SAT’s Baffle Bookworms with Simple Reality TV Essay Question

The students who most seriously prepare for the SAT’s obviously don’t watch television, because they know it’s a complete waste of time. At least that’s what they thought, until they actually took the SAT’s.

Studying for the SAT’s is a damn stressful time in a young person’s life. It’s intimidating to face a standardized test that determines the intellectual worth of a 17 year old. The result is something that borders on masochistic punishment, as high school students beat themselves up over absurd analogies and mathematical logic problems asking in what order Johnny, Timmy, Ralph and Alex sat on the roller coaster.

But teens are told that this brutal, unforgiving test will determine the rest of your life, because as we all know the promise of an Ivy League university is a great job, attractive spouse, money, power, and respect. Duh.

So of course students spend years in preparation for the exam. They attend expensive prep classes offered by The Princeton Review and Kaplan, and parents shell out even more money for private tutors.

The process is draining on the parents’ bank account, as well as physically and emotionally taxing for students. It’s not until years later that we find out the SAT’s don’t necessarily determine success or future financial stability. Neither does where you go to college. Granted, some schools look significantly more attractive on a resume, but it doesn’t need to say Harvard on your degree to impress an employer.

Naturally, some ambitious students study endlessly for these tests, allowing themselves very little time watch TV, go outside, eat, breathe and enjoy their youth, in general.

There is simply too much to learn. How are they supposed to learn Japanese during cello lessons, while they’re watching reality television? I mean, “The Almanacs” is a very dense book, and you never know what they might ask. Imagine if the test poses an analogy based on San Paulo, Brazil’s annual rainfall? You’d be fucked.

And so it goes.

The truly industrious students give up socializing and bury themselves in textbooks in order to achieve the American Dream known as the school of their choice. There is nothing wrong with this: it’s admirable that some teenagers can be amazingly goal-oriented at such a young age. I continue to envy them.

However the SAT people threw a little twist in this year’s test. The topic of the massive essay question revolved around Mike ‘the Situation” Sorrentino and the forgettable world of reality television.

For a lot of over-achievers, the question might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. On second thought, they probably would have understood it better that way.

It’s common knowledge that if you take your education seriously, “The Jersey Shore” doesn’t exactly fit into the curriculum or warrant a study break. When the question was posed on the test, some people just couldn’t compute and the tears began to flow. All this hard work for a question structured around one of our society’s greatest embarrassments?

It’s a shock that the kids’ brains didn’t cartoonishly combust.

According to the New York Times, SAT message-boards have exploded in an uproar over the unfairness of the essay question, but a spokesman for SAT states that the only goal of the essay is to see how well a student can write. Meaning, you don’t have to know the answer to the question. The student’s who took the test could have written bullshit, but as long as it was well-written, they would have scored well.

But these aren’t the type of students who are comfortable with not knowing the answer. Their life’s goal is to know the answer, but they forgot to calculate the variable chance ‘The Situtation’ might fuck with their college admissions.

I’d be willing to bet that high school students who can’t quote Shakespearean soliloquies from memory probably had no issue writing their opinion on reality television.

Which means no matter what you do, the SAT’s will always be an unfair, soul-sucking disaster waiting to happen.

[NY Times]