Up Your Score (63 page)

Overall, these biases are mean and nasty and we wish they’d go away. But don’t be too discouraged. You’ve read
Up Your Score,
and therefore can overcome any SAT hurdle that comes your way.

In 1999, the ETS, in their infinite cluelessness, proposed a scoring feature called “Strivers,” which would have identified students who scored higher on the SAT than their income levels would have tended to predict. This would have supposedly
enabled colleges to more easily identify students who were “striving” to achieve beyond their circumstances. The “Strivers” concept was abandoned after wide ridicule in the press (the SAT is supposed to be an objective test, after all). Interestingly, the plan was actually much more scaled down than the ETS proposal from which it evolved. The ETS developed something called the “Measure of Academic Talent” (MAT) score way back in the early nineties. The MAT would have been an SAT score that was adjusted to reflect a student’s income level and background—raised for poorer students and lowered for wealthier ones. Imagine having your score go up and down based solely on how much money your parents make! The ETS knew that this plan wouldn’t fly, but thought they’d be able to slip by with “Strivers.” They were wrong!

Most of the information for this section came from FairTest (the National Center for Fair and Open Testing), which leads the fight against the ETS. If you have any questions or would like to subscribe to their newsletter, go to
www.fairtest.org
, call (617) 477-9792, or write to FairTest (P.O. Box 300204, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130). Tell them
Up Your Score
sent you.

After you ace the SAT, you will decide that, because you are such a good, involved student with a kick-butt SAT score, you could get into a prestigious college. You will develop a passion for this particular college, but your dreams of attending will be crushed when you learn that it costs about three times as much as you can possibly afford.

At this point you have several options. You could turn your back on the material world and join a socialist commune where money is not an issue. You could create a charity called Educating Our Future Leaders and solicit everyone in the phone book, then take their donations and spend them on your college education. (This is probably illegal, by the way.) You could sell your little brother, but you probably wouldn’t make enough money.

Or you could try to win some scholarship money. Ask your guidance counselor about scholarship opportunities and research them online or in the library in the most recent scholarship books you can find. Many of these books are huge and daunting, but you will soon realize that you don’t qualify for many of the scholarships in them unless you live in Santa Fe, your birthday is February 29, and you’re a direct descendant of an original signer of the Declaration of Independence. You can also try searching the Internet and using a site like
www.fastweb.com
. Although scholarship applications are less fun to fill out than tax forms, they can be much more rewarding. Please note that the cost of a college can be a misleading indicator of whether you can afford it. Some of the most expensive colleges have the best financial aid options.

Sorry. This section is unfortunately not about “Sex and the SAT.” It is, however, about the next best thing: money. You see, a good SAT score can be worth lots of money. Not only could you get more scholarship money and maybe a better job because you went to a better college, but now, thanks to us, you may be able to get your parents to pay you for a good score. This is how the devious plan works: Some parents are willing to spend up to $1,000 on an SAT prep course. And comparatively this book costs next to nothing! So you could tell your parents that they are saving roughly $990 and you are getting excellent preparation for the SAT. See where we’re going with this?

Sit your parents down. Tell them you think your SAT score will be the deciding factor for colleges. Discuss what you think your score goal should be. Say how your friends are taking prep courses, and you might need to do the same to reach your score goal. Then, when the moment feels right, spring “The Deal.”

The Deal is this: “If I reach my score goal using only
Up Your Score,
practice, and hard work, how about you reward me
with a relatively small percentage of what you would spend on a prep course . . . say, $400?” Work from there. Negotiate. Eventually you might get a good $250 out of it. Or an iPod Touch. The possibilities are endless.

But what if you think you really want to take a prep course? Well, you can still do it without having to spend $1,000. Try visiting
www.collegeboard.com
where, in addition to a free practice SAT, for $69.95 they also offer an online course and other services to help you improve your score. Your parents will be so impressed with your initiative—and by the money you’ve saved them—that they may just go ahead and buy you a new toy! So go out there and siphon from your parents!

What if you wake up on test day and don’t feel well? Panic, beat your fists against the wall, and shriek, “Why me?”

Then sit back and assess how you feel. If you really feel vile, consider postponing the test and asking the ETS for a refund. If, however, you just have a cold, slight nausea, and a mild headache, you should still take the SAT. First of all, your “illness” could just be nerves, in which case it might go away after you take a shower. Even if it doesn’t, adrenaline might well carry you through the test (you can come home and allow yourself to wallow in your symptoms afterward), and you won’t have the SAT looming in front of you for another few months. Take some cold or headache or tummy medicine as long as you’re certain it won’t make you drowsy. (It’s very difficult to succeed on the SAT if you take the test while you are sleeping.) Try to relax and breathe deeply and focus on the test, not on your scratchy throat, runny nose, watery eyes, throbbing head, clogged sinuses, or aching stomach. And remember, the SAT nauseates everyone. Finally, if you know you didn’t do well, just cancel your scores.

If, after the test, you think you might have screwed up, that’s only natural, and you shouldn’t worry about it. However, if you
know
you screwed up, you should cancel your scores. If you made some grievous error like choosing (E) for all the sentence completions or falling asleep during a section, then it is probably wise to cancel. But don’t cancel just because you made a few stupid mistakes.

