Princeton Review PSAT Prep Is Wrong about Passive Voice

[abbyblah1]

I understand why you are saying that that the PR books and classes may not always be ideal, but do you think it is still worth it to pay for a class as long as I also supplament it by doing practice tests in the College Board books?

[TestingIsEasy]

@abbyblah1 Hi! Personally, I wouldn't, but I'm probably biased :) It might be better to find some people who have already taken the specific course you're planning to take, with the specific instructor, and ask them what their experiences were like. As far as supplementing with real College Board tests, I highly, highly recommend that, no matter how you decide to prepare. If you're not practicing with real test questions, you simply have no legitimate way to know if you're improving. Good luck!

[TestingIsEasy]

You're certainly welcome to teach it however you want, but if you teach the student that the problem with (A) is the passive voice, you'll have to explain why the passive voice is acceptable in some questions and not acceptable in others, or else you'll find yourself in the position of saying that some aspects of the test are arbitrary. I view the test as a non-arbitrary, rule-governed system, and there is a rule to explain why (A) is wrong that has nothing to do with grammar at all [more . . .]

[TestingIsEasy]

@TestingIsEasy . . . and everything to do with consistent rules that apply across all real SAT Improving Sentences questions. There are many ways to explain why (C) is right without the passive voice--I might say, for instance, that when the shortest answer choice is grammatically acceptable to the CB it is always correct. This rule applies universally, unlike the idea of the passive voice, which will frequently lead students to make incorrect decisions if they follow it [more . . .]

[TestingIsEasy]

@TestingIsEasy . . . all the time (and, again, if they're not supposed to follow it all the time, how do we teach when it should be followed and when it shouldn't?)

The point of the video is to demonstrate that PR and many others provide information that isn't consistently accurate, demonstrating a lack of understanding of the test. If we approach the SAT purely in terms of subject matter, parts of it will seem unpredictable. But it's very predictable if you approach it in terms of design.

[aquagorillabear]

Though they had earlier indicated otherwise,

(A)it was eventually decided upon by the legislators to have the bill passed

(B) it was eventually decided upon by the legislators to pass the bill

(E) the legislators eventually decided to pass the bill

Notice there are no real errors in either choice A or B -- simply awkward usages of passive voice.

Now, you state that you don't like to teach awkwardness in and of itself.

So, what do you teach about this problem?

A: Passive voice.

Case closed

[LtgHarrison]

@aquagorillabear Actually, there is an error with both choice A and choice B. Since the beggining of the sentence states "Though they had earlier indicated otherwise," what logically comes next has to be modified by the "Though they had earlier indicated otherwise." In this case, the "they" in the sentence should describe the legislators. So, E is the gramatically correct choice. The other two answers choices, A and B have the gramatical problem of modifiying the "it."

[LtgHarrison]

@aquagorillabear Here is an example of what I am talking about:

Barking loudly, the tree had the dog's leash wrapped around it.

This sentence is awkward because the barking loudly modifies what comes after (the tree). Could you imagine a barking tree?

Here is a more appropriate way to write this sentence:

Barking loudly, the dog wrapped its leash around the tree.

So with your example, A and B have the mistake of the "barking tree." E is the choice that avoids this problem.

[aquagorillabear]

there are occasions when the only difference between a correct and incorrect answer is the use of passive voice. I encounter these often enough to recommend that my students be able to spot this distinction (though only as a last resort, after having eliminated obviously grammatically incorrect choices).

I found another of these today, on -- I believe -- a test from 2009:

[aquagorillabear]

What's up with your comments being limited to so few words? Very annoying.

Anyway, you proved my point with your statements; by saying that it is advisable not to rely on awkwardness alone but rather to look for test specific elements, whether grammatical or not, to eliminate choices, you are making my case that in some cases knowing the difference between active and passive is useful.

Again, I agree that a pronounced focus on passive as Princeton Review teaches is not a good method, but...

[aquagorillabear]

Further evidence to support my assertion from a week ago (hmmm... can't find my provenance here, but it's a real test from the past two years, not May 2010, not October 2009, as I have both of those in front of me too):

[TestingIsEasy]

@aquagorillabear:

There are, of course, a lot of ways to prepare a student for the writing multiple choice section of the SAT, and there are plenty of students who achieve scores they're happy with by relying on the notion of awkwardness and trying to avoid that in the Improving Sentences questions.

