REWRITING
THE SATs “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” —Malcolm Gladwell I have my ten thousand hours in taking tests. It’s not that at some point I counted all the tests I’ve taken, summed up every minute I ever spent bubbling answers on scantrons, and finally reached a quota. No, the principle described by the above quote, from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, is simple: it is only by investing the time and energy to practice something thoroughly and repeatedly that a person can get really good at it. This is applicable to learning any skill, manual or mental. Over the course of thirteen years in Texas (public) schools, I have answered more multiple-choice questions than I have had schoolmates. One of my few concrete memories from the year I spent in kindergarten—along with making a “learning poster” about the plesiosaurus and watching as each of the Painted Lady caterpillars we had been taking care of spun a dusty chrysalis around itself—is taking my first standardized test. (It was the Stanford.) We had quizzes at the end of the week, tests at the end of the unit, big tests at the middle of the term, really big standardized tests at the end of the year. By the time I took the practice PSAT for the first time in my freshman year of high school, I was an old hand at taking tests. I knew how to identify problems that looked tricky, and come back to them once I’d earned the bulk of the points from questions that could be answered more quickly; I knew how to nap, leaning forward on my desk, when I was done early and didn’t have a book with me; I knew how to keep scores concealed from classmates, how to grimace a little when asked about a test without actually saying anything.
The PSAT, however, began to hint that tests could have an even greater significance than I was used to giving them. Geometry tests determined whether or not I passed the class. TAKS tests determined whether or not I passed the ninth grade. The PSAT’s big brother, the SAT, lurking not too far around the corner, determined whether or not I went to college. This was a genuinely scary idea for me and my ilk—all tests had teeth, but this one had wings and talons, too. It would be wrong to say that I avidly tore through test-prep material, studying diligently with the sole goal of bringing my score as close to 2400 as I possibly could, but it would be further from the truth to say my attitude toward the SAT was ever nonchalant. My scores on practice PSATs were almost—but not quite—promising, so before I took the PSAT in my junior year to try and qualify for a National Merit Scholarship, I enrolled in a Princeton Review prep
…all tests had teeth, but this one had wings and talons, too. course. For four days, over two consecutive weekends, I went and sat with other uncertain students, answering multiple-choice questions and then analyzing the correct way to have done so. Nothing of what we learned was content. No revolutionary new concepts were introduced, no vocabulary words or mathematical theorems were reevaluated; rather, we reviewed the test’s structure, the ways in which questions were worded, the most efficient order S U M M E R 2014 • 37