uh... the workshop last week for those who were here was called preparing for tests and
some people don't do well on tests because they don't prepare right so kind of address
that issue
today's workshop is test taking skills next week is almost like part two if you want to
call it that and i just wanted to let you know what uh... next week was going to be
about sometimes when people look at these two names
it doesn't tell them very much so this is the simple explanation
today i'm going to start with three general test strategies that would work for any test
you have
and then
i want to talk today about true false tests
and essay tests or any other kind of written tests
next week
at the more test taking skills workshop
i'm gonna give three more general strategies and then i'm gonna talk
almost all about multiple choice since that's kind of the
big most common type of uh... test question in college
so that's sort of the break down
and one other thing i want to say before we get into these right here is that um...
it's impossible for me to do a perfect job of explaining to people
how to be a great test taker and the reason is because
every class is different
every test is different every student is different and so i can't
address everything that you may struggle with sometimes on tests but what i'm gonna
give you today are things that have helped a lot of students to do better on tests in
the past so i'm just gonna
focus on those ok so uh... first of all
we're gonna spend about uh... fifteen minutes twenty minutes or so on this
there are three things that i always suggest to students
to help them do better on tests
and
if you by the way i should say this to if you don't
study for the test
nothing i am going to explain is going to help you these are not miracles that i'm going
to give you like don't have to study and you get a's
i'm not that good nobody is that good you have to put in the effort right but
here's the first one and this us surprises some people
i don't know why this is this is a mystery to me but a lot of students when they find
out that i teach study skills on how to be a better student
the first question they like to ask me
they kind of whisper
and they say
can i ask you something
and i say sure
could you tell me what's the smartest
best way that i could study on the morning of the test
what should i do
they're looking for you know like tricks and techniques or whatever and i give them a
really so i know the answer to that and what answer you think i give em nope it's
one word
and they don't like to hear it
this is we're talking about the morning of the test ok this is what i tell em
okay don't
and they look at me like
no you must have misunderstood me what should i do and again they're trying to get everything
possible well i'm gonna explain this to you in a second but
the basic policy that i always try to encourage students to do
is don't study on the morning of the test
there are a couple of exceptions to that that i'm going to give you in a minute
but this is the basic rule
okay so in other words when you go to sleep the night before a test usually
you should lie there thinking
it's done i did all the studying it's all up there it's not going anywhere and just let
your mind
rest for a while okay
um...
the reason that i usually suggest this is that bad things tend to happen to most people
when they study on the morning of the test leading up to
five minutes before the test
um... if you haven't studied at all
go ahead and get up at three in the morning and start cramming
that's not going to work very well but go ahead
but if you have studied here's what happens and i've had a lot of students tell me this
they get up on the morning of the test and they think ok i've already studied but
how about if i
study just a little more you know couldn't hurt so while they're eating breakfast or
something similar while they're waiting they actually
uh... open up their textbook or go to go to their notes and start just skimming through
everything they've already studied in all of that sounds okay
except really often what will happen
is that they'll look at something in their book or notes
something important and they'll look at it and think
oh
that's right i forgot all about that
and then the next thought they have is
what else did i forget
and they start
panicking they start kinda getting confused other people do something even worse they're
flipping through the book and they see something and they think oh i remember that
oh but that's not the way i remember it in other words i put it in there one way that doesn't
look right well all of that tends to uh...
hurt your confidence
hurt your ability to do well on the test and so
that's not a good thing to happen on the morning of the test now there are two exceptions to
this
the first one is a good one and this may apply to some of you in here if you have a test
that day but it's not until late in the day like three or four in the afternoon seven
at night something like that
it's not a bad idea for you when you get up to at least do a little bit of light review
not cramming not studying or anything but just a little review because if you get up
at seven or eight in the morning and your test is at seven at night
that's a lot of hours to pass without thinking about it at all so it wouldn't be bad to just kind
of
loosen up your brain a little
but if your test is at eight in the morning or nine ten eleven noon or whatever the first
few hours after you get up it's better to just
let good enough alone and just leave it alone
and then move on from there
the other exception
uh... is a bad one so if this ever happens to you your time management was terrible and
leading up to a test and that is if you go to bed the night before a test and you haven't
finished all your reading yet
go ahead and get up and start reading the next morning so for example if you have a
uh...