But I reject the notion of awkwardness as a reliable basis for answering these types of questions . . . [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@TestingIsEasy . . . because it's so vague that it's essentially useless. It's much more effective, in my mind, to pinpoint specifically the elements that appear consistently in correct answers and in incorrect answers, and train students to recognize those things. This approach is more effective, more reliable, and less frustrating, because it quantifies exactly what to look for and doesn't rely on vague ideas.

Many of the dispositive elements in an Improving Sentences question . . . [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@TestingIsEasy . . . are grammatical (for instance, choices with subjects and verbs that disagree are always wrong) but, as you mentioned, in many cases the dispositive element isn't grammatical at all, but a unique, reliable peculiarity of the SAT's design. If we learn to look for these test-specific elements reliably, whether grammatical or not, we never have to resort to awkwardness to explain an answer, and the questions become every bit as predictable and certain as math . . . . [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@TestingIsEasy . . . questions.

The passive voice is not a feature that gets treated in any kind of reliable, consistent way in the Improving Sentences questions. Here's part of a correct answer that I literally just opened my CB book to at random, from page 599 of the second edition of the *Official SAT Study Guide*: "the chairperson was extremely frustrated by the committee's failure to understand her solution." This correct choice uses the passive voice, while other *incorrect* . . . [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@TestingIsEasy . . . choices in other questions also use the passive voice, as you noted. The only possible conclusion to be drawn from this is that the SAT doesn't care about the passive voice at all, and students who avoid the passive voice while taking the SAT will be wrong at least some of the time as a consequence of this misinformed strategy, which the Princeton Review irresponsibly pushed on its customers. [end]

[aquagorillabear]

Since scientific advances are central to progress, basic research deserving

continuing support.

A) basic research deserving continuing support

B) basic research being what deserves continuing support

C) basic research deserves continuing support

D) continuing support is deserved by basic research

E) continuing support is what they deserve in basic research

[aquagorillabear]

Obviously, (C) is the answer, but the point here is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with (D) except that it is awkward, and (drumroll please) its awkwardness derives primarily from the use of passive voice and can be spotted by recognition of such.

[lkg6379]

i hate when i hit enter too soon.

it's not passive for the sake of the question. the SAT doesn't check passive/active. This question actually was testing noun/verb agreement, if I remember from my SAT tutoring days.

But yes, from my days at The College Board in lovely downtown Princeton, NJ, it actually DOES like the active voice, but does not test for it.

[lkg6379]

have been placed is not passive.

[Klingstermatrikaz]

In the sentence improvement questions you list as evidence from the official book, where you found the passive voice being right when there were active voice options available, did the active voice ones introduce new errors or reproduce errors from the original fragment?

Cause - that's KINDA a big deal. Were there any with passive and active options, everything else being identical, where passive won out?

[TestingIsEasy]

There are no improving sentences questions on real SATs in which the only difference between two answer choices is the use of the passive voice AND one of those two choices is correct. This is because the SAT and PSAT do not test the passive voice in any way; there are zero questions on real SATs or PSATs in which a student needs to know about the passive voice in order to find the correct answer.

[TestingIsEasy]

I made this video in part because people were coming to me saying things like "(a) is correct and (b) is wrong but (a) is in the passive voice and I don't get why that's okay." The reason it's okay is that the College Board never tests the passive voice.

As one dispositive example, question 24 from page 410 reads "The derelict old house across from the warehouses and the even more decrepit one just beside them *have been placed* on the list of historic landmarks."

[TestingIsEasy]

There are no errors in the question, and the phrase "have been placed" is underlined, meaning a student could choose it as an error. The phrase could easily be replaced with an active voice construction like "appears" if the College Board had an issue with the passive voice.

There is, again, no reason to learn about the passive voice for the SAT or PSAT. If a student wants to learn about them for real life, I'm all for that. For these tests, though, it's a waste of time.

[aquagorillabear]

True, passive voice is not an error in and of itself, and, so, yes, none of the Error Correction problems such as those on page 410 would EVER test on passive voice, since those types of questions concern the location of actual errors.

[aquagorillabear]

However, on the Sentence Revision type of problems, the use of passive voice can make an answer choice awkward. And in some cases (on real tests), the only readily identifiable difference between a correct and incorrect answer is that one uses Active and one uses Passive. I have seen many examples of this throughout my decade of teaching SAT/PSAT (on real tests), but rather than search all my material and find examples, I will just give one example from the same pages you are citing:

pg. 408 #10