On a Saturday, 2 weeks ago, thousands of high school juniors around the nation took the SAT college entrance exam. The June SAT is the most popular college entrance exam for juniors who will be seniors in the fall. The majority of juniors take the exam with hardly any preparation, just to see how they will do, a practice run. Good idea? Not really.
All you need to do is stand at the exit doors of any high school or testing site and watch the faces of the kids walking out the door, to know they have just been through intellectual hell and back. I speak from experience, as I was there to pick up my son and his friend after 3 hours and 45 minutes of a cerebral workout. I wish I had taken pictures of the facial expressions that walked by me. I saw bowed heads, frowns, disgust, fear, and worst of all a look of shell shock.
Many of the parents waiting would walk over to their teens and ask “How did it go?” and the most common response was “I don’t want to talk about it, let’s just go home” or “It was horrible, I know I’ll have to take it again.” There was an occasional smile, a student who must have known what to expect, had prepped and went into battle ready for whatever the ETS (Education Testing Service) had created. Of all the hundreds of students who walked by me, there was only a handful of them.
As my son walked toward me, I held my breath and prayed he had a good day. He was walking slowly and when he saw me he made eye contact and smiled. I exhaled a sigh of relief; my son has a pretty good sense of how well he does on exams. As Mike approached me, he gave me his calculator and snack bag and told me he had answered all the questions before the time ran out and even got to finish the essay. I gave him a big hug. It wasn’t a football or basketball game where he made the winning point it, was better than that; my son had survived the dreaded SAT exam and felt he had done pretty well.
Even Mike’s friend felt the exam was not as bad as the practice test he had taken a few weeks ago at school. He had worked on relaxing more and trusting his gut instincts and not dwelling on questions that were too difficult to answer. He admitted he had between four and six Math problems that he was clueless how to answer or went blank. Overall, my son’s schoolmate felt that he would get a decent score.
In spite of both the boys stating that they felt good about their efforts, I knew they were still stressed, maybe not as bad as most of the other students, but they still needed to depressurize. Perhaps this is one of the rites of passage for teenagers; learning how to deal with a stressful situation and recover from it afterwards. Therefore, I gave them both a hug for a job well done and took them to lunch to celebrate. In the car, I tried not to say anything as they started going through the test. They needed to talk about it obviously, needed to find out which questions were too easy and which was were just too darn hard and which ones were traps put in by the SAT test makers to ensure no one gets a perfect score (according to my son).
I think taking your teen with a friend to take the SAT is a great idea and then going on an outing afterwards, can help each other unwind. No matter how well a teen has prepared, the test takes its toll. It is a test of mental stamina. Another good idea is to not bring up the next test date or schedule another test for the following week; “too much too soon.” Teens need to recover from the SAT and have enough time pass before taking the test again; he/she needs the day of the test to be a faint memory. That is why we told our son if he had to take another college entrance exam it would be in the fall; and this way he would have time to prep and by then he would be mentally ready to go through it again.
Of course, as a parent you feel you need to say something after your child walks out of the building looking bewildered and lost. Sharing others’ experiences, maybe your own can help lighten the mood. You could point out that he/she survived the test. I would not be surprised to find out that some students go back to school with a T-shirt stating “I took the SAT and survived”. In fact, why not surprise your teen with one or a small gift, a token to show him or her how proud you are of them. After all you’re teen could have waited until fall to take the test, knowing he/she would not be able to take it again or take the other test, the ACT. I’m just giving ammunition to those parents who need to help their teen recover from a hellish morning.
However, after a week or so has gone by, it will be time to have that discussion about test prep with your teen. You don’t need to say “I told you so,” but you can say “now you know why some students take prep courses or buy test prep books. Do you want to do something like that?” There is nothing like the first SAT test experience to open a teen’s eyes to either how ready they are for college or how much they still need to learn.
Oh, and while you are having that discussion about test prep for the SAT, do not forget to encourage vocabulary building and have a look at the words for today:
- Tedium (noun) being dull, wearisome
- Temerity (noun) unreasonable or foolhardy
- Temperate (adj.) moderate, mild, benign
- Tenable (adj.) defensible, reasonable
- Tenacious (adj.) determined, tending to adhere or cling especially to another substance
Word Count 680/3,000
