Opportunity

I hate the SAT.

I also hate its counterpart, the ACT, but the SAT has been my main focus for the last year and a half.

I hated the 5-hour SAT seminar that my mother paid for me to sit through one beautiful Sunday afternoon a year or so ago. My only comforts (as I received none from the chair in which my butt was parked) were the 4 short breaks we took and the two or three friends (who ALSO had mothers that cared far too much) that sat on either side of me.

I hated the SAT books that I bought/borrowed that I had to study the couple of weeks before each test, when I could be enjoying good times with my friends, times that are quickly slipping through my fingers as May approaches. The books were filled with tips, strategies, and practice tests. One of them was written by 6 college undergrads, mostly from Ivy league schools, that had all made a perfect score on their SAT's, a 2400. These writers tried to make the SAT "cool" by throwing little anecdotes and jokes in between things such as vocab words or geometry strategies. The SAT is not "cool," and their humor made me feel as though I was sitting in the middle of a robotics club meeting.

Of course, I hated the actual test as well. I've taken the thing 3 times now, and have lost roughly 150 bucks worth of good Saturday working hours because of it. I didn't enjoy sitting through 10 sections, not being able to eat much more than a small package of crackers, and not knowing what in God's name "circumlocution" meant.

However (yes, there is a "however")...

As I sit here and type all the negativity that swirls about my head at the first mention of the test's name, logic tells me that there must be a method to this madness. There must be SOMEthing good about this test, otherwise there would be no point.

I steer my attention to the system that the SAT represents, a system that strives to give kids that try and kids that work every opportunity to do well in life, regardless of their upbringing or financial situation. I look at the opportunities it has given me personally, such as the scholarships that my scores have qualified me for, which are not available to just anybody. I look at the fact that as my scores increase, so does the monetary value of said potential scholarships, which would increase the value of my education, which would lead to a better career, which would lead to a better quality of life down the road. It's given me new perspective as to why we put ourselves through things like this, why we have to work hard for success, and the sheer amount of windows that we open for ourselves if we do.

I have stopped to smell the Scantron. In retrospect (write that one down kids, its on the test, take my word for it), I'm glad that my mother was here to tell me to get off of Facebook and hit the REAL books, and I regret not a bit of time or energy that I've spent doing so.

I love the SAT.