As the title of this blog post suggests, I did in fact wake up at 6:45 on a Saturday morning to take a lovely little test known as the SAT (but most commonly referred to by students as "death itself"). This "lovely little test" can more accurately be explained as an unnecessarily long four hour exam that must be endured by nearly every student planning on applying to an American college. Needless to say, this morning was not my best, but surprisingly, not my worst either.
My mom drove me to the high school one town over where the test was being administered. I couldn't help but fidget with the buttons on my graphing calculator and tap my toes to that catchy Enrique Iglesias song a little too forcefully. I hate getting all worked up about this kind of thing because because I know the SATs don't matter, not really. What's the difference if I score 500 points this way or that? My score will only be a portion of what the admission's staff at any particular school will examine when deciding whether to accept me into their glorious institution. In the grand scheme of my life, a high SAT score means absolutely nothing.
Even so, I can't help but feel the obsessive need to do well. Maybe it comes from society's absurdly high expectations regarding education forcing their way into my thought process. Maybe I just want to make sure all the money my parents spent on SAT prep courses pays off. It's probably both, but as I approached the test center entrance, all I could think about was keeping my cereal down. Thankfully, I found a group of people from my school and stood with them awkwardly because my good friends hadn't arrived yet. You know the kind of dreams where random people from your life show up in places they are not supposed to be? Like when your dreaming about relaxing on the shores of a distant tropical island and suddenly you notice the Varsity Football Team doing squat jumps across the length of the beach? That is what waiting to take the SAT feels like. In the ten minutes I spent anticipating my entrance into the the testing room, I saw girls from my sleep-away camp, a girl from my 5th grade travel soccer team, kids I knew from middle school, kids that used to go to my school before switching to private school, and even a few kids that I swear I recognized but couldn't quite place. This bizarre, worlds colliding kind of experience only contributed to the feeling of uneasiness that I felt prior to test time.
When I finally sat down to take the test, I realized it wasn't that bad. I couldn't answer every question, but as I progressed through the test I realized that I knew more than I had initially given myself credit for. The test was long, and though my hand began to cramp with an hour still to go, I felt confident about the work I had accomplished and optimistic about the sections I had yet to complete. I wrote my essay about how "The Jersey Shore" creates misconceptions toward people of Italian decent, which I thoroughly enjoyed writing. And my testing room was full of giraffes. Posters of giraffes, small stuffed giraffes, giraffe cartoons with speech bubbles written in spanish, giraffe magnets, and even a large giraffe statue. Oh, and there was one poster of a koala bear. Poor lonely koala bear.
The SATs are hardly the nightmare students make them out to be. What I had assumed was going to be a painful experience comparable to that of mandatory torture or forced labor actually turned out to be more of a general unpleasantness. I didn't suffer through it so much as I stumbled along, occasionally hitting bumps in the road but ultimately reaching the other side unscathed.
Well, this is good to know. I'll be taking the PSAT next year. I should have taken it last fall, but was gone at outdoor school, and thankfully it wasn't actually necessary. It was like the pre-PSAT or something. Anyway, I've heard the hardest part is just sitting there for a few hours and not going loopy.
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