SAT-ing

Soo not fun.

I started studying for real last weekend. I had NO CLUE how hard this stuff was going to be. I went through the diagnostic test I took a while ago and decided that I really needed work on critical reading (not counting the sentence completions) and the identifying sentence errors part of the writing. The math section's results were more sporadic--I think I'll hold off studying math until after I take another practice test, and take more time on each section (I would get bored and just move on once I finished).

The biggest thing all of this has shown me is that I really am a poor test-taker. I'll do a set of practice questions, and afterwards, when I go over the answers, I won't believe some of the questions I got wrong. And, as you know, my school is full of geniuses who can't believe that I would bother studying for this simple test.

The first time someone asked me why I was studying , I firmly said "I'm a poor test-taker," and the kid left me alone. Then two people came close to laughing at me when they saw the giant book I was carrying around because "I didn't need to study". Finally, in homeroom, a kid was telling me about how he got a 780 on the critical reading on the PSATs last year. I had first period free, and I just wanted to curl up and cry. Who says something like that? I can understand pride, but to volunteer your score and boast about it is totally uneccessary.

My highest ever score on a subsection was a 730 on critical reading on the PSATs last year. I scored a combined 2090 on the diagnostic--a whopping ten points improvement. And went down by 20 points each on math and CR.

Some of the answers in the book I actually disagree with. I'm averaging less than a fifty percent on the questions I can reduce down to two choices.

The SATs don't care how smart you are, how well you can read things and understand them, how much math you know, or how well you can focus under pressure. All it cares about is how long you can sit in a room with twenty other stressed-out teenagers and not become a basket case.

I don't want to take them. I'm terrified.

November is too soon. December worries me because it's right after the end of the trimester and a Model UN conference. January is during a Model UN conference. My gut tells me that March is too late.

A lot of people are waiting until March or even May. But I just want to get it over with. And I don't know what to do.

So all of you guys who laugh as I study for this test, fuck off. This is really, really hard for me. But I'm going to beat it. I'm going to work ten times as hard as you and probably score lower than you, but I will have accomplished something. I will have actually done something that helped me do better than I would have otherwise.

Don't give me lectures on how to study, don't say "Oh, those questions are easy!" and then proceed to give me tips that I know and I've tried and just don't work, don't act like I'm being sarcastic, and don't try to help.

I had a horrible day today, and all of my anger and frustration and desire right now is going to be slammed into studying. Whenever I lose my focus, I will think about today. Because my road to a high score is unpaved and uphill. Yours apparently has a sidewalk. In the long term, my road is more worth taking. I'll get more out of it.