test on chapter five and six and seven
and when you go to bed the night before the test you've read all of five
half of six
you haven't even looked at chapter seven yet
you're in big trouble anyway but you might as well get up and start reading it's better
than nothing but again this is something that you would want to avoid at all costs so this
is the first strategy first general strategy and then the second one
i want you to help me with this a little bit
it involves two words
ok first one is the most obvious one you can't take a test if you don't arrive
but when
yeah early
and uh...
if there's ever a time
as a student that you're going to arrive early at the classroom
it's on the day of a test it's the smartest thing and so i wanted to ask you this 'cause i'm
always interested in people's ideas before i give you mine
uh... if you could set up your schedule perfectly how early
do you think would be perfect to arrive at the classroom on the day of the test
fifteen minutes
ten minutes any other
thirty minutes
uh... sometimes when i ask people the amount
keeps growing
okay and so i wanted to tell you before i put this up here that uh...
a lot of students have told me they like to get to a classroom
forty five minutes
an hour something like that before the test now if there's no other class in the room before
yours that means you can go in like an hour early and you have sort of the room to yourself well
if somebody shows up that early what are they likely going to do while they're waiting for
the test
they're gonna panic and they're going to
study
because it's right in front of em and here's what happens kind of imagine that the clock
is in front somewhere here
students have told me especially those who tend to get nervous when they take tests all
the way to very nervous
they tend to get to a test early and they sit there and study so that's
one mistake and they also keep checking the clock
and they look at it like
thirty minutes
twenty five minutes
twenty minutes and it's like the countdown to the electric chair starts to make them
more and more nervous which is not good your trying to minimize that as much as you can
so my suggestion to everybody always
is to arrive
five to fifteen minutes early and you may end up doing that normally in your classes but
as i said especially on the day of a test it's really important to do
now one of the things that i can tell you as a teacher and having looked at a lot
of teacher of uh... student tests over the years
uh... on average
people who are there at the beginning of a test
score higher
more uh... higher percentage pass a test
than people who show up late
and this is true even if somebody's one minute late
or five minutes late or ten minutes late doesn't matter they almost always score lower
and so one reason to get there a little early is so that
you're there for the entire test and have all the time you need that's kinda obvious
but there's another thing
and that is um...
quick question for you about this is that if you arrive five ten fifteen minutes
early
and you're not going to sit there studying
what are you going to do
for those last five ten fifteen minutes
yes both of those sound good to me uh... not take a nap or whatever that's probably
bad but relax and breathe
um... i don't know when you take your tests in college whether you are totally calm
all the way to
really nervous everybody's different but even if you're a little bit nervous one of the
things that's really good when you get there is to get make sure you have your scantron
and your pencil or whatever you need
and then just sit there and close your eyes and take
some deep breaths in-and-out
what most of the time when somebody's really nervous they're breathing changes and they
usually don't know that but it does change and what happens to the breathing
when you get nervous
it gets
uh... yeah
uh... i always described this like a dog panting although hopefully you don't look like that
but it's
like that like short
panting breaths and that's what happens when you get
really nervous well if you show up for a test
and you sit there and you think i'm nervous or i'm not nervous whatever you think
and you end up taking some deep breaths and this is the way your breathes sound and this
happens to students all the time
i've had students say
i don't think i'm nervous but
maybe i am let me try and so they do this
(inhale/exhale)
and then they
open their eyes and think
i think i need another one and another one and so you get your breathing under control
it doesn't mean you're not going to be nervous but it helps
also
big benefit
every time you take a really deep breath you're getting more oxygen to your brain
that's a good thing right before a test it's like you're opening up everything that's in
there
and so uh... this is the main reason for it
and then uh... wanted to
show you one other thing and then i'm gonna give you the third strategy
does anybody have a text book in here that i can borrow for uh...
