端木·宇 2008-6-19 20:41
General Test-Taking Strategies
Most of these “strategies” are common sense; many of them you alreadyknow. But we’re including them anyway because it’s amazing how a timedtest can warp and mangle common sense. If you review anything in theminutes before taking the test, review these strategies.
[b]General Hint 1: Be Calm[/b]
The best way to do poorly on a test is topsych yourself out. Physics in particular calls for cool, systematicthinking: if your mind starts thrashing about wildly, it will have ahard time settling on the right answers. There are a number ofpreventative measures you can take, beginning weeks, or even months,before the test date. Buying this book was a good start: it’sreassuring to see all the information you’ll need to ace the test in acompact, manageable form. But there are a number of other things youought to keep in mind:
Study in advance.
If you’ve studied at regular intervalsleading up to the test, and don’t do all your cramming the nightbefore, the information will sit more securely in your mind.
Be well rested.
Get a good night’s sleep on the two nightsleading up to the test. If you’re frazzled or wired, you’re going tohave a harder time buckling down and concentrating when it reallycounts.
Come up for air.
Don’t assume that the best way to take anhour-long test is to spend the full hour nose-to-nose with the testquestions. If you lift your head occasionally, look about you, and takea deep breath, you’ll return to the test with a clearer mind. You’lllose maybe ten seconds of your total test-taking time, but you’ll beall the more focused for the other fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds.
[b] General Hint 2: Fill in Your Answers Carefully[/b]
This is very important. People make mistakesfilling in their answer sheets and it can cost them big-time. This slipup occurs most frequently after you skip a question. If you leftquestion 43 blank, and then unthinkingly put the answer to question 44into row 43, you could start a long, painful chain of wrong answers.Don’t do this.
Some test prep books advise that you fill inyour answer sheet five questions at a time rather than one at a time.Some suggest that you fill out each oval as you answer the question. Wethink you should fill out the answer sheet in whatever way feels mostnatural to you, but make sure you’re careful while doing it. In ouropinion, the best way to ensure that you’re being careful is to talk toyourself: as you figure out an answer in the test booklet and transferit over to the answer sheet ovals, say to yourself: “Number 23, B.Number 24, E. Number 25, A.”
[b] General Hint 3: Pace Yourself[/b]
At the very least, aim to look at everyquestion on the test. You can’t afford to lose points because youdidn’t have the time to look at a question you could have easilyanswered. You can spend an average of forty-eight seconds on eachquestion, though you’ll probably breeze through some in ten seconds anddwell on others for two minutes. Knowing how to pace yourself is acritical skill—and these three guidelines should help:
Don’t dwell on any one question for too long.
If you’ve spent a couple minutes laboringover the question, you might just want to make a note of it and moveon. If you feel the answer is on the tip of your tongue, it might comemore easily if you just let it rest and come back to it later. Not onlyis it demoralizing to spend five minutes on a single question, but italso eats up precious time in which you might have answered a number ofeasier questions.
Nail the easy questions.
As we said in the previous chapter, the testquestions get progressively harder as you go along. Nonetheless, therewill be some tough ones thrown in right at the start, and you’ll findgiveaways right up until the end. If you dwell too long on toughquestions, you jeopardize your chances of looking at every question andgaining points for the easy ones. Remember: you get as many points foranswering an easy question as a difficult one, and you get a lot morepoints for five quickly answered easy questions than for onehard-earned victory.
Skip the unfamiliar.
If you encounter a question you can’t makeheads or tails of, just skip it. Don’t sweat too hard trying to sortout what’s going on. If you have time at the end, come back to it andsee if you can make an educated guess. Your first priority should be toget all the easy questions, and your second priority should be to workthrough the questions you can solve with some difficulty. Unfamiliarmaterial should be at the bottom of your list of priorities.
