A nine-month affair with the SAT

Right, so I am back. Again. Like an old man dissatisfied with life in general yet incapable of improving it, I have resurfaced, only to weave my adventures with the SAT into a most horrendous essay, scaring aspiring test takers out of their wits for no definitive reason other than, say, entertainment. Which is somewhat similar to telling German fairy tales. So, like innocuous kindergarteners oblivious to the monstrous nature of such fairy tales, let's dive into it. Expect the unexpected.

But before blinding those whose extraordinary misfortune lead to this article, I shall elaborate on my current situation, so as not to come across as teeming with arrogance and condescension. I have taken the SAT, and my score has been pleasurable. Bear that in mind. One final note: this essay is but objective; the ubiquitousness of my experience is my very downfall in composing an article that is universally accurate. That is to say, what I witnessed, others, with extreme luck, may avoid altogether; the bullets I dodged may strike you in your very heads. Be warned; but now that you are here, be welcome.

The newly erected building proudly and haughtily turned its face towards the moon. The winter solstice, and yet it radiated a luminous light; hundreds of windows filtered the warm glow inside, creating a most incandescent obelisk of light beams, the lights that signify reunion and comfort, that illuminates persistence and perseverance, that ignite passion and determination, that fuel daydreams and treasure hope. One of them belonged to a haughty teenager, head bent over a voluminous book as if in prayer. His room was filled with the mellifluous yet repulsive screeches of violin in a symphony; his mind bursting with math formulas and grammatical structures, his hand moving ceaselessly over the book, highlighting the wisdom to his success; his smartphone humming in muted disagreement (it required his attention, but was promptly silenced by Focus Mode).

That teenager was me. Obviously.

Once my peaceful affair with the charming IELTS test was over, I immediately turned my attention to the SAT - a most evasive mistress. For, unlike the IELTS, whose undeniable popularity accounted for her availability in learning courses and online materials, the SAT was very much a rising star in Vietnam, and thus, mostly regarded with polite oblivion from English centres - that is to say, little to no resources were ready to present themselves through a single Google Search. But then again, if the ancient Greeks displayed the Library of Alexandria to the world as a landmark of their wisdom accumulated through the ages, then modern citizens had also a library of equal magnitude - and it was through this very library that I acquired the shackles to held the SAT back, preventing her from escaping my grasp. Z-library, the most extensive shadow library in existence, saviour of dirt-poor students, gatekeeper to daydreamers, and benefactor of the ambitious. I downloaded my SAT books there. And rubbed my nose on them until it shone with wisdom.

The realistic process of working through such books is, admittedly, somewhat more complicated and nowhere as nearly romantic as the scene conjured beforehand. For one, most of the time my learning (especially the gathering of vocabulary) happened in the ungodly timeframe of 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., right before the compulsory education system ushered me to class. Indeed, looking back, I have not the faintest idea concerning the source of my motivation, simply to get up. The next step is reading volumes through volumes of SAT courses, highlighting the important keywords, and jolting them down, scrawling them over a neat notebook (courtesy of Oxford Stationaries) if necessary. (An unconventional benchmark to measure my progress was the number of highlighters I burned through. One of them would be completely exhausted of ink every productive one-month period). This way, six months flew by in feathery tranquillity, with me settling into a routine of downloading SAT courses from Z-library, obliging to their exercises, absorbing the wisdom they offered, and taking diagnostic tests when present. My confidence was palpable; surely the SAT would not throw me off guard; surely the sweet ripe apple offered to Snow White could contain no poison, she having cherished her life and lived harmoniously?

Until it did.

Apparently, the SAT was undergoing major changes to its format. Was I aware of such changes? In a way; the books obtained from Z-library, published in 2022, all covered broad changes to the test format, namely its transformation to a completely digital format, its renovation of test sections and refurbishment of fresh, up-to-date topics, etc. What they failed to address (and rightly so, for there simply was not enough time to adapt to the new format, notwithstanding the scarcity of reference mock tests and practice material) was the test takers' experience when confronted by questions of an alien to the point of otherworldly nature. Oh, let me tell you the day I took the pilot test for the new format, and the shockwave coursing through my infuriated veins when I received a face-slapping score of 1380. My English proficiency was mortally insulted, my confidence demolished to rubble, and my anxiety burgeoned like mushrooms after rain - it was time to seek professional educational assistance. That is to say, at that time my need to register myself in a formal SAT course finally dawned on my inane noggin of a brain.