just a minute
okay will be more okay
every semester that i teach here's what i see especially first test i walk in to give
the first test
take role
then two minutes to the test and half the students are sitting there with their scantron they're
looking at me
and just saying kind of like
ok here we go
other people frantically
studying
ok so they have their book open
or their notes and they're looking and they're looking at me
and trying to cram all this information in at the last minute and then finally here's
what i say
i say to everybody okay time for the test you need to close everything up put it off
to the side or on the floor
so half the people who are doing this say
and then they do it
but there's always at least one two three people who keep
the book open and they're still studying and they're looking at me and i finally say okay
you need to close it up and so this is what they do
and they say ok i'm ready
i think what's going through their mind is
i'm the smartest person in this class because i use every minute of study time until the
test but my attitude about studying in those last minutes right before the test is the
same one that i mentioned up here and that is unless you haven't studied at all
anything you see at the last minute in your book or notes is much more likely going to
do something
negative
than positive start to cause you to panic because you forgot something same example
as before so it's a lot better to just sit there
breathe relax ecetera and then there's one other idea that may sound a little bit
strange to you at first
but i always think this is a good idea too especially in a big classroom
when you go in
on the day of a test
and you're there five ten fifteen minutes early
that means hardly anybody's there so you have your choice of wherever to sit
where should you sit
and i've heard people say front back
the left the right people say all kinds of ideas well one little idea to throw out
there is front is good on the day of a test even if normally you sit somewhere else
and the main reason is this who gets their test first
usually people in the front and if you're in a classroom not like this but that has
you know uh... rows of chairs
you probably have the experience of being in the middle to back of a classroom and
the teacher
counts out ten copies and then the person gives nine behind them and they take for
ever to get the test back there and you're looking like this and by the time you get
it the people in the front have already been working for maybe a minute or two
and i know it's just a minute or two but it's a minute or two you're trying to get every advantage
you can
but the other suggestion that the official one is this
and that's
sit alone the anti-social usually socials good but in this case
sit alone
why is that
well uh... it's the same basic idea here and that is to avoid distraction and uh... avoid
confusion so i'm gonna give you two quick examples of this
in my first year of college i made a huge mistake twice
about one week apart and then i learned don't ever do that again and i don't know if this
is ever happened to anybody in here
but i walked into a classroom that was probably twice as big as this one
and i was about ten or fifteen minutes early
and hardly anybody was there they were just a few students kind of sprinkled in the classroom
and i for some reason walked
and sat right behind two students who were sitting together
and as i
closed my eyes to breathe and all that like i said before they started talking to each
other
and what do people usually talk about right before a test
yeah they talk about how nervous they are and they also talk about the... test you know
the information right well if i'm sitting there and they're like three feet in front
of me and i'm closing my eyes trying to mind my own business like be in my own world
i can't help but
here everything they're saying and the first time this happened one person said to
the other one something like this i can't remember the the name but it was like this
uh... who was john smith again
and my eyes were closed and i remember thinking
that's easy i know that one and the other person gave the wrong information about the wrong
person
said he's the one who did such and such which is wrong and i was thinking
i don't want to hear anything wrong before a test i'm just trying to keep the right information
in my head
the second time this happen it's about a week later and this was even worse i sat behind
two people different class
and they were talking to each other
and uh... one person said something like this
um... who was mary roberts again
and i remember thinking
who who are you talking about and the other person said oh
she was the one who did this and then this
and then after that she did this and this and explained this long thing and i opened my eyes
and i said
excuse me and they turn around i said who is that we never learned anybody like that
they said oh yeah it's
right there in chapter two
the heart attack begins
i'm thinking wait a minute i studied i didn't study that name at all
what other names didn't i study and now i'm starting to panic and here comes the teacher 0:17:07.790,0:17:09.150 saying are you ready
and i'm thinking
i thought i was a couple minutes ago that's a
horrible way to get started on a test to be doubting yourself
so all of this is designed to have you be relaxed and be in a good frame of mind when the
test starts ok one last thing about uh... getting to a test late uh
when a student comes late to one of my tests
often times maybe that's either five minutes late which doesn't sound like much
what they end up doing is this
everybody is sitting there quietly taking the test and they walk in
like this
and i just look at em and i think oh man you are headed for a disaster
uh... when you are rushing
your heart pounds your breathing goes faster and all that the same things that happen when
you're nervous so if you're nervous and you're running late
forget it and so you want to be there and when the test is given to you again be in really
good
focused frame of mind it doesn't guarantee that you're gonna get an a on every test
you take but if you don't do these things you have a tendency to get off to a bad start
and when you get off to a bad start usually it gets worse and worse after that
okay so these are three strategies and to give you three more next week when
we're talking about
more test taking skills does anybody have any questions about this before we move ahead yes
uh...