[b] General Hint 4: Set a Target Score[/b]
You can make the job of pacing yourself mucheasier if you go into the test knowing how many questions you have toanswer correctly in order to earn the score you want. So, what score doyou want? Obviously, you should strive for the best score possible, butalso be realistic: consider how much you know about physics and howwell you do, generally, on SAT-type tests. You should also do a littleresearch and find out what counts as a good score for the collegesyou’re applying to: is it a 620? a 680? Talk to the admissions officesof the colleges you might want to attend, do a little research incollege guidebooks, or talk to your guidance counselor. Find out theaverage score of students admitted to the schools of your choice, andset your target score above it (you want to be above average, right?).Then take a look at the chart we showed you before. You can score:
800 if you answered 68 right, 7 wrong, and left 0 blank
750 if you answered 58 right, 12 wrong, and left 5 blank
700 if you answered 51 right, 13 wrong, and left 11 blank
650 if you answered 43 right, 16 wrong, and left 16 blank
600 if you answered 36 right, 19 wrong, and left 20 blank
Suppose the average score on SAT II Physicsfor the school you’re interested in is 650. Set your target at about700. To get that score, you need to get 51 questions right, whichleaves you room to get 13 wrong and leave 11 blank. In other words, youcan leave a number of tough questions blank, get a bunch more wrong,and still get the score you want. As long as you have some idea of howmany questions you need to answer—bearing in mind that you’ll likelyget some questions wrong—you can pace yourself accordingly. Takingpractice tests is the best way to work on your pacing.
If you find yourself effortlessly hittingyour target score when you take the practice tests, don’t just patyourself on the back. Set a higher target score and start aiming forthat one. The purpose of buying this book and studying for the test isto improve your score as much as possible, so be sure to push yourlimits.
[b] General Hint 5: Know What You’re Being Asked[/b]
You can’t know the answer until you know thequestion. This might sound obvious, but many a point has been lost bythe careless student who scans the answer choices hastily beforeproperly understanding the question. Take the following example:
Two positively charged particles, onetwice as massive as the other, aremoving in the same circular orbit ina magnetic field. Which lawexplains to us why the less massiveparticle moves at twice the speed ofthe more massive particle?
(A)Coulomb’s Law
(B)Conservation of angular momentum
(C)Hooke’s Law
(D)The ideal gas law
(E)Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
The hasty student will notice that thequestion is about charged particles, and see “Coulomb’s Law” as thefirst answer choice. Without further ado, the student answers [b]A[/b] and loses a quarter of a point.
A more careful student will not just read the question, but will take a moment to [i]understand[/i]the question before glancing at the answer choices. This student willrealize that the question ultimately deals with particles moving incircular orbits, and the relative speeds of these particles. Whether ornot these particles are charged is irrelevant: you’re facing a problemof rotational motion, not of electric forces. Once you’ve recognizedwhat you’re dealing with, you will have little trouble in correctlyanswering [b]B[/b].
[b] General Hint 6: Know How to Guess[/b]
ETS doesn’t take off 1 /4of a point for each wrong answer in order to punish you for guessing.They do it so as not to reward you for blind guessing. Suppose that,without looking at the questions at all, you just randomly enteredresponses in the first 20 spaces on your answer sheet. Because there’sa 20% chance of guessing correctly on any given question, odds are youwould guess right for four questions and wrong for 16 questions. Yourraw score for those 20 questions would then be: [img]http://www.24en.com/d/file/sat/sat2/physics/2008-01-24/6d98c6a2d80ab3977139475e12386b81.gif[/img].
You would be no better off and no worse off than if you’d left those twenty spaces blank.
Now suppose in each of the first 20questions you are able to eliminate just one possible answer choice, sothat you guess with a 25% chance of being right. Odds are, you’d getfive questions right and 15 questions wrong, giving you a raw score of:[img]http://www.24en.com/d/file/sat/sat2/physics/2008-01-24/ba0147447c326fa89f325b127a85258a.gif[/img].
The lesson to be learned here is that blindguessing doesn’t help, but educated guessing does. If you can eliminateeven one of the five possible answer choices, you should guess. We’lldiscuss how to eliminate answer choices on certain special kinds ofquestions in [b]Physics Hint 5: Eliminate Wrong Answers[/b].
Most of these “strategies” are common sense; many of them you alreadyknow. But we’re including them anyway because it’s amazing how a timedtest can warp and mangle common sense. If you review anything in theminutes before taking the test, review these strategies.
[b]General Hint 1: Be Calm[/b]
The best way to do poorly on a test is topsych yourself out. Physics in particular calls for cool, systematicthinking: if your mind starts thrashing about wildly, it will have ahard time settling on the right answers. There are a number ofpreventative measures you can take, beginning weeks, or even months,before the test date. Buying this book was a good start: it’sreassuring to see all the information you’ll need to ace the test in acompact, manageable form. But there are a number of other things youought to keep in mind:
Study in advance.
If you’ve studied at regular intervalsleading up to the test, and don’t do all your cramming the nightbefore, the information will sit more securely in your mind.
Be well rested.
Get a good night’s sleep on the two nightsleading up to the test. If you’re frazzled or wired, you’re going tohave a harder time buckling down and concentrating when it reallycounts.
