2300

And my dad thinks I should retake, with a 740 in math.

And both he and my guidance counselor think I should take the ACTs.

NO.

tomorrow is the day

I'll find out my sat scores in less than twelve hours.

I cannot focus tonight.

I've checked that I know my password at the Collegeboard website about four times.

I've looked at scattergrams (GPA vs. SAT scores) for about eight colleges.

I have to update my resume, but I want to know my scores first.

TWELVE HOURS, PEOPLE.

News

1. I am officially a student at FCS for the summer. I sent in all my materials and got my student ID number and everything. Now, all that remains is for me to convince my parents to let me fly there on my own.

2. I have lots of tests tomorrow, but then I'm pretty much done until spring break, which starts next Friday. Knock on wood, of course.

3. I got to spend over an hour today mixing together solutions and making colorful precipitates. Next week, I will hopefully have some more salts of transition metals to play with so I can make even prettier colors.

4. Report cards for second trimester were mailed today. The only grade I'm sad about is in chemistry, and I should be able to get a high average third trimester so my grade for the year will be an A.

5. I got an honorable mention award at GWU Model UN.

Less than a week until SAT scores are released. I'm hoping that my confidence after the test translates into high scores.

Retaking.

Sigh.

I mean, I took them early so that I would have time to retake them. But STILL.

CR: 800 (??)
M: 690 (WTF????)
W: 700
E: 9
MC: 69

690 on math? Really?

ugh.

Freaking out.

SAT scores come out in under ten hours.

Now was not the night to drink two large mugs of strong cocoa.

But I did it anyway, and now have a headache from the ridiculous amounts of sugar and caffeine I consumed.

More SAT fun...

Today we received the results of the SAT/ACT Combo Practice Test, administered by Kaplan, that we took way back on September 5th. Here's the breakdown:

SAT:
Math: 740
CR: 640 (FAIL)
Writing: 760
Total: 2140

ACT:
Math: 30
English: 33
Reading: 34
Science: 33
Composite: 33

I kind of freaked out when I first saw those scores, but then I realized that this was BEFORE I started studying.

But you know what really freaks me out? I got ALL the "Global/Detail" questions wrong. All of them. I still get those questions wrong on practice tests.

And I failed the essay. 4/6. Which means 8/12. Which is bad. But whatever. I wasn't trying very hard at the essay, since I had never done one before.

I'm thinking about taking it in December. Tennis is over, so I get home fairly early, and I still don't have to take gym, so I have lots of free time at school, so I do have the time to study. I worry about the stress levels, though--my trimester 1 finals are November 10, 13, and 18, and then I have a Model UN Conference from the 20th to the 23rd. But that would still give me two weeks for last-minute studying before the test.

Any advice? I have til next Wednesday if I don't want my parents to have to pay a $23 late fee. Agh. This is so complicated. Classmates, when are you taking them?

I've already decided that I'm taking them in a town that's not my town but is near my town, because that's where I took the Math Subject Test, so I know my way around and stuff. Not knowing anybody there is helpful, too, because I don't have to be self-conscious about my sweatpants and super-old t-shirt.

Score

One of the questions I got wrong yesterday was a bubbling-in mistake.

:D

Wow

I'm still failing critical reading, but I did much better in math and writing:

PSAT Practice Test (from College Board):
CR: 740 x.x
M: 800
W: 800

I think this "improvement" is a function of the type of questions--Barron's is ridiculously hard. I think it was getting me more scared than I needed to be.

Anyway, at least I'm good for the PSAT on Wednesday :)

Good news.

Did much better on improving sentence errors today. I'm still missing some stuff with verb and pronoun agreements, but it's getting better--26/30 on a practice set today!

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.