one of the things that uh... i hate to do is sort of put you off on this one of
the subjects that's covered in next week's workshop is sort of how to get your brain working again
if you start to blank out or get nervous 'cause that happens all the time and it's
no big deal if it happens you just need to
have a plan for how to
get it going again and that's one of the things i'm gonna explain next week so we have
to wait a week but that happens all the time so
any other questions
oh...that's good
uh...
uh... we're gonna talk about two
test question types for the rest of the workshop today
the first one is true false and so i'm going to put you to work on something in a minute
but i wanted to introduce true false this way uh... when i ask students this question i
usually get a weird look from them but i say out of all the different types of test
questions what's your favorite type
and most people say none
right but when they say a particular type almost everybody amazing number say
oh true false
and i say that's your favorite one why
and here's what they do
their thumb comes out i don't know what that is and they say
fifty-fifty
that's their answer it's like flip a coin
you know multiple choice is one out of four one out of five true false oh just fifty fifty
get the feeling and answer it
but true false can actually be among the most confusing and tricky questions of all and
that's what i wanted to kind of show you and talk with you about for a little bit today ok so
i'm gonna uh put you to work this is a test taking workshops so what am i going to have you do
yeah take a test and
my attitude is you can never take too many tests and people look and say you're
a teacher aren't you this is should be the most relaxing test you ever take in your
life because first you're not gonna turn it in
and it's not going to get graded it's just an illustrate some things ok and the other thing i'm going
to tell you two things
ten true false statements
want you to read each one carefully couple times and put t or f in the blank
right normal but the one thing i wanted to tell just so you understand this is
that the first five questions the first half of this little test
has to do with board games and card games
and if you read a few of these you may not even know what those games are
and so don't worry about it just look at it carefully and make your best guess i'm
not trying to test your knowledge of things which is what usually happens on a test
the last five questions are about study skills so everyone's kind of more i guess even on
that one so again you have to put your name on this you're not turning this into me but
i'm gonna give you about
maybe three minutes or so to work through these and i don't want you to go really really
fast but i don't want you to get stuck on one either so uh... just take a few minutes
to do these try to answer them the best you can
and then i'm going to use this as part of my uh... teaching in just a couple minutes
right now
whether you got all those right whether you missed half of them doesn't really matter for this
but what i wanted to say first
is to make sure everyone understands the most important thing about true false and that
is when you read a true false statement how much of it needs to be true in order for
you to mark true
yeah um all of it and so and the reason for that so a hundred percent that means that
if you read along true false statement in ninety percent of it was right and one little
part was wrong
its false it's gotta all be right so one of the worst things you could do as a test
taker is to read a true false statement kinda quickly nnn..
ok that's true
uh... okay that's false
because it's easy to overlook one word or one part of the word that can make the whole
thing false
so you actually want to slow way down
when you read true false and look at every word and even look at it twice
and make sure you
see everything and then answer ok now the second thing which is the main point of this
little quiz that i had you take is this
it's always good to be on the lookout for specific words in true false that have a tendency
to guide you
as to whether something is more likely true or false and so i want you to help me with
these will just kind of compile a list pretty quickly here in statement number one what
is the key word there
everyone
okay what does everyone mean
it means everyone ok how many exceptions
none ok when you see a word like that in the true false statement what is the answer usually
going to be
it's usually going to be false always false no
but usually and that's because most things in life have at least one exception and all
you have to do is think of one exception
and it makes the whole thing false and i'm gonna show you a little more about that in a minute
how about number two
right no one ok and no one
means
no one no exceptions it's the same exact idea as this
it's just on the other end so whenever you
see a word that has no exceptions to it it's very extreme
then all you have to do is say okay that is a danger word
so if i can think of one exception its false and if you can't think of any exceptions
mark true
but usually those are false ok and number three what's the word there
right frequently and why is this word better
in the true false statement than those other ones
right its its more kind of more reasonable and sort of like more in the middle
these are actually called in between qualifiers and these are one hundred percent qualifiers
and so other words like most
some
few
you can write a long list of these
these might be in the middle they might be leaning one way or another but because they
allow for exceptions they're more often true
and again it's not that these are always false and it's not that these are always true
but you need to be on the lookout for them ok number four i'm going to skip for a second
number five the word there is mostly and i can sort of stick a little l_ y_ on the end
uh... and then uh... number six there are two words there
what are the key words in number six
one of them is
always