Come up for air.
Don’t assume that the best way to take anhour-long test is to spend the full hour nose-to-nose with the testquestions. If you lift your head occasionally, look about you, and takea deep breath, you’ll return to the test with a clearer mind. You’lllose maybe ten seconds of your total test-taking time, but you’ll beall the more focused for the other fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds.
[b] General Hint 2: Fill in Your Answers Carefully[/b]
This is very important. People make mistakesfilling in their answer sheets and it can cost them big-time. This slipup occurs most frequently after you skip a question. If you leftquestion 43 blank, and then unthinkingly put the answer to question 44into row 43, you could start a long, painful chain of wrong answers.Don’t do this.
Some test prep books advise that you fill inyour answer sheet five questions at a time rather than one at a time.Some suggest that you fill out each oval as you answer the question. Wethink you should fill out the answer sheet in whatever way feels mostnatural to you, but make sure you’re careful while doing it. In ouropinion, the best way to ensure that you’re being careful is to talk toyourself: as you figure out an answer in the test booklet and transferit over to the answer sheet ovals, say to yourself: “Number 23, B.Number 24, E. Number 25, A.”
[b] General Hint 3: Pace Yourself[/b]
At the very least, aim to look at everyquestion on the test. You can’t afford to lose points because youdidn’t have the time to look at a question you could have easilyanswered. You can spend an average of forty-eight seconds on eachquestion, though you’ll probably breeze through some in ten seconds anddwell on others for two minutes. Knowing how to pace yourself is acritical skill—and these three guidelines should help:
Don’t dwell on any one question for too long.
If you’ve spent a couple minutes laboringover the question, you might just want to make a note of it and moveon. If you feel the answer is on the tip of your tongue, it might comemore easily if you just let it rest and come back to it later. Not onlyis it demoralizing to spend five minutes on a single question, but italso eats up precious time in which you might have answered a number ofeasier questions.
Nail the easy questions.
As we said in the previous chapter, the testquestions get progressively harder as you go along. Nonetheless, therewill be some tough ones thrown in right at the start, and you’ll findgiveaways right up until the end. If you dwell too long on toughquestions, you jeopardize your chances of looking at every question andgaining points for the easy ones. Remember: you get as many points foranswering an easy question as a difficult one, and you get a lot morepoints for five quickly answered easy questions than for onehard-earned victory.
Skip the unfamiliar.
If you encounter a question you can’t makeheads or tails of, just skip it. Don’t sweat too hard trying to sortout what’s going on. If you have time at the end, come back to it andsee if you can make an educated guess. Your first priority should be toget all the easy questions, and your second priority should be to workthrough the questions you can solve with some difficulty. Unfamiliarmaterial should be at the bottom of your list of priorities.
[b] General Hint 4: Set a Target Score[/b]
You can make the job of pacing yourself mucheasier if you go into the test knowing how many questions you have toanswer correctly in order to earn the score you want. So, what score doyou want? Obviously, you should strive for the best score possible, butalso be realistic: consider how much you know about physics and howwell you do, generally, on SAT-type tests. You should also do a littleresearch and find out what counts as a good score for the collegesyou’re applying to: is it a 620? a 680? Talk to the admissions officesof the colleges you might want to attend, do a little research incollege guidebooks, or talk to your guidance counselor. Find out theaverage score of students admitted to the schools of your choice, andset your target score above it (you want to be above average, right?).Then take a look at the chart we showed you before. You can score:
800 if you answered 68 right, 7 wrong, and left 0 blank
750 if you answered 58 right, 12 wrong, and left 5 blank
700 if you answered 51 right, 13 wrong, and left 11 blank
650 if you answered 43 right, 16 wrong, and left 16 blank
600 if you answered 36 right, 19 wrong, and left 20 blank
Suppose the average score on SAT II Physicsfor the school you’re interested in is 650. Set your target at about700. To get that score, you need to get 51 questions right, whichleaves you room to get 13 wrong and leave 11 blank. In other words, youcan leave a number of tough questions blank, get a bunch more wrong,and still get the score you want. As long as you have some idea of howmany questions you need to answer—bearing in mind that you’ll likelyget some questions wrong—you can pace yourself accordingly. Takingpractice tests is the best way to work on your pacing.
If you find yourself effortlessly hittingyour target score when you take the practice tests, don’t just patyourself on the back. Set a higher target score and start aiming forthat one. The purpose of buying this book and studying for the test isto improve your score as much as possible, so be sure to push yourlimits.
