SparkNotes: the scourge of the SAT reading section
"Yes, but describe the setting in the Lord of the Rings," I ask.
The student gives me a vague recap of the entire setting of Middle Earth, including stuff he shouldn't be able to know from the first two chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring.
"No. I mean in the first chapter. Where do the first scenes take place?" I reel in the net.
He couldn't do it. He couldn't tell me about The Shire, or the party field, or even Bag End. A book that is nothing but rich, detailed description of scenery, he could describe nothing.
With a nervous laugh, he admitted to reading SparkNotes.
His SAT reading scores, of course, were crap.
After three years of SAT tutoring, I've learned to expect this. When I see a low reading score combined with a startlingly low vocabulary score (about 43-53% on the vocab sentence completions is very common) I know I have a student who's short circuited his or her education with SparkNotes.
Some have never read a single book assigned to them.
SparkNotes dumbs the vocabulary down and explains the plot, setting, theme in simple terms. No complex sentences, nothing tough. As a result, these student can't handle college level reading. They don't do well on the SAT and get exactly the score they earned.
At my school, if you were caught using SparkNotes, you got an instant F.
Also posted at http://icarus.dreamwidth.org, comment wherever you please.
The student gives me a vague recap of the entire setting of Middle Earth, including stuff he shouldn't be able to know from the first two chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring.
"No. I mean in the first chapter. Where do the first scenes take place?" I reel in the net.
He couldn't do it. He couldn't tell me about The Shire, or the party field, or even Bag End. A book that is nothing but rich, detailed description of scenery, he could describe nothing.
With a nervous laugh, he admitted to reading SparkNotes.
His SAT reading scores, of course, were crap.
After three years of SAT tutoring, I've learned to expect this. When I see a low reading score combined with a startlingly low vocabulary score (about 43-53% on the vocab sentence completions is very common) I know I have a student who's short circuited his or her education with SparkNotes.
Some have never read a single book assigned to them.
SparkNotes dumbs the vocabulary down and explains the plot, setting, theme in simple terms. No complex sentences, nothing tough. As a result, these student can't handle college level reading. They don't do well on the SAT and get exactly the score they earned.
At my school, if you were caught using SparkNotes, you got an instant F.
Also posted at http://icarus.dreamwidth.org, comment wherever you please.