and the other one is every and again this again allows for no exceptions so that means
that it is more likely to be false
but i did want to stop here for a second a lot of people get number six wrong
and probably some of you missed that and that's because teachers always tell you
don't leave anything blank you know even if you have to guess answer everything cause if
you leave it blank you're gonna get a zero
but remember all it takes is one exception to make it false uh... does anybody know
any test
you've ever taken or anybody ever takes where that's not true that you should always answer every
question
um... scantron is possible what i have in mind more is
most of you at one point in your life took a standardized test like the s_a_t_ and other
kinds of tests and on those tests they had the weirdest scoring ever you never experience
this in college
you get a point if you get it right
you lose a fraction of a point if you get it wrong and if you leave it blank if you don't
answer it at all what happens
nothing
they don't count it
well that's pretty rare right usually if you leave it blank its automatically wrong but all
it takes is one so again that's why you wanna notice those words number seven the word is
some which i have up here number eight i'll skip for a second how about nine and ten
what are the words there
never and
all
okay so again these lists can be much longer these are not the only words but
this idea of qualifiers hundred-percent qualifiers
inbetween qualifiers is very important to look out for ok and then the other thing
that i want to share with you about true false and i will get to uh... essays and other writing
that'll be the last topic today
number four and number eight
we skipped and that's because they deal with something different um... if you got number
four and number eight right
uh...either you were a lucky guesser or you knew what to do with them most people miss
one a lot of people miss both and the reason is easy if you look back at them
can't even figure out what they're saying
they're very confusing the way they're worded and the reason for that is because of
this problem that comes up a lot in true false and that is
double negatives so that means when you
see two words or parts of words that are in the negative in a statement
it makes your brain kind of twist like a pretzel and it makes it hard to even figure out what's
being asked and so when you look at number four
i want to encourage you to do something usually you can't do what i'm about to ask
you to on the test because teachers don't usually want you to write on the test booklet
you just have to do it mentally but you can do it physically 'cause this is yours
i want you to cross out the two negatives in sentence number four and those are not
and un just the un part
those are the two negatives so if you take those out and you read what's left it says
monopoly
is a suitable game
for children aged six and under
and if you don't know much about monopoly that wouldn't help but monopoly is a pretty
complicated game some adults can't even figure out how to play it so it's not really good
for a very small children that's why that's false and number eight is even more extreme than
that you could cross out the word not
and the out
part of without because that's the negative
and when you do that and you read what's left it says a test may be with
or have
poorly worded questions
is that true that a test may have poorly worded questions yes like that one and so that's
why that's true and when people see that they think
why didn't they just say it that way than i would have gotten it right i didn't even know that's
what they're asking again it's confusing
so uh... as i said usually you can't do it physically by crossing out but you could take words
out read what's left
and just see does it make more sense now
this won't always work like it won't solve the problem every time but a lot of times
it will
and once you take the negatives out and read what's left you think ok now i know what it's
asking and hopefully you've studied
correctly and as a result you do well on that
okay so there's a lot more that i could explain about true false but these are i think some
of the the most important ideas so we're going to spend the last part of the workshop talking
about essays and
that this is most people's least favorite kind of test if you love writing
and every time you get an esssay test you get excited
that's good
but you're kind of in the minority most people would rather fill in a bubble
on a scantron anytime rather than write so i'm gonna give you some ideas
and i have to tell you one really quick thing before we
start this
and that is everything that i'm gonna tell u in the next uh... ten to fifteen minutes
has nothing to do with english teachers
ok all of you have had english teachers before
and you know the way they are with your writing
they get out a magnifying glass and they find every little thing
and they're very picky about everything in the reason they are is they are trying to turn you
into the
good writers okay so that's their job
but most teachers when you write for them in college
they have a different way of looking at it than english teachers do and so the first thing
that i wanted to tell you is this i don't know if you're familiar with these terms or
not
but this is always an important place for me to start when it comes to essay tests
there are two types of tests questions that you get in your life
objective and subjective ok
uh... every question is one of those two
some tests have both on them depending
well objective the best way to remember that is that any
question that you can answer
by filling in a bubble on a scantron
is considered an objective questions so that would normally be multiple-choice true false
that kind of thing
uh... subjective is totally different and the most common type is essay although it could
include any kind of written assignment a report or anything like that
and the reason that i think this is important to know is this
all of you have done scantron test before and when you get your scantron back
you see
