Bullet Point Problems (aka "Rhetorical Synthesis")

These passages consist mostly of a list of bullet points, making them easy to identify. Additionally, these are easy to find because they're always the last few questions out of the 27 questions in each Reading & Writing module.

These questions always give some goal that someone wants to achieve using the information from the bullet points. This is always in the text that comes after the bullet points, so don't even read the bullet points initially - skip right to this text and carefully identify the goal that they want to achieve. For example, in the question above, the student wants "to present the study's results", so that's the goal.

We still haven't even looked at the bullet points yet, but we're going to go through the answer choices and see whether they accomplish the stated goal. The majority of the time, there will only be one answer choice that actually accomplishes the goal. If this is the case, we have arrived at the correct answer without even having to look at the bullet points. If you have time, it's still good practice to reference your answer against the bullet points and make sure it is consistent with the information given. If there are multiple answer choices that accomplish the goal, then most likely only one of them is actually consistent with the information in the bullet points, so you'll want to look at each choice and see if it can be backed up by the bullet points.

It's important to note that in many cases, there are multiple parts to the goal that is stated. For example, the passage might say "The student wants to make and support a generalization about the Alta conflict." In this case, the goal has two parts: "make a generalization" and "support the generalization". You'll want to make sure that your answer accomplishes both of these, not just one of them. So, the correct answer choice would need to make a statement that could be considered a generalization about the Alta conflict, and it would also need to "support" it by providing some evidence that this generalization is true.

This specific language shows up often enough it's worth addressing. Sometimes the question might say something like "the author wants to introduce X to an audience familiar with Y" or "the author wants to introduce X to an audience unfamiliar with Y". If it says the audience is familiar with something, then the correct answer choice should be worded as if it assumes the audience already knows that that thing is. If it says the audience is unfamiliar with something, then the correct answer choice should give some context as to what that thing is. For example, "They went to see Wicked, a play based on the Wizard of Oz, on Thursday night" is written as if the audience is not familiar with Wicked, whereas "They went to see Wicked on Thursday night" is written as if the audience is already familiar with Wicked.