Chapter 19

Ten Mistakes to Avoid on the Praxis Reading and Writing Exams

IN THIS CHAPTER

Unlearning instincts for the reading and writing tests

Understanding what the graders of the essays aren’t looking for

Taking care not to outsmart yourself

We have instincts for a reason, but they don’t always serve us well in every context. If you’ve ever played baseball or softball, you’ve probably learned that “an outfielder’s first step is always back” — this is an example of a rule that players have to internalize in order to help them unlearn their natural instinct to run forward when the ball is hit. Running toward the ball is what your mind wants you to do, but by doing so, you run the risk of misjudging the ball and watching it sail over your head.

Just like sports, test-taking is an arena where your mind sometimes encourages you to do the wrong thing, and in those situations, you have to learn not to follow your instincts. This chapter helps you steer clear of common errors that test-takers make on the writing and reading portions of the Praxis Core.

Avoiding Mistakes Common to the Writing and Reading Tests

Before we turn to specific pieces of advice about the writing and reading tests, here are a couple of tips to keep in mind on both of them.

Don’t look for patterns in the answers

The human brain has evolved to see patterns in everything. This capability is helpful when a pattern really is at work, but it can trip you up when you’re confronting something truly random. For example, the fact that the ball of a roulette wheel has landed on an even number three times in a row doesn’t mean that an odd number is due to come up next. Perhaps the biggest mistake that a test-taker can make on the Praxis is to look for a pattern in the answers. It’s a waste of time and energy, and it won’t help you get any more of the answers correct — in fact, it will probably cause you to select wrong answers that you wouldn’t otherwise have picked.

Say you’ve eliminated three of the answer choices on a particular question, and now you’re down to a 50/50 split between Choices (B) and (D). There are many logical ways to proceed, depending on what sort of question it is, but one thing you should never do is base your answer on how many (B)s or (D)s you’ve selected so far or which answer letter you selected most recently. The fact that you chose (B) for two of the previous three questions doesn’t mean that the right answer to this question is any less likely to be (B) than (D) (and even if it did, you may have been wrong on one of the previous questions).

Where this instinct really has a tendency to trip up even very good test-takers is on those questions in the Writing test that offer the choice “No Error.” It’s easy to feel paranoid about whether you’ve selected “No Error” too many or too few times. But the best thing to do with that nagging little voice is ignore it. Even though it seems like a “special” answer, “No Error” is statistically no more or less likely to be right than any other answer. Every test is different, and the Praxis writing test you take may have a lot of correct “No Error” responses, or it may have only a couple. The best method is always to mark the answer you think is correct for each individual question on a case-by-case basis, paying absolutely no attention to how many or how few times you’ve selected the same answer choice previously.

Remember, this goes for “in-a-row” logic too: The fact that it seems unlikely that the correct answer would be Choice (C) three times in a row is no reason not to choose (C) if you genuinely think it’s the right answer. There are few guarantees in life, but one thing you can take to the bank is the fact that looking for patterns on the Praxis Core is always a bad idea.

Don’t change answers merely for the sake of changing them

The computer-delivered Praxis test allows you to skip and return to questions or even to look back over questions you’ve already answered. But just because you’re allowed to do it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea!

The trickiest question to answer as a test-prep tutor is when students ask us, “Should I go back and check over my answers if I have time left over?” There’s no one right answer to that question, because every student is different. Some test-takers tend to actually catch their careless mistakes when they look back, and others tend to get nervous and change answers that were right the first time.

To see which type of test-taker you are, go back over one of the practice tests in this book after you finish (but before you check your answers) and see whether you tend to catch real mistakes and improve your score when you go back and change answers, or whether you tend to outsmart yourself and change answers that were right the first time.

If you do end up deciding to go back and change an answer, you should be thinking more about whether the first answer you put is wrong than about whether the other answer you’re considering seems right. It’s common for more than one answer choice to seem right, and the way to avoid the problems this can cause is never to change an answer unless you can articulate to yourself a reason why it’s wrong. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is an expression for a reason!

Sidestepping Mistakes on the Writing Test

Now that you’ve heard some general pointers about multiple-choice tests as a whole (see the preceding section), this section turns your attention specifically to the Praxis writing exam. The first two tips are about the multiple-choice questions, and the second two pertain to the essays.