pink lines hopefully not too many of them but pink lines right and those are all the
wrong answers and then you
see a score
stamped on there
that's your score
it has nothing to do with the teachers opinion
view anything else it's just whatever you get you get and that's why it's called objective but
subjective is totally different from that it is up to the mood and the opinion of the
teacher
and they're looking for certain things but there are certain things students do all the
time in writing that drive teachers crazy
and if you drive your teacher crazy
what happens to your grade
yeah it's just starts
pretty soon it's circling the drain at the bottom so if you know ahead of time what bothers
a teacher
you'll try not to do it and then hopefully that should help your grade to be better so
that's my job in the next several minutes to tell you some of the things that teachers
really hate to see in writing
and then if you know those you'll be careful to avoid them and that's the whole point okay
so the first thing is this
want to ask you this from your own personal experience or just a guess
if you got an essay question on a test and then you had room to write on the front
and the back or a blue book or anything else
what do you think most students do as
soon as they read
the essay question what's the very next thing they do
yeah they start writing
which sounds like the right thing to do but usually that's a huge mistake they read
the question and think oh..oh.. and then they just here we go and start writing but the
problem with that is unless you're the greatest writer in the world what ends up usually happening
is that you write about something and then you think
okay that's about it about that and then you go on to something else
and then halfway through that
you remember something else about the first thing
and your paper starts turning into a
mess
if you're a i always tell students this if you're ever with a teacher
and you're watching them watching their face while they correct your writing and you
see them they're on the second page you see them do this like that
you can just sit there and go there went my grade right down the tubes because they're looking
thinking wait a minute
he talked about that over there and now he's
talking about it again and you're making the teacher work
way too hard okay
so a much better thing to do than this is this
you get the essay question from the teacher and you're ready to go and before you do anything
before you write any part of your answer
it's a really good idea for you to write a really short
really short outline
and i don't mean roman numerals and all nothing complicated like that but just maybe
up in the corner of your paper somewhere
you can just number from like one to three
and then jot down a phrase here and a phrase here and a phrase here and what are these things
that you're writing yeah they're the main ideas the topics that you want to make sure you include in your answer ok if you do that if you spend like thirty seconds
to a minute sort of planning these are my three and i'm going to do that one first
that one second and then i'm gonna finish with that one then what you did is you
took a minute to plan
and you've heard the saying
it's really good to think before you speak
and we'd all be in better shape if we remember that
it's also good to think before you write and so you take one minute doing this
everybody else is just writing like crazy
but when you start writing
you write about your first topic
you write about the second one you write about the third one and then when you turn it in
even if your writings not perfect
it's so easy for the teacher to follow it's like your guiding them through and if you
were a teacher
and you were correcting a lot of papers and you had to try to
figure one out
i think you'd have the same reaction so if you just deliver it in a way that's very clear
and organized that really helps and so just writing a brief outline can help a lot especially
if writing is not your greatest strength
ok the other things that i want to share with you over these last few minutes are on
this handout and i'm not going to be able to go through all of this you can certainly
take this with you and uh... read through it a little bit more at a later time there's
a lot of good
advice on here but i just want to hit
on about three or four things that i think are maybe the most important on here
um... the first one when you look at the top of the page is
it says the most crucial task you have when preparing for
and then taking an essay exam is to ask your teacher exactly what he or she wants you to
include in your answer
and how you're supposed to write it and this is extremely important because essay tests are
subjective as i mentioned and each teachers unique
in terms of what he or she wants to see and doesn't want to see on your paper
if every teacher had the exact same
rules for writing
life would be a lot easier but every teacher has different rules and again we're not talking
so much about english teachers here
okay so here's what i want to show you a couple of things first of all
i have talked to a lot of teachers who are not english teachers but who have their students
write and i have asked them what bothers you the most about student writing
number one is what i just explained here writing is just all over the place and not organized
but the second thing
that drives teachers crazy so this is good for you to know
has to do with number one under the general guidelines
it says read the question carefully
and watch for instruction words well what are those
well turn over to the back i want to show you some examples here
this is not a complete list there are a lot more than this but you see the words compare
down to summarize then you see the meaning for each one
every essay question you ever get in your life is going to have one of these words in
it or another word that means something similar
and what most students do which lowers their great everytime is they ignore that
okay so here's my example look at the second word on the list that says contrast and you
