SAT

Hey, I'm back, not like anyone actually reads this. It's October and the buzz around my school has been nothing but three letters. S. A. T. Not only is there SAT I but also SAT II and PSAT, which happened to show up on today's crossword in the newspaper. Everything has been centered around the SAT which supposedly determines how well you can answer questions that, from my point of view, are bias towards those whose mother language is English. Yes I'm probably making a huge deal out of this but it's not like anyone can see from my point of view anyways.

Being brought up in my overly competitive school I'm surrounded by a modest mob of frantic test-takers whom know nothing about life other than how to bubble in answers and study. Sorry I can't be like every other person who can put up with spending four hours stuck in a classroom doing nothing but taking tests and absorbing lectures five days a week and some even more. Sorry I despise all of you for being better than me because I can't motivate myself to study in a midst of overachievers that can make me feel inferior in every way. Sorry I'm a good-for-nothing who can't possibly bring myself to be assessed on how well I can read passages or how well I can memorize a thousand-word-long list of vocabulary or how well I can write a monotonous, well-structured essay that's the equivalent of a straight jacket.

But most of all, I'm sorry I can't be as high and mighty as all of you people with 2400s out there and feel good about myself for being worse. Of course you'd never understand what it feels like to be ostracized by your group of friends who all went to the same SAT prep classes and all achieved significantly high scores. What's even worse is they don't even know it. They don't know how I feel, they don't know how I could possibly do worse than they did, they don't know what it's like to be academically inferior to them in every way possible in a school that revolves around grades, they don't know and they probably will never know how I feel. Seriously? Oh no you got a B+ on the most recent test-- of course that's so much worse than my D+. You only have a 4.0 GPA? What a shame it can't be a 5.0.

But I'm getting side-tracked. Your SAT scores are so nonchalantly achieved that if I were to ask you how to study I'd probably be waved off with something along the lines of "Oh you don't know? Well it's kind of common sense" or "I don't know how to explain it, I just kind of know." You're not helping. "Oh it's okay there's still time for improvement," well guess what, it's kind of hard to improve when you don't know how and no one around you can possibly understand what it's like to not get something.

I hate, I loathe, I despise, I am so ineffably outraged at our country's testing system. It doesn't measure how much you know about a subject, It doesn't measure your abilities to process information, what it does assess is how well you can study before a test, how much money you spend on tutors and classes, basically how well you can take a test. There's no knowledge needed to take any multiple choice test, and when you don't know you can just guess and have a 1/4 or 1/5 chance of getting it right. Sure free response tests are harder and take longer to grade and require more money to hire people to grade them but at least they're more accurate. Instead of thinking of a student's knowledge they're thinking of the most efficient way to soothe their own problems and hardships at the cost of the student. And we have no choice but to conform and adapt to their way of assessment or else we're sure to fail.

Well guess what all you bubble machines with a 5.0 GPA on your report card, a 2400 on your SAT, a 800 on your five different SAT II subject tests, and a 5 on every single one of your AP tests. I have a life. I have a social life. I have friends who actually care about how I feel. I have knowledge of subjects that aren't mandated by college board. I have a skill set that will get me further than sitting in a cubicle. I actually do sports (huh what is that?). And guess what? I'm not sorry for writing this.