Don’t equate different with wrong

Quick! Which is correct: to say, “I walked down the street” or “I walked along the street?” Well, based on the title of this section, you probably correctly guessed that either one is perfectly acceptable. Keep that in mind when you’re taking the Praxis writing test: Just because you can think of a way to phrase something other than the way the question phrases it doesn’t necessarily mean that the phrasing in the question is grammatically incorrect. There’s often more than one correct way to say something.

This is a problem for a lot of test-takers on questions with the “No Error” answer choice. The fact that you can think of another word or phrase that could be substituted for underlined portion (B) doesn’t mean that underlined portion (B) is an error. The sentence may have no errors, or portion (B) may be distracting you from another underlined portion that really does contain an error.

Those questions aren’t asking whether anything about the sentence could be different — they’re asking whether anything about the sentence is wrong. You’re supposed to be on the lookout for broken rules, not arbitrary stylistic matters.

Don’t assume something must be correct just because it sounds fancier or more complex

Are you familiar with the term overcorrection? It’s a mistake that occurs as a result of trying extra-hard to be right, and it’s a common pitfall in grammar. An example is saying, “Just between you and I,” even though “Just between you and me” is actually correct. Most people are insecure about their grammar, and grammatically stressful situations — such as taking a test or having a conversation with an English professor — can exacerbate that insecurity and cause people to say things in a way they wouldn’t normally say them, even if the way they’d normally say them is fine.

Perhaps no single word in the English language pops up unnecessarily more often as a result of overcorrection than whom. Nervous students writing essays may slap unneeded m’s onto the end of the interrogative pronoun right and left. They’re so nervous about saying who when they should say whom that they end up saying whom when they should say who. (See Chapter 12 for a review of when to use “who” and when to use “whom.”)

Verb tenses are another area where you’ll want to watch out for overcorrection. If “I drove to the store yesterday” sounds perfectly fine in context, resist the urge to select “I had driven to the store yesterday” just because the past-perfect tense sounds more complex than the regular past tense.

Fancy words like whom or fancy tenses like the perfect tenses aren’t right all the time or even most of the time — they’re right when they’re right. So, trust your ear and select the answer choices that sound correct in context, rather than always going for the fancy ones.

Don’t turn the essay into a thesaurus explosion

Deploying ostentatious diction due merely to the fact that your extemporaneous prosody is slated for appraisal is egregiously unadvisable.

Does the preceding sentence sound good to you? Or would “Using big words just because you’re taking an essay test isn’t a good idea” be something you would rather read? That’s what we thought.

The idea that you get extra points for big words is probably the most persistent urban legend about standardized tests. Nevertheless, you should ignore the urge to use a 50-cent synonym for each everyday word that pops into your head.

Stopping to think of big words you wouldn’t normally use eats up precious time, and it won’t make your score go up anyway, because — contrary to popular belief — the graders don’t “count big words.” If anything, adopting an unnatural style will probably make your score go down, because it sounds robotic and obnoxious (and if you don’t normally use those words, chances are pretty good that you’re using the big words incorrectly anyway).

The graders of the essay look for a sense of ease with written communication. You want to sound thoughtful, personable, persuasive, and, above all, as if you think writing is fun. If it seems like your main concern is trying to work in as many big words as you can, you’ll end up looking like you’re trying to disguise the fact that you’re uncomfortable with the writing process.

Don’t paint yourself into a corner with a rigid thesis

The first of the two essays on the Praxis writing test is thesis-driven; it asks you to adopt a stance on an issue or defend a viewpoint. You want to carve out a clear position and sound like you believe in what you’re saying, of course, but it’s not a good idea to start off by asserting your thesis so stringently that you won’t be able to acknowledge an exception or gray area that occurs to you, for fear of appearing to contradict yourself.

When it comes to theses, you don’t get extra points for extremism. If you think each side of the issue has some valid points, it’s entirely okay to say so. You’re graded on how well you write, not on your opinion. You want to steer clear of the dreaded essay-test dead end where you think of something bright and interesting to say halfway through your writing process but feel as if you can’t say it because it doesn’t fit in with your uncompromising thesis statement.