see the meaning of that ok
imagine that you're in an english class
it's a literature class you've been reading stories and books all semester long
and when you go in for your final exam and here's the final exam teacher says
contrast this character from this book with this character from this book
so that's your essay
well if you're like most students
you ignore that word and you write everything you know about that character
and everything you know about that character you just throw it all on the paper and then
when the teacher reads it they read and say oh this is all good stuff
good stuff
d or c or whatever and why are they giving you a bad grade if everything you wrote was good
because what it did you do wrong
yeah you didn't follow the instructions they didn't want the whole life story of those
two characters they wanted you to think of maybe three or four ways in which they were
different
and do that
so whenever a teacher uses one of these words
they're not just sort of throwing the word out there they want you to answer it a specific
way so one of the smartest things you can do
is before you've ever even done this before you ever
do your outline
read the question really carefully a couple times and ask yourself
where's the instruction word and when you see it
think for a couple seconds and think what exactly does that mean
and then try to answer it that way and if you're able to do that you usually can get a higher
score because you're following a simple direction
okay back on the front side i wanna give you a
couple of other ideas
number four under the general guidelines
says incorporate the question into your first sentence and briefly state your answer to
the question and so alot of teachers really like this
um... if i give you an essay question that says
list and describe several reasons why you enjoy living in the southern california area
okay assuming you do
the way you start your answer is
uh... i enjoy living in the southern california area for several reasons including the nice
weather
the nearness to the beach and mountains and the am closest to my family and relatives
so you repeat the question
and you kind of give your answer
but if you do that
you gave it all away
in the first sentence
what are you going to do you do for the whole rest of the essay
you kind of
gave it all away so what do you do
write yeah write more but what kind of writing do you do well
number five
in the rest of your essay develop the points that explain your answer and provide enough
details to show that you know the material well
this is something that i always think is good news for everybody to know about i've talked
to teachers a lot and i'd ask them when you're reading a student paper and it's you're
impressed it's good
how do you decide whether to give the person an a or a b because those are both you know really
good grades
and the answer almost every teacher gives me is the d word
which is details if a teacher gives you a b on something that you wrote they're basically
saying there's nothing big that you did wrong at all it's
strong good paper
but how do you get from there to there it's by slowing down and giving more details
and examples 'cause that shows that you know more about the subject and it's not just writing
forever for the sake of writing but it's giving more
when a person is really brief and quick and to the point most teachers don't like that as
much as someone who develops their points and so i think this is good for you to know
and then the last thing that i wanted to mention is over on the back side
on the bottom and again many things i could say here
but i just wanted to mentioned the bottom two number five and six these are kind of favorites
of mine to talk about number five says is the writing mechanically grammatically and
stylistically correct
what does that mean well again we're not talking about english teachers here i've talked to some
teachers and i say what bothers you about student writing and you know what some teachers
say first thing
besides what i said here they say spelling
i hate spelling mistakes
okay this is their own sort of
pet peeve
if you're not the greatest speller in the world and your teacher hates spelling mistakes
that's not a very good combination and if you have to do writing in class what should
you do to solve the problem
one of them is to ask the teacher can i bring a dictionary to use when i take it if they
say yes then that solves the problem
but what if they say
no closed book close all books and what do you do
and here's the answer i know this sounds dumb but it's works
only use words you know how to spell
okay so while you're writing and you're about to write a word you think is that
e i or i e
don't use it
you're just trying again to keep the teacher sort of in a good mood while they read your
paper and if you do things that just kind of jab at them it tends to affect your
score at least a little bit and then the last part of this is uh... number six is the writing
at least fairly neat or legible um... one of my skills as a teacher as i can read almost
anything
after all these years but some students i'm convinced are training to be doctors
you know what doctors writing looks like no other human being can read that
and if you're at a point where you finish an essay
and you have five minutes left go back and reread it and i know you can read your
writing
i don't know how many other people can it depends on how nice it is
but uh... if you end up looking at a couple words on there and even you your thinking
what is that word
try to fix them
and these are just a minor things but again you're trying to deliver a paper in such a
way that the teacher can very easily and comfortably read they don't have to
strain
and that tends to help your grade even a tiny bit in your looking for every advantage you
can get
okay so lots more i could say but well you can read through the rest on your own
then i appreciate you coming today
next week uh... multiple-choice test anxiety kind of all of that that we'll talk about so
i hope to see you then