The simplest way to cancel is to fill out a Test Cancellation Form before you leave the test center. However, if you decide to cancel after you’ve left the center, you must notify the ETS by the Wednesday after the Saturday or Sunday you took the test. (For details, go to
www.collegeboard.com
.)

If you’re set on getting an amazing score, memorize all the problems that you weren’t sure about and then go home and see if you guessed correctly. If you did guess correctly, keep your score. Otherwise, cancel. (We recommend this only if you want to take the test over and over again until you get a perfect score.)

If you cancel, your score report will read “Absent or Scores Delayed.”

In his spare time, the Evil Testing Serpent likes to play match-maker. This is why he invented the Student Search Service (SSS). The SSS (sounds like something the Serpent would say) is like a computer dating service, except that instead of matching sexually frustrated singles, it matches colleges with potential students. It’s free, and it’s a good way to get lots of mail, so you might as well do it. However, if you’re eco-conscious, you may not want to waste all that paper. One way to save trees is to share college brochures with your friends. Just make sure you have your own application when the time comes.

In order to enroll in the program, you have to fill out the Student Descriptive Questionnaire (SDQ) in the Student Bulletin for either the SAT or PSAT (both of which are
available in your high school guidance office) or you can enroll when you sign up for an Advanced Placement test. By the way, doing this questionnaire is a great opportunity to practice filling in little circles.

Unless you’re a compulsively ethical person, there is no reason why you have to tell the truth when answering the questionnaire. If you have no artistic ability, but you still want to see the pretty pictures in the brochures that the art schools send out, then fill out question 6 to say that you got an “A or Excellent in Art and Music.” Also, do not be modest when answering the questionnaire. If you’re good at something, say that you’re great at it. That way you’ll be sure to get mail from the colleges that are interested in that skill. The way it works is, the colleges send the ETS a list of characteristics that they are looking for in their students, and the ETS sends them the name, address, sex, date of birth, Social Security number, high school, and intended major of students who match those characteristics. The college doesn’t know your answers to individual questions; it only knows that the matchmaking Serpent thought you might be compatible.

Another similarity between the SSS and a dating service is that they both make mistakes, matching you up with some real losers. The “Registration Bulletin” claims that you will get mail only from schools with “the academic programs and other features you find important.” This is false. If you put on the questionnaire that you are an Alaskan native who wants to study philosophy and has no mechanical ability, you will still get mail from the Mormon School of Interplanetary Auto Mechanics.

Most of you already know all the fun stuff you can do on the Internet. You can download any LMFAO or Justin Bieber song you want, you can play
Halo
with someone in New Zealand, you can even flirt with 40-year-old men. Now, for your extreme convenience and pleasure, you can also prepare for the SAT on the Internet. We’ve spent countless hours checking what’s out there. Here’s what we’ve found.

As we’ve mentioned one million times already, the College Board has a site on the Web that is surprisingly peppy for such a stuffy organization. You can register for most of the SAT services mentioned in
Chapter 1
(see
page 24
), and it offers advice not only on test taking, but choosing a college and getting financial aid. There’s even a “store” where you can buy books and software and a “library” where you can review documents. Address:
www.collegeboard.org
. If you have any practical questions about the SAT, a visit to this site might be helpful. There’s a free full-length practice test available at sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-practice-test. They have a “Question of the Day” that is a good place to see SAT practice questions. You can view it online, or you can sign up to get one e-mailed to you each day—which is an easy way to integrate SAT prep into your routine. The College Board even provides an analysis of your score and suggests areas where you need work. We recommend that you save this for a Friday or Saturday night when you’re looking for a good time. You might be a little hungover the next morning, but with words like
licentious
and
bacchanalian,
the rush is worth it.

Several SAT schools now have online versions of their courses that are less expensive than their classroom offerings and have the excellent advantage that when you get bored (and you will get bored if you expect the other guys to be as witty and charming as we are), you can always log off.

The Princeton Review also has a pretty good site. You can take a practice test, read some sample questions, and get lots of college advice. Address:
www.princetonreview.com
. It has one promising feature—online dissection of recent tests—but unfortunately the dissections are pretty superficial. They tend to say things like “The critical reading section had no particular surprises” without getting down to details about specific questions.

Kaplan’s website (
www.kaptest.com
) covers territory similar to The Princeton Review’s—analysis of the recent tests, lots of college advice. Their SAT course itself seems solid enough.

And, of course, you should follow
Up Your Score
at upyour
score.com
, and on Twitter (@UpYourScoreSAT) and Facebook, where JaJa will post the latest and greatest SAT tips and you can commiserate with fellow test prep sufferers.

Ever since the ETS increased the length of the SAT to practically three days long, he so generously allows students to bring in snacks. (We know this is just to keep his victims alive longer in order to continue torturing them.)

You shouldn’t eat the food during the test because that would waste valuable time. Instead, snack between sections. Choosing your SAT menu can be lots of fun. Here are a few guidelines and suggestions:

1. Nothing noisy: no potato chips, carrots, rice cakes, or tuna casseroles (at least not the kind with cornflakes on top)

2. Nothing sticky: no cookie batter, maple syrup, toffee, or Superglue

3. Nothing big: no turkeys, cotton candy, melons, or shish kebabs

As long as you stay within the guidelines, we leave the specific choices up to you. However, we do recommend the following recipe.

½ pound butter

1 (1-pound) box dark brown sugar

3 cups flour

3 eggs