Maxigumee

The SATs were ridiculous. I mean, really, split them into two separate days! Don’t make us sit for FOUR AND A HALF hours in a hot classroom. Don’t make us solve horrible math problems over and over again, just when we think it’s over! Even though the SAT was fairly easy in its questions, it was made very difficult because time constraints and the fact that there were like TEN sections. I think it was probably the most irritating exam I’ve ever taken.

I woke up on Saturday, the morning of the SAT, relatively early and got ready relatively fast. I was out the door on time and we swung by Mary’s house to bring her over to Nardin for the exam. When Mary came out of her house holding her SAT ticket, I remembered that I had forgotten mine. We all got into the car and had to drive back to my house. I called my father and told him to be waiting outside of the house with my ticket. So, I went home, got the ticket, hooray! Okay. We drive off. When we’re about two blocks from the house, Mary asks me if I have remembered my photo I.D.

Crap.

We rush back to the house, I dash inside, go upstairs, and get my school ID. I rush back out and we head off for the exam. Since we got out of the house originally at a pretty safe time, we were still early by the time we got to Nardin. When we get inside, Mary and I go into the cafeteria and see a bunch of people standing up and talking.

“Do you think these are all Nardin kids?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Mary says. “They’re all talking to each other. I don’t know any of these people.”

We go to a cafeteria table and sit down. We are sitting for a few minutes before we realize that the group of people spread out by the cafeteria wall is not just a standing group of people. It is a line waiting to be checked in to the SAT. We stand up and walk over. We are in line for about ten minutes or so before we get our room assignments. We sit back down.

Finally, a woman tells us that we can go upstairs into the classroom we have been assigned to. We go upstairs, go into the classroom, get into desks, get our SATs, whatever, whatever.

The first part is the writing task. I think that out of all of them, this one was the most easy, even though we only got twenty minutes to write an essay. The task was to talk about which philosophy we agreed with: that in order to be successful, you must trash your past and move forward in life, or that in order to succeed, you must embrace your past and learn from your mistakes, etc. I chose the second one and wrote an essay with various examples, the largest of which was about a bank robber.

A bank robber walks into a bank with a gun and holds it up. He asks for all of the banks money. The man does not realize that somebody has used their cell phone to call the police. Within a minute, the police are at the scene and the arrest the man and put him in prison for ten years. When the man’s prison time is up, he is released and put back into the world. Now. The bank robber can do two things. He can live under the first philosophy and go rob a bank in the exact same fashion, or he can learn from his mistakes and make a better plan. He could rob a bank that is less public and not in such close proximity to a police station.

Yeah, that was my essay. In retrospect, I think that perhaps saying that in learning from his mistakes, the man decided to not rob any more banks would probably have been the better answer, but I thought my response was at least humorous. The next parts were all dull and incredibly tedious, consisting of either english skills, reading skills, or math skills. I’d would have to say that my math skills sucked. I still don’t think I did too badly, though.

On one of our breaks, I told Mary that I had left some of my answers blank. She told me not to do that as leaving them blank would lose us points. She said that if we at least answered them, we would get one fourth of a point. Being incredibly tired and confused, at the time, I thought this statement was completely logical. However, after the test was over and I was at home, I was chatting with somebody who told me that for a blank answer, you get no points, whereas with an incorrect answer you get NEGATIVE one fourth of a point. Oh, bother.

It seemed that some of the other people were a little nervous about the exam as well. A girl sitting close to me got a pretty bad case of the hiccups towards the end, and I felt kind of bad for her.

When the exam was finally over, I got up, feeling a little dizzy after being seater for such a long time, and walked out into the fresh air. I called my home and my sister told me that I would have to walk home because my father had taken the car. Mary bought a piñata at a yard sale. The end.