SAT Road Trip | Teen Ink

SAT Road Trip

May 15, 2008
By Anonymous

The SAT Reasoning Test is defined in many ways: vigorous, challenging, long, tedious, difficult. The list travels around the fulfilling globe over and over again. It is the test of your life – your future. It is required you take the SAT for college and ultimately determines your fate in areas of school and job occupation! The SAT Reasoning Test seems impossible again and again to receive a high score. Furthermore, it seems like one out of one million receives a perfect 2,400 points. But with all this stress swishing through my head, I eventually entered testing center of living doom to take the SAT.

This was supposedly just a “practice run” to view my progress and to view areas hungry of improvement; however, my stomach flopped, my brain kicked, and my mind set off like a fire alarm. Especially after viewing “The Official SAT Study Guide”, my world flipped heaven and hell. Words like ‘taciturn’ and ‘invidious’ appeared on the pages I blankly stared at, in the form of multiple choices A, B, C, D, and E. Grammatical errors I did not recognize laid innocently before my eyes. I knew I was ironically ‘scoring’ my life away.

One relief was the mathematics section because, for me, math was a breeze, as simple calculations led to definite answers. Multiply, divide, add, and subtract made perfect sense to my brain. Mathematics made ‘literal’ sense. Area, trigonometry, and volume all had their unique personalities and held formulas of their own. The equations clicked in my head and came easy. Whew, that was something I didn’t have to have a trauma about.

Something I did have to worry about was critical reading. Those long passages gave me goggling eyes that occasionally drifted off the page. The vocabulary consisted of words I had never heard of and bedazzled me. The garrulous nonsense squabbled in my head, mixing around like a batter of brownie mix. I prayed to God to help me, to save my soul. Miraculously, it seemed as if He really did, as I got at least three-fourths of the practice questions correct! Yet, somewhere somehow, I knew I was close to hopelessness.

The last of the three main topics, writing, stabbed me through the heart. It seemed as if the College Board wanted to trick you, alluring you to answer the wrong answer, precisely testing your knowledge. Parallel structure (thank goodness, something I just learned in my English class) appeared in many examples and I answered most correctly. The spelling was easy to recognize, but the other fluffy grammar puzzles still confused me. “Upcoming years of school, please help me through this treacherous journey!” was the only thought consecutively running through my head.

The essay (part of the writing section) was undeniably easier said than done. The question you had to answer struck you hard, and you were trapped in writer’s block. It was like quicksand, suffocating your brain of creative words and imaginative passages. Gratefully, once I started, it was easier to continue, and I finished the essay within the last two minutes.

Then I was protruded during my restless sleep by my parents on May 6th at 6:30 AM to wake up and smell the coffee. That day, in approximately an hour and a half, I was to take the SAT.

The difficult tasks ranged from 8 AM to 1 PM. I sat in a desk, writing to fully develop an essay within twenty-five minutes and bubbling in nine other sections with myriad time limits ranging from ten to twenty-five minutes. Some questions were easy and others were dangerously unwelcoming. But I finished the last section to the last second, and was ideally able to relieve myself.

Knowing sagaciously in the back of my head that in due course I am to take this unbreakable test again, I put my best effort into the current SAT, head-strongly pushing my nerves aside. I successfully finished the test and walked outside to the fresh, sanguine air and was finally able to breathe easy again after the long road trip in preparing for the SAT.


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