Up Your Score (61 page)

And well you should gasp! This demented version of a chair, or one much like it, will be your home during the three most important hours of your high school career. Equipped with hardly ample desk space of about one square foot, this chair undoubtedly will have you making a fool of yourself as you attempt to keep your test booklet and answer sheet together on the desk and not let them fall all over the floor. They will fall on the floor anyway, making a rustling sound, and you will wind up annoying everyone in the testing hall. If you are left-handed, the situation will be even worse—you will wind up with the book on your lap and the answer sheet on the desk—leaving your left arm wrapped across your body to mark the circles. This is misery. Demand from the proctor a more appropriate place to take the test. He will probably just laugh wickedly and enjoy watching you suffer.

To make matters worse, the legs of the chair are usually too short and the edges too sharp. If you’re not careful, you’ll cut yourself and there’ll be blood everywhere. And if you don’t keep your posture (practically impossible to maintain), you’ll wind up in traction with a slipped disc. Only the strong survive.

But there is hope. For help, we suggest you turn to knowledge that has existed for centuries in the eastern regions of the world. The ancient art of yoga, we have found, offers the most
relevant conditioning for the serious-minded. If you practice the following “sun salutation” sequence, starting at least a month before the test, you will suffer minimal discomfort from your immediate surroundings during the test.

In addition to doing yoga to improve your concentration for the SAT, try some concentration meditation. It’s simple and could really help you home in on what’s important—like the history of celery.

To meditate, simply focus your attention on a single object (say, the tree outside your window, your bedside lamp, or even this wonderful book) and sit in a relaxed, but upright position. Focus your attention. Increase your awareness of the object. Think of it as zoning in, not zoning out. Do this for ten minutes twice a day and you’ll be surprised at what it can do for you.

Cheating is rampant at many test centers. Among the cheating methods we have encountered are sharing answers during the breaks between sections, peeking at other people’s answer sheets, communicating answers through sophisticated body language codes, leaving a dictionary in the bathroom and looking up words during the breaks, and even having one student take the test for another student.

Two kids with whom we went to high school cheated by using the following method. Since their last names were Basset and Bates (the names have been changed to protect the guilty) they knew that they would be sitting near each other during the test. Basset was a math whiz and Bates was a vocabulary guru. So Basset did both of his own math sections while Bates did both of his own verbal sections. When the proctor turned around, they traded tests. Basset did Bates’s math sections and Bates did Basset’s verbal sections. They both did very well and—what a surprise—they both got exactly the same score.

Another way of cheating that we heard of involved using M&M’s. Throughout the test, one kid would eat different-colored M&M’s, each one standing for a letter—yellow for A, green for B, etc. The other kid would watch him and know what the right answer was.

Some years back, the ETS lost a lawsuit to a high school student it suspected of cheating. Brian Dalton’s score rose from 620 in May 1991 to 1030 (out of a possible 1600) in November 1991, and the large increase caused ETS to withhold his score from colleges until it had “investigated” further. Dalton explained that he had been sick the first time he took the test, and that he had subsequently completed a prep course. But the ETS still refused to release his scores because a handwriting expert suggested that another person might have filled out his answer sheet. Dalton took the ETS to court, and the judge ruled in his favor because the ETS hadn’t thoroughly investigated information that Dalton had submitted, including testimony by proctors and another handwriting expert. However, it was too late for Brian: St. John’s University had already rejected him due to his initially low SAT score.

Should you cheat?
No. You should not cheat
. You see, there’s nothing wrong with beating the system by learning what you’ve learned in this book because, although we do teach you a lot of tricks, we don’t break any rules. But if you beat the system by breaking the rules, you are doing something that’s wrong. You will feel guilty and wish you hadn’t done it. When your friends who didn’t cheat don’t get into their first-choice colleges and you do, you will feel awful. Just ask Basset and Bates.

So why did we write this section? To make you aware that cheating is a reality and that you shouldn’t let people cheat off you. In fact, you should screw them over when they try. Suppose that during the break someone asks you what you got for number 22. Even though you know that the answer is (B), tell them that you got (C) and that you’re totally sure you got it right. Then after the test say to the person, “Did I tell you (C)? I meant to say (B). Golly, I’m really sorry.”

Note:
If you were planning