My SAT Experience:

I took the SAT this morning. As an SAT tutor, my company requires me to take the actual SAT once a year to not only see how well I score, but also make sure I have a sense of what my students are actually going through. It's been over 10 years since I last took the SAT, but it seems like not a whole lot has changed.

I took the test on Columbia University's campus in the business school. My ticket said to arrive at 7:45 a.m. I walked into the building and the first thing I am greeted by is perhaps the most obnoxious woman I have ever met. It's her job to explain to the arriving students that they have to locate the number of the room in which they will be taking their exam, which is specified by the first letter of their last name. This information is displayed on an easel, but could easily be missed by rushing students. So this woman's job was to basically say hello, point to the easel, explain what the student needs to do, and then give directions to the stairwell around the corner. This woman could not have done this in a more obnoxious way. She immediately yelled at a student in front of me, and told him he needs to find his name on the easel. He must not have heard and, because he was already holding his admission ticket, showed it to her. She looked at it and yelled "what is this? What are you showing me? Why you showing me this? You need to find your name over here. There, there!" She was the bitchiest woman I've ever met. Then she yells "go down the hall and through the X." Of course this doesn't really mean a whole lot, and I start walking down the hall looking for an elevator to get to the third-floor. What she meant to say, but was too much of a bitch to explain it properly, was that the stairs were marked "staircase X” and were down the hall and to the left.

Then I get up to the third-floor. I am inundated with maybe 150 high school students all waiting around in a narrow hallway. You could cut the nervous energy with a butter knife, but that would be cliché. I start to wait, thinking, this shouldn't take too long since it's already 7:45 a.m.. Then I bumped into a student of mine from last year for whom I taught the physics SAT II. He is a really nice guy and we chatted for a little bit about how he did and how everything was going. I kind of expected to run into a student.

About an hour later, after standing around waiting, they finally decide to start letting people into the classrooms. I have no idea why these idiots told us to show up at a quarter to eight when nothing happened for at least 45 minutes after then.

What really pisses me off about this whole process is that these students are incredibly stressed to begin with. They're walking into this exam a bundle of nervous energy. They have been working intensively for the last few months, maybe even six to eight months, on preparing for this one exam. They have been thoroughly tutored, have attended classes, have spent countless hours doing review problems and questions as well as taking several mock tests. A lot of them, especially the ones from top private schools, earnestly believe that the outcome of this test will determine their future course in life. But the sense I got from the way this test is administered is that the proctors and people running the show could not have cared any less about this. I'm certainly not saying these students should be coddled or anything like that, but it really seemed as though this experience was meant to ADD a ton of unnecessary stress to an already stressful situation. Proctors should do their job and not try to add their shit to the already stressful atmosphere. I don't believe this is helpful in any way because I think student performance suffers at a certain point. It is perfectly healthy to come to a test like this a little bit nervous, but once you're there, other things should simply fall into place and not compound that nervousness.

For example, why exactly were we waiting around for an hour before the exam even came close to starting? What was the point of this? What was the urgency?

The proctors are really the face of the College Board, and judging from my brief run-in with several of them today, they tend to be pretty obnoxious and not very bright, and not all that experienced.

So we finally were allowed into the classroom, our tickets were checked, and we were all seated. Next, the Proctor, an austere middle-aged woman, read us our rights -- I meant read us the SAT instructions. One line really stood out. As she introduced the test, she read "the SAT is designed to test how well you are prepared for college," or something similar like that. I will speak a little bit more on that in a minute.

The Proctor explained that nothing can be on our desks, no water, no food, nothing. A girl raised her hand. Could she keep some water on her desk because she has a really bad cough and her throat gets dry. No. Another girl raises her hand. Could she keep a box of tissues on her desk because she has a cold and has to blow her nose. Yes, that would be okay. I was amazed that these kinds of exceptions were made out to be such a big deal. Why the hell would a box of tissues on a sick kid's desk be an issue?

Also, unbeknownst to me, you are not allowed to use mechanical pencils on the SAT. What the fuck? I actually stopped in Duane Reade to pick up a package of mechanical pencils, (which was all they had), because I don't have any real pencils at home since I always use a pen. I could not believe mechanical pencils aren't allowed. Of course, consistent with the way the entire test was being administered, the Proctor gave no hint as to why mechanical pencils would not be adequate for the test. Instead, her assistant came around with a box of regular pencils. The really inane part of this is that in writing the essay, a 25 minute section of the test, using a pencil with a dull point is a huge pain in the ass and it slows you down.