This doesn’t mean you have to hem and haw. You can state your opinion clearly up-front and add an “on the other hand, I can understand why someone might think …” later. That way, if an exception to your thesis pops into your head, you can say so. This strategy not only helps you out when it comes to length, but it also gets you points for what essay graders call anticipating objections — demonstrating that you’re able to see the issue from the other side’s point of view, even though you don’t agree with it. That’s a sign of philosophical maturity (and it earns you points).

Evading Mistakes on the Reading Test

Reading comprehension is not as rule-based as grammar, but there are still a few definite traps you want to avoid falling into on the Praxis reading exam.

Don’t rule out the “too obvious”

No one’s saying the Praxis is easy, but there’s no point in making things tougher on yourself by expecting it to be harder than it is. We can’t tell you how many times we see students about to circle the correct answer, only to change it at the last second. When asked why, they often say that the first (and correct) answer was “too obvious.”

So, we can’t stress this enough: There is no such thing as “too obvious.” There’s only right or wrong.

The “too obvious” mistake is really a confidence problem: You expect the test to be hard, so when a question seems easy, you assume you must have missed something and question your (good) instincts. Some students even say they whittle the answer choices down to 50/50 and then pick the one they think is wrong, because they’re so sure that there must be some trick that they’re missing!

One of the answer choices will be right, and the other four will be wrong. There’s no such thing as a question with an easy right answer or a hard right one. When a right answer seems obvious to you, give yourself some credit and assume that you’re getting pretty good at this rather than being tricked.

Don’t word-match

Do you know what students who don’t speak English very well do when they have to take a multiple-choice test in English? They look for the answer choice that has the greatest number of words from the passage in it and pick that one. The people who write multiple-choice standardized tests like the Praxis reading test know this, and they use it to try to trick you. Inserting a string of matching words from the passage into one of the wrong answer choices as bait for people whose reading comprehension is weak is a common method that test-writers use to compose the wrong answer choices.

We’re not saying that you should always pick the answer choice that has the fewest words in common with the passage, of course. We’re just saying that you shouldn’t base your answer on anything to do with how many words or phrases from the passage appear in a particular choice.

Don’t ignore your outside knowledge

Unlike the writing exam, for which you need to know as many grammar rules as you can cram into your head, the Praxis reading exam doesn’t test you on outside knowledge. A passage presents you with some information, and then you answer the question you’re asked based solely on the information in the passage. For example, if a passage is about economics, you don’t have to know anything about economics in order to get the question right — the passage is designed to tell you everything you need to know.

But just because you don’t need to know anything other than what the passages tell you in order to correctly answer the questions, you shouldn’t ignore or forget about things that you happen to know from real life. Now, we’re not saying you should try to select right answers based on what you think is true in real life — when the question says, “according to the author” or “according to the passage,” it means that you are to identify what the text says, not give your personal opinion. However, outside knowledge is frequently useful when it comes to eliminating wrong answers.

Many of the passages may involve unsettled matters of opinion, but none of the authors is ever out-and-out wrong about anything. You may see a passage by a scientist who thinks life exists on the moon of Jupiter known as Europa, or you may see a passage by a scientist who thinks such life doesn’t exist. According to current scientific thought, either opinion is plausible. But you’ll never see a passage by a scientist who thinks there are panda bears on Mars, because that’s just crazy! So, although you’re not supposed to select right answers based on your own knowledge or opinions, if you see an answer choice that you happen to know is definitely, factually false, you can cross it off immediately.

Don’t try to answer more than the question asks you to

“Answer the questions” probably seems like unnecessarily obvious advice. Of course, you’re supposed to answer the questions — you’re taking a test! But you’d be surprised how many test-takers forget to follow that advice. The question following a passage may ask something like “Which of the following claims is explicitly made in the passage?” You may see an answer choice that does indeed paraphrase a claim that was explicitly made in the passage, but then avoid picking it because the claim wasn’t the author’s main point. Huh?! The question didn’t ask you what the author’s main point was — it just asked you which of the claims was explicitly made in the passage. So, answer that specific question and that specific question alone.

The same confusion can even occur with a simple vocabulary question. When the question says “The author is using this word most nearly to mean … ,” it isn’t asking you what that word means most of the time or for the fanciest thing it could possibly mean in another context. It’s just asking you what the author used it to mean in one specific place, so just answer that question.