SATire

Emphasis on the "ire"

In high school I started to give more serious thought to what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t so much decide that I wanted to go to college as decide I wanted to be an editor, and college seemed like the first step. A lot of people I grew up with, including most of my siblings, opted out of college, so I was fortunate in that I didn’t feel a lot of pressure one way or the other.

Deciding to go to college meant that at the end of my junior year¹ I would have to take the big standardized test: the SAT.

If you search “what does SAT stand for,” google says, “The acronym SAT no longer stands for anything.” Me too, babe.

The SAT, like most standardized tests, was developed by a eugenicist who wanted to keep the undesirables out of higher education. Periodically people try to abolish it, but it’s an unfortunately complicated issue. Obviously, well-off people can pay for tutors and exam prep, so they tend to get higher scores and win more scholarships and get into nicer colleges, etc. However, if colleges dropped the SAT requirement and instead just asked for the personal essay, it would be even easier for wealthy kids to phone it in.² It’s much easier to pay someone else to write an essay for you than it is to get someone to take a test for you. No one seems to be quite sure what do with it.³

I’ve decided that if I don’t have good pictures to go with an essay, I’m just going to sprinkle in pictures of Hutch. My thanks to Kristina and George for their editorial feedback on this.

When I took the SAT, it lasted three hours and was made up of a short essay, an English section, and a math section.⁴ The essay has since been made optional.

At that point, the only standardized tests I had taken were ones that Pennsylvania required us to do in third, fifth, and eighth grade. They didn’t actually count for anything—we got our scores back, but the school district didn’t do anything with them. We were also allowed to take them at home, so in theory we could have very easily cheated.

We generally had an easy time with the reading comprehension questions and blew through that section. As previously mentioned, I did a math worksheet about once a month, so the math section was a whole different beast. In eighth grade (roughly Year 9 in the English system), to everyone’s great amusement, I ended up scoring in the first percentile for math, which is to say that 99% percent of people did better than I did. “It hadn’t occurred to me that one could be in the first percentile,” mom said through laughs.

“I wasn’t even trying,” I told everyone, but my siblings assured me that no one ended up in the first percentile through circling random answers in a multiple-choice test. So I had a big chip on my shoulder regarding my ability to take math tests.

I had pre-algebra workbooks that mom had provided, and I was working my way through the basics. I had my brother’s humongous official SAT book, which featured sample questions and one or two practice tests. In addition to this, I had a snappy, self-helpy book written by a nerd who had gotten multiple perfect scores. I think I got that one from the library, but it might have been something mom gave me or my older siblings passed down.

The nerd was the most helpful. He didn’t pretend that the SAT was anything other than a big puzzle to crack. His book outlined strategies, showing how the point system worked and detailing when it was in your favor to skip questions and when to guess.

Looking back, I can’t remember having any kind of strategy for learning SAT math. It was like a whole new frontier. I had never studied for anything math-related before—I suppose I had never studied for anything before—and I had no understanding of what my aptitude was in relation to the test. I really just started working my way through the pre-algebra/algebra books at a faster pace, although I can’t say now what that pace was. I asked mom for help if I was confused.

When I started to understand the problems in the SAT book better, I also checked out an intro to geometry book from the library. I actually loved that, and if math had just been proving things about triangles, I would have been all in.⁵

I just aimed to get as far as I could with the math before the test. Again, it’s all hazy, but I think I just kind of hoped for the best and assumed I’d know enough by the time the test rolled around.

The SAT essay was a strange thing. The people who graded it had an absurdly short amount of time, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but as they didn’t really have time to think they weren’t allowed to factor any kind of “believability vibe” in. So you could make up historical events or decide that you were a survivor of eyelash cancer etc and they weren’t allowed to dock any points.

The nerd provided a formula for the essay. I memorized his fill-in-the-blank first paragraph, which included the line, “The presupposition that [BLANK] is [BLANK] is categorically false/true.” Then you wrote three body paragraphs, giving one historical, one literary, and one pop culture example to back up your argument. Finally, you used his fill-in-the-blank concluding paragraph, which was a lot like the introduction. The nerd recommended practicing this formula repeatedly, and then going over each attempt with a thesaurus and swapping in as many fancy words as possible.