And the test begins. The first section is the writing section, and the question -- yes, I'm going to spoil it even though after the test the Proctor said we were not allowed to discuss the question until after we got our score reports back, but I don't give a fuck -- was the following:

Do people achieve more success through cooperation or through competition?

I wrote a pretty solid essay that I couldn't have disagreed more with. my first example was the medical industry, where in order to become a doctor you must get through a rigorous series of highly competitive phases, beginning with achieving high grades in college, competing with your classmates to get into cutthroat medical schools, and ultimately getting into a good internship. I argued that this competition yields the best minds in medicine, although in reality I disagree and believe that because medicine is chock-full of the most competitive types of people, all struggling to outdo the next doctor on a given patient's case, patient care and the health-care industry in general both suffer as a result of the lack of cooperation.

The next example I used was Wal-Mart and how the market economy is a highly competitive environment that yields benefits for the consumer when businesses have to compete to offer the best product at the best prices. Of course Wal-Mart does this at the expense of paying their workers a fair wage and giving them health care, but it was a wonderful example for my crappy little essay.

Finally, my last example was the space race -- when John F. Kennedy said we'd put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This, of course, was a competition between the United States and the USSR, but in reality the success of our space program owes almost everything to the cooperation and collaboration of all of the scientists who worked together in NASA.

I’m so good at writing bullshit!!

The rest of the test was by no means a breeze, but I think I did all right. Curiously, there was one short reading passage about wind turbines and their associated impact on carbon emissions, and another short passage about sea turtles and habitat destruction. I am a big fan of the College Board sneaking in environmental issues into their test.

I'd like to discuss a few of my ideas on how the SAT isn't exactly the best way to evaluate how well a student will do in college -- which is their claim. Ostensibly, you would assume that because I went to a top college and majored in physics and computer science, and then went to Columbia for a masters in journalism, I represent exactly the type of student who should have aced my SAT. I performed well in college and pursued a masters. But I only got a 1360 out of 1600 when I took my SAT almost 10 years ago. I would argue that the College Board probably does virtually no back testing to see truly how well its test evaluates how well a student will do in their four years in college. My father’s example is even more egregious – he barely broke 1,000 but he is one of the best doctors in Westchester and is by any standard a success.

My biggest problem is the essay that students have to write by hand using a pencil. At no time in their college career, I can safely say, will students ever -- and I mean ever -- have to hand write and essay using any writing instrument. Obviously all writing is done on a computer, and because most students these days are understandably and fortunately in the habit of typing papers rather than hand writing them, a good test would offer the same environment students would be used to. For instance, with e-mail, instant messaging, and Microsoft Word, pretty much every student these days can type 40 to 70 wpm. Most cannot hand write that fast legibly. Additionally, when writing an essay on the computer, students are used to deleting and rewriting sentences, phrases and words until they get it right and say exactly what they want how they want to. Unfortunately with the essay on the SAT, you have a limited space to write.

What they don't explain to you at the beginning of the test is that your essay will be photocopied numerous times and distributed to teachers across the country who will be responsible for grading that essay. In photo copying these essays, you will be at a disadvantage if you try to erase words and write over them because when you erase pencil it leaves a gray marketing that will make it very difficult to read those words on a photocopy. Therefore, my tutoring company strongly encourages students to cross out rather than erase. Well, you run out of a lot of space very quickly if you aren't writing exactly what you mean to say. Anyway, a 25 minute hand written essay in a limited space, written in pencil is going to be far different from one written on the computer. When I took the GRE several years ago, which was administered on the computer, I wrote several essays that were pretty good and comprehensive thanks to my typing skills. If I had to handwrite those essays, they would have been an illegible mess.

The other major problem I have with SAT questions is that the math and reading passages don't have anything to do with the real world (with the notable sea turtle and global warming exceptions). I'd like to see real math problems that deal with real issues one would encounter in the real world. For instance, a good question I thought of on my way out watching all of these students put on their iPods was the following:

Apple outsources their production of iPods to a Chinese manufacturing company. Ping works for this company and gets paid $0.07 for each iPod he produces. If Ping can produce 8 iPods per hour and works 16 hours a day at the factory, how much does Ping make per month?

Now there is a question that is more appropriate.

And who the fuck is EVER going to be docked points in college for not having a number 2 pencil or not bubbling in their answers properly. What the fuck kind of progress has the college board made that they haven’t been able to figure out a more advanced system that can handle other writing utensils. Its been 10 fucking years. Fuck you college board!

I think I should probably finish up this rant about the SAT so I can move on to more interesting rants.