:15.460]  They make the AP test.
[52:15.560 --> 52:16.560]  They make the Praxis exam.
[52:16.720 --> 52:19.580]  So, yeah, there's a wide network of applicability.
[52:19.720 --> 52:19.880]  Absolutely.
[52:20.080 --> 52:27.840]  So, one of the things, just to piggyback on that, that I've moved on to after the SAT prep is preparing the teachers for their professional exams.
[52:27.840 --> 52:29.440]  I think that's a really interesting space, too.
[52:30.000 --> 52:30.720]  Quick comment.
[52:31.060 --> 52:36.980]  In my day, the SAT multiple choice questions were A through E, not just A through D.
[52:37.140 --> 52:39.080]  So, that added a layer of complexity.
[52:39.280 --> 52:44.640]  I would always tell students, when it comes to the guessing, just pick one letter and guess that the whole way through.
[52:44.800 --> 52:44.940]  Right.
[52:45.680 --> 52:46.620]  Yeah, same thing.
[52:46.780 --> 52:51.980]  And the ACT, again, like the sister test to the SAT, almost everything I said applies to that as well.
[52:53.420 --> 52:55.480]  That's a five choice, multiple choice test.
[52:55.740 --> 52:56.120]  And, yep.
[52:56.380 --> 52:56.460]  Okay.
[52:56.700 --> 52:57.040]  I gotta go.
[52:57.260 --> 52:57.560]  Thank you.
[52:58.200 --> 52:58.660]  Thank you.