It’s no secret that the standardized tests for college admission are a burden to bear. With so much riding on the scores- especially if you’re planning on applying to public schools- there are two ways to look at it, regardless of your level of preparation: first, the test is so difficult and there’s so much riding on the results that if the scores are not reflective of YOU, in your opinion, ALL dreams will be lost; or perhaps a more grounded perspective, everybody out there for the last century, who had hopes of gain admission to colleges and universities across the U.S. have taken this test and it has not altered the state of the universe- in any apocalyptic fashion. In other words, it’s just a test. The weight of the world does not depend on the score that you receive.
To be quite honest, it’s not appropriate to have the colleges that one hopes to apply to selected BEFORE ever taking either the ACT or the SAT or both. If this is the case, a student is putting him/herself in a perfect position to feel like a failure. However, it will be no one else’s fault but your own if you do not prepare properly. For all of the hype surrounding college admissions and the SAT and ACT exams, it surprises me how many students skirt the preparation.
Let me digress for the sake of an example. My sport of choice was water polo. I grew up in a pool, training as much as one could. In water polo there is a penalty shot called the 5-meter. Similar to a penalty kick in soccer, a field goal in football or a free-throw in basketball, a 5-meter penalty shot is precisely as it sounds: one player, unguarded, 5-meters out who, with the blow of the whistle, has to pick the ball up and shoot into a cage which is guarded by a goalkeeper. Not the hardest thing in the world, is it? Surely not. Is it the easiest? Not by a stretch. Especially when it’s a close game, perhaps in the conference tournament or, better yet, the NCAA Championship. However, a good player will always make time in their days to practice this shot. They practice at the close of a workout, when their legs are exhausted, their arm and shoulder can hardly hold the ball up let alone throw another shot, yet they know, come game time, when it really counts, they have practiced this shot so often that the ability to score is a habit. Missing the shot is not even a fleeting thought . . . this is, arguably, the greatest anxiety a player can experience. How do the top performers cope with the pressure on a day-to-day basis? Through repeated practice.
An old adage that I remember hearing from one of my childhood coaches, “practice doesn’t make perfect, PERFECT practice makes perfect!” resonates with me to this day. When I work with my students to help make them smarter and better prepared to enter any type of learning situation- be it a test, debate or, perhaps, an admissions interview, we don’t focus on the AMOUNT of work as much as we do on the QUALITY of the work. The point is not to maximize the capacity for memorizing test-like problems as it is being the most prepared mind in the room. When stumped on a vocabulary problem, the difference in scores of a “successful” test-taker and a disappointed test-taker are those who are able to make NO educated guess and those who can narrow the options down to three, sometimes even two choices. Through recognizing the connotation or root of the words or the context of the sentence where it is placed, the tests do tend to be biased in favor of those students who are more critical thinkers and better prepared. In other words, students who can analyze a sentence for a positive or negative missing word or whether the two missing words are going to have similar definitions or, perhaps, be opposites, because they have trained themselves through practice, will find greater success than students who think that the SAT/ACT require no extra preparation outside of an English III Honors course.
I have had one student who suffered such great anxiety attacks and, literally, responded to the idea of the SAT like he was Chicken Little and sure enough the sky WAS falling. By all fair reasoning, he was mildly prepared and should have been in the range of 1000 combined for the math and reading sections, maybe even a bit higher. However, his panic was so intense, beginning about two days before the test, that he lost all focus and would, apparently, stare at his answer sheet like he was asleep with his eyes open. Luckily, we made sure that he had many other things going for himself when it came to the strength of his application and he will be enrolling in one of my favorite schools for the Fall of 2008, University of Colorado at Boulder. I would highly recommend that if you have this similar test-day lapse, get yourself an appointment with a psychologist who does testing evaluations and is knowledgeable regarding the process of how to recommend certain accommodations for when you actually sit for the SAT, ACT, SAT II’s and AP exams, etc . . .
With testing season upon us, my greatest advice for all students who are feeling the nerves and pressure of their future looming in one, four-hour, standardized exam: it is never too late to get yourself prepared. Set aside the same thirty minutes to one hour every day to go over vocabulary, review math problems that you have not done in a year or two and maybe, if you have reviewed and crammed all your vocabulary and math and you still have a few minutes before practice starts or your music teacher or your study group arrives, go to http://www.nytimes.com/ and read an article or two!
Good luck.