(Small footnote: The following passages, seemingly extracted from a book about pyramid schemes and advertisement strategies, are not promotional content, and thusly not sponsored by any third party. At least, not at the time of this essay's writing.)

So anyways I found this person through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of my mother. He taught the SAT, in a library of his own, within walking distance. "Promising" was the word when I embarked on a 20-minute walk to his lecture hall; "This is it" was the phrase I uttered as I walked home from an entrance-exam-plus-interview-plus-library-tour with him; I have found the ideal mentor to guide me through the calamities of the raging months ahead.

Three months thusly passed in his lecture hall. What a period that was; for in the lecture hall, what I witnessed was not merely the process of teaching, but the process of education. The atmosphere there heightened the sense of individuality, encouraged logical reasoning and intuition, cherished the imagination and treasured ambition; the personal library (here I admire his investment in replicating a most stimulating educational environment, evident in rows of bookshelves and high-tech equipment) adjoining the lecture hall borne fruit to knowledge and wisdom; also the seats in the lecture hall was more comfortable than any other that I have rubbed my...on, including the ones at my own home. Having said that, the spotlight evidently falls on the lecturer himself: he who is not an artist weaves knowledge into the canvas of our minds and polishes the diamonds of our intelligence, who calmly and reassuringly unveil the curtains of the future to us ignorant students, who points us down the path to take. More could be said about my lecturer, but I think the message is crossed. Also, he might be reading this right now (If you are, then thank you, for everything, and also for putting up with my gibberish words that I call an essay. And also the aforementioned sentences were not flattery, but the mere truth, blended with my reverence and admiration. Sincerely so. And one more thing: I really hope my poem, though littered with grammatical mistakes, was not too bad).

Indeed, in that class, I acquired the correct approach to the new SAT format; and not only familiarised myself with it but actually grasped it within my reach and excelled at it. I stored in my brain quadratic formulas and SAT Vocab, I studied the cryptic meaning of poems and dissected scientific studies; I succeeded in distinguishing correlation and causation and in drawing simple diagrams illustrating how a conclusion was reached; in short, I braced myself with shining armour for the SAT, and in the process, also embellished my brain for the future.

And so, only one obstacle remained to be jumped through. Unfortunately, it was a mountain: Actually taking the SAT.

In accordance with the usual protocols, I registered a break from all my current projects, severed all communication ties to the outside world, shut down my phone, and stored it away in a treasure chest for a week. I was determined not to touch the accursed object until the SAT has been taken.

This radical act brought forward a plethora of benefits. For one, having isolated myself from all peers, my already mounting anxiety shall not be exacerbated by, well, peer pressure. Another thing, the freedom from deleterious distractions posed by smartphone notifications not only enhanced by orders of magnitude my concentration span but also allowed me an abundance of free time - the majority of which I utilised by administering myself to books. I could list a few novels completed in this one week, all classics that I enjoyed immensely, all the while conscious of their abilities to sharpen my reading comprehension skills and vocabulary extensiveness: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; And then there were none, by Agatha Christie; All the light we cannot see, by Anthony Doerr, to name a few.

Another thing: I spent this week reviewing the concepts present in the SAT, as well as taking daily mock tests offered by the Bluebook app. Furthermore, I went over my vocabulary list on a day-to-day basis (Important note to aspiring test takers: Do not try to cram new words in this final week. It won't work, trust me. It just isn't like that). But yes, mostly I tried to repress the circumlocutive wheel of thoughts inside my brain, about how I should be doing more oh no I should be doing less and review more oh nein ich musse Vocab lernen wait was that broken German...Something like that. Highly unhealthy, but then again, such thoughts are a staple of major exams, so my best advice would be to acknowledge their existence and repress their occurrence.

I shall brief over the administration process - this is standard knowledge, offered by College Board by any person registering for a SAT Test. However, there are two points that I would like to bring attention to:

- It is clearly stated in the instruction manual that snacks are permitted during the interval break. Having said that, on the day of my examination, only one other person actually brought any snacks at all (it was a doughnut, a highly sugary snack that would give you an energy boost for some time but would impede your brain for hours later). I brought a red apple, for good luck.