I was in a phase where I wrote a lot of short satirical sketches. I had already completed “The Cause of the Clause,” an imitation of the writing manuals and style handbooks I read.⁶ There was a Fault in Our Stars parody that was mainly a vehicle for the line “maybe ‘literally’ can be our ‘always.’” Then there was the dystopian YA chapter that opened with something like, “Brad walked into the cave covered in ash and reeking of havoc.”⁷

The only way to keep my sanity through this process, I reasoned, would be to begin by writing a satirical SAT essay. Of course, I titled it “SATire.” The prompt I made up was about whether there was objective truth, and I proved my thesis using the famous American battle where Benjamin Franklin screamed his last words (“Veni, vidi, vici,” for my European readers), an episode of CareBears where Grumpy Bear becomes worried everyone hates him, and Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez’s on-and-off-again relationship. I’m not sure if I argued for or against objective truth, but judging by the evidence I think it could have gone either way.

I showed SATire to my parents and they just kind of looked at me, an educational monster of their own creation. “Where did you learn the term ‘blitzkrieg’?” mom asked. The online thesaurus, of course.

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Eventually I got to the point where I was ready to try taking a timed practice test. I can remember that I was unhappy with my score on it, and that made me worried.

As my junior year drew to a close, the SAT drew closer. I read conflicting information about whether I’d be required to write my social security number on the test, so I memorized it just in case. I neurotically sharpened my pencils and packed Jasmine’s calculator.

I showed up for my first actual exam at a high school somewhere in the South Hills. I stood in line for a bit and then was directed to a classroom,⁸ where we were admonished not to open the test until the proctor gave the word. No one asked for my social security number. The proctor began giving instructions. The guy in front of me and to the left leaned over and patted his leg hair. I wondered if this was a good-luck ritual.

I don’t remember much of the test, but I remember that the essay was first and the question was bad. I felt that I wasn’t writing at top form, as far as SAT essays went, but I wrapped it up and worked through the English language portion. The math is a blur. I’m not sure that even then I had any idea if that was going well or not. During the last bit, I started to feel a little loopy and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” began loudly playing in my head, so I concluded that my intellectual faculties were exhausted. The proctor announced the end of the test, and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played me out.⁹

My score took a couple weeks to arrive. Back then you got an individual score for the essay but then one big numerical score for the full exam, no indication of how you did on the individual portions beyond the essay. As it was a number the score was meaningless to me, but I googled it and it was just fine. It’s possible that I did OK on the math portion. I think it’s more likely that my English score singlehandedly pulled the overall score out of the gutter. Although even that was not above scrutiny—when I said I got a five out of six on the essay, Jasmine sniffed and said, “Huh, I got a perfect score.” OK, then. Mine eyes have seen the glory.

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In the US, a bachelor’s degree usually takes four years. Those four years are, generally speaking, incredibly expensive, but you can shave quite a bit of the price off by doing your first two years at a “community college,” which is publicly funded and operates with drastically reduced tuition prices.¹⁰ This is what I did. Sometimes people act like this was a rogue choice, and in certain circles there is a certain level of stigma attached to it, but that’s what almost everyone I knew who went to college did. I followed the herd.

To attend community, I had to come by campus the summer after my senior year and take yet another test so that they could place me in a math class. I guess this was about a year after I took the SAT. This was much more laidback. It was on a computer, and it got progressively harder or easier depending on how you were doing. When you hit a point where you were unable to answer the questions, the test ended. I got placed in a pre-college-level algebra course.

My first class ever was a math class. The professor was in her 70s and wore fantastic matching skirt-and-blouse sets that she sewed herself, complete with shoulder pads. On the first day, she passed around a quiz about basic algebra terms and symbols. Although it didn’t count toward our grade, she gave it back to us on the second day with a score; if memory serves, I got a C or a D. The class though was mostly made up of people who struggled with math, so I ended up with a good group who cheered each other on through the semester. There was also a great tutor from Grove City in the “math café,” and I would always go during her hours. Those two things got me through the class.

