PUT TO THE TEST
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Casual PUT TO THE TEST It was a bright, breezy morning of drifting sunlight and chorusing birds, so I decided to ruin it by taking the SAT. The SAT used to be the Scholastic Aptitude Test....
...Casual PUT TO THE TEST It was a bright, breezy morning of drifting sunlight and chorusing birds, so I decided to ruin it by taking the SAT...
...Why would you end with a question...
...Even so, I fi lled both sides of the sheet with muscular prose, impish quips, and a learned allusion to the advent of the First World War...
...You’ll notice that on the master list of the world’s most thoughtful questions, this one does not rank incredibly high...
...In the early 1990s, at the height of political correctness, the name was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test, “aptitude” having been suddenly revealed as a culturally conditioned construct, hence exclusionary, hence unacceptable...
...As for the essay, it was graded on a onetosix scale...
...Three...
...I felt better about “Critical Reading,” once known as the “verbal” section of the test...
...We graded my test together...
...SAT math is exclusionary...
...As I gazed at the problems I felt excluded, objectifi ed, condemned to second-class citizenship in a patriarchal old boys’ network of people who were much, much smarter than me...
...Studies have shown that students can make gross errors of fact and logic in their essays and still get a splendid score (and then a job at the New Yorker...
...He clapped me on the shoulder in commiseration...
...The pages looked unpleasantly familiar, as though I were encountering a neighborhood bully I hadn’t seen in 20 years...
...ANDREW FERGUSON...
...Here was nothing so straightforward as long division or multiplication...
...Maybe that’s okay for a magazine or a book,” he went on...
...Three,” he said at last...
...It is, in fact, dumb, since the two alternatives the question presents as mutually exclusive could both easily be true...
...My closing lines cut to the very heart of historical causation: “Great oaks come from the smallest seeds...
...SAT was the fi nal snare to be got through...
...I waited for my son to return from taking his SAT...
...You’re supposed to be making a point...
...My math score was a disaster— in layman’s terms, lower than lobotomy patient, higher than Yankees fan...
...You’ve got that one thing about the First World War...
...The prep booklets all say the same thing,” he said...
...You need three supporting examples...
...Maybe two...
...Critical Reading was totally solid...
...Two...
...Page after page was strewn with x’s and y’s in weird combinations, bunched into equations and wrapped in parentheses, crouched under slash marks, sneaking around the corners of triangles, every hieroglyph laid out in a line and marching straight into a question mark, as if to say, “Well...
...I toted up my score...
...Escape it with a good showing, and you could enroll in a nice school, maybe bag a little scholarship money, and earn the right forever after to lie about your score...
...But this is the SAT...
...I could see he was trying not to roll his eyes...
...But where do the seeds come from...
...You can’t get away with that stuff on the SAT...
...I tried not to watch my son as he read...
...The essay is a new and controversial part of the SAT...
...Still the three letters can make the blood of a high school senior run cold—make the blood run cold of anyone who ever was a high school senior and had hopes of moving on to college one day, to a life of beer and oversleeping...
...I knocked a point off for modesty’s sake and gave myself a score of fi ve...
...The block arrows were still stamped at the foot of the test page, still demanding: “Go on t o t he next page,” until you reached the even more forbidding: “St op: Do not t urn t o any other sect ion in t he t est .” Can we talk about exclusionary...
...I was curious to see if the decline could be quantifi ed...
...My test required that I write an essay in 20 minutes on the question, “Do small events lead to catastrophes or are great events initiated by other causes...
...The answer sheet looked just the same: still the tidy rows of little ovals, beckoning me to fi ll them in wrong...
...And so I set my timer and opened the book...
...When the timer chimed I had fi nished 11 of the 20 problems...
...It’s a long time since you’ve been tested, isn’t it...
...And you end with a question...
...I was moved to do this by paternal fellow-feeling—one of my kids was taking the test that morning, too— but also by a suspicion that several decades of watching TV news, rearing children, drinking Scotch, and writing for newspapers had caused an irreversible decline in my own aptitude, if you’ll pardon the expression...
...The decline could indeed be quantifi ed...
...So fearsome is the SAT that an opportunistic “test prep” industry has formed around it, including practice books that contain old tests, where I found the one I took the other day...
...But it was with the “essay” section that I regained a scholastic toehold...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 8