[b] General Hint 5: Know What You’re Being Asked[/b]
You can’t know the answer until you know thequestion. This might sound obvious, but many a point has been lost bythe careless student who scans the answer choices hastily beforeproperly understanding the question. Take the following example:
Two positively charged particles, onetwice as massive as the other, aremoving in the same circular orbit ina magnetic field. Which lawexplains to us why the less massiveparticle moves at twice the speed ofthe more massive particle?
(A)Coulomb’s Law
(B)Conservation of angular momentum
(C)Hooke’s Law
(D)The ideal gas law
(E)Heisenberg’s uncertainty principl
The hasty student will notice that thequestion is about charged particles, and see “Coulomb’s Law” as thefirst answer choice. Without further ado, the student answers [b]A[/b] and loses a quarter of a point.
A more careful student will not just read the question, but will take a moment to [i]understand[/i]the question before glancing at the answer choices. This student willrealize that the question ultimately deals with particles moving incircular orbits, and the relative speeds of these particles. Whether ornot these particles are charged is irrelevant: you’re facing a problemof rotational motion, not of electric forces. Once you’ve recognizedwhat you’re dealing with, you will have little trouble in correctlyanswering [b]B[/b].
[b] General Hint 6: Know How to Guess[/b]
ETS doesn’t take off 1 /4of a point for each wrong answer in order to punish you for guessing.They do it so as not to reward you for blind guessing. Suppose that,without looking at the questions at all, you just randomly enteredresponses in the first 20 spaces on your answer sheet. Because there’sa 20% chance of guessing correctly on any given question, odds are youwould guess right for four questions and wrong for 16 questions. Yourraw score for those 20 questions would then be: [img]http://www.24en.com/d/file/sat/sat2/physics/2008-01-24/6d98c6a2d80ab3977139475e12386b81.gif[/img].
You would be no better off and no worse off than if you’d left those twenty spaces blank.
Now suppose in each of the first 20questions you are able to eliminate just one possible answer choice, sothat you guess with a 25% chance of being right. Odds are, you’d getfive questions right and 15 questions wrong, giving you a raw score of:[img]http://www.24en.com/d/file/sat/sat2/physics/2008-01-24/ba0147447c326fa89f325b127a85258a.gif[/img].
The lesson to be learned here is that blindguessing doesn’t help, but educated guessing does. If you can eliminateeven one of the five possible answer choices, you should guess. We’lldiscuss how to eliminate answer choices on certain special kinds ofquestions in [b]Physics Hint 5: Eliminate Wrong Answers[/b].
[b] Guessing as Partial Credit[/b]
Some students feel that guessing is likecheating—that guessing correctly means getting credit where none isdue. But instead of looking at guessing as an attempt to gainundeserved points, you should look at it as a form of partial credit.Suppose you’re stumped on the question we looked at earlier regardingthe charged particle moving in circular motion in a magnetic field.Though you don’t know the correct answer, you may know the answer isn’tthe ideal gas law, because the question doesn’t deal with gases in anyway. Suppose you also know that the answer isn’t Hooke’s Law, becauseHooke’s Law deals with force exerted by a spring, and there are nosprings in this question. Don’t you deserve something for that extraknowledge? Well, you do get something: when you look at this question,you can throw out [b]C[/b] and [b]D[/b] as answer choices, leaving youwith a one in three chance of getting the question right if you guess.Your extra knowledge gives you better odds of getting this questionright, exactly as extra knowledge should.
[b] Guessing as Partial Credit[/b]
Some students feel that guessing is likecheating—that guessing correctly means getting credit where none isdue. But instead of looking at guessing as an attempt to gainundeserved points, you should look at it as a form of partial credit.Suppose you’re stumped on the question we looked at earlier regardingthe charged particle moving in circular motion in a magnetic field.Though you don’t know the correct answer, you may know the answer isn’tthe ideal gas law, because the question doesn’t deal with gases in anyway. Suppose you also know that the answer isn’t Hooke’s Law, becauseHooke’s Law deals with force exerted by a spring, and there are nosprings in this question. Don’t you deserve something for that extraknowledge? Well, you do get something: when you look at this question,you can throw out [b]C[/b] and [b]D[/b] as answer choices, leaving youwith a one in three chance of getting the question right if you guess.Your extra knowledge gives you better odds of getting this questionright, exactly as extra knowledge should.
[[i] 本帖最后由 端木·宇 于 2008-6-19 20:44 编辑 [/i]]