- The admission ticket. Please, just print it. Your smartphones will be confiscated before checking in, and you don't want to delay the admission of other test takers by taking time to show your admission ticket on your laptop screen, do you?

On that note, let's dissect the actual test itself.

The test has two sections, divided into four modules in total: 2 Reading & Writing, and 2 Math, all administered on the Bluebook app on your laptop. Bear in mind that after swearing an oath of secrecy, the Bluebook app will force your laptop into lockdown mode - any notifications or apps popping up will automatically stop the test and cause you numerous troubles with the proctors, so turn those off - and a proctor will read our the unique 6-digit code to begin your examination. You test in your own time; you finish on your own terms.

Now, the first reading section was...surprising (in retrospect, I found the first section more difficult than the second, as I took some time to get used to the proceedings of the test). There were several vocabulary questions that featured a bunch of odd words (I still remember a few of them, say...engender, calibre, precursor, detractor, inception, assuage); however, my learnt strategy of prioritising words that I've already known, and guessing the connotations of unknown ones, proved effective. Side note: The word "precursor" was actually featured in a passage further down the line, so I could actually guess its meaning based on that. Anyhow, proceeding onto the function questions: those did not prove much of a challenge, as the passages' topics were not too alien. One of them was about Richard Nixon's scandalous yet impactful legacy - that was the one where "precursor" appeared, so I remembered. But, oh, the logical reasoning ones.

:)

Those were...difficult. And not just plain difficult, but systematically so, almost as though the most difficult questions of the Reading Section had the same obstacles embedded in them. That day the obstacle was what I coined "Distractions". Many of the analogy questions all used a kind of "control subject" that actually had little to nothing to do with the experiment and then introduced that "control subject" into the answer to confuse the test takers. I still remember vividly a question about language comprehension in dogs, where the "control subject" was dogs listening to gibberish (it messed up the answers), and one about shared diets between otters or something, where the "control subject" was the otters who didn't share their diets with their mothers (it trick the students into selecting the wrong data representation).

This common "Obstacle of the day" thing was witnessed again in the Grammar section. Most of those did not pose a threat, but I encountered two about the uses of commas (whether to use them to separate subjects or not. Example: The price of a potato sack was $4.00 and $4.68 in two of the United Nation's members _______South Korea and the USA, respectively. The options offered: ":" ";" " " and something else. The answer apparently was " ", or nothing.)

But those were the main highlights of the Reading section. With an intensive vocabulary list and some sharpening of logical intuition, most of the questions could be answered with ease.

Note, however, another staple of tests administered in such large and all-important-looking ballrooms: The time. It FLIES, man. One minute you have thirty minutes, and another you have, like, seven minutes left to go over all your questions all over again, if that's what you want to do. So, be extremely wary of the time. It's never as long as it seemingly was.

The Maths test...were somewhat conventional. Such truths may own their roots in the fact that only 5 months (at the time of this essay's composure) have passed since College Board renovated their SAT; nevertheless, the types of questions offered in the official exam were strikingly familiar to the ones I have had practised with at those three months attending lectures. Not only that, I even remembered one about the maximum number of hardcover books available to satisfy two inequalities - it was identical to the one I practised, with the only difference being in the numbers. Furthermore, there were no trick questions that day, I think - but then again, that could be attributable to my luck. Your case may vary drastically from mine.

But yeah, once the tests have been turned in, you're free to leave the ballroom. And go home, to weep and to wait.

Apparently, no one warned me about the tension to experience in the two weeks of waiting for the score to arrive (The Bluebook app had already calculated my score by the time I finished the test, but hey, making students wait for their scores was just that much funnier). Those two weeks was a period of constant migraines, stomachaches, and of course, roundabout thoughts sometimes kept at bay by novels I read and sometimes overwhelming my mind entirely. Also, during those two weeks, everything I consumed tasted like sand.

But hey, it was worth the wait.

But then we do I go from here? How can I choose which universities to apply to, how am I supposed to compose a poignant introduction letter, how do I even track down available scholarships?

Hello? Is anyone there?