The admissions department had helped me sign up for my initial classes, but I had to go to the guidance counselors for help with the next ones. The community college I attended did not have enough funding to offer therapy, so the guidance counselor office doubled as a place to sign up for classes and the place where they sent people when they normally would have recommended talking to a therapist. The waiting room was filled with literature about learning to control anger etc.

“Why don’t we put you in a stats class? Grad schools like when you’ve taken a stats class,” the guidance counselor asked.

“I’m never going to grad school,” I told her.¹¹

“Well, we’ll see,” she said and put me in the class anyway.

I do remember the stats class better than algebra, but only because I understood none of it. I can remember sitting there listening to the lectures and just finding everything incomprehensible. I failed an actual exam in that class—I can’t remember my exact score, but it was in the 40s or 50s (the grading system in the US differs somewhat from the UK). I still pulled through that class, though, because in the exams the professor gave points for each correct step, even if you got the wrong answer. I’m good at memorizing and was pretty good at telling from the word problems which formula was needed, so I would just write the formulas out very carefully, and even though my answer was almost always wrong I could still get a lot of points.

I wanted this to be the end of my math career, though, and I was desperate to avoid taking another class. Thankfully, I could take an introductory computer programming course and count it as my final math credit (do not ask me to explain this, I don’t understand either). I actually really enjoyed it. I had never understood why they were called programming “languages” before, but I found learning the rules a lot like reading a grammar manual and the homework felt a lot like copyediting. I think in another dimension I’m a computer programmer. A man named James Bond offered to help me cheat on the final exam, but I was a good Christian woman and turned him down.

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Writing this essay confirmed for me that I remember essentially nothing from these classes. I know what a square root is, and I know that something happening does not affect the statistical likelihood of it happening the next time. (Does that make sense? I’m probably wording that wrong. I know what I mean.)

In my mind, numbers are shapes. Doing math is like tetris. If I can envision whatever I’m adding as tetris shapes, I do OK. Seven is a bad shape and throws everything off. I get real nervous if I have to do even basic math around other people and will subtly check myself on my fingers.

If I have to think of numbers more abstractly, everything gets hazy. When I moved to the UK I got a lot of questions about how many people live in Pittsburgh or how many people went Duquesne relative to Pitt etc. I would always say I didn’t know. A fair amount of people would push me and be like, just guess. I have no idea! Large numbers are completely meaningless to me. 100,000 is the same as 150,000 as far as I’m concerned.

My general strategy is when people are casually estimating or trying to add a large figure or what have you and they say “Does that seem right?”, I just respond with a mysterious “Mmmmmmmm” and look off into the distance, not really agreeing or disagreeing, as if I am an Audrey Hepburn character busy living in the glamorous world of her mind. Eventually they just figure out the tip themselves.

So, to conclude, did I learn anything from the SAT? From any of this? Well, occasionally I write my social security number from memory. There’s that.

1. For my European readers, junior and senior are the last two years of school. I tried to google what forms these would be but just ended up confused. I think British high school is shorter?

2. Not to mention blah blah blah AI blah blah.

3. I also read about this thing where colleges purposely send admissions information to people who get very low SAT scores. The colleges do this so that these kids will apply and then they can reject them, thereby enabling themselves to say they’re so elite they only accept a tiny number of applicants. Evil. Just evil.

4. I’m going by memory here.

5. In 2020 I briefly considered doing a free online Euclidean geometry course and I’ve been kicking myself ever since for not.

6. This despite the fact that I wasn’t really sure what a clause was. Could I give you a definition of one now? Uhhh I’m really busy rn there’s a lot going on in this essay…

7. The important phrase in this sentence came to me while I was seeing one of the Hunger Games movies in theaters.

8. A real public high school classroom, like in a movie!

9. Please, please send me or comment your Battle Hymn of the Republic recs. I currently have three in my liked songs but I’m obsessed with this version.

10. Most people are familiar with this concept from the very funny and often quite accurate show Community.

11. Joke’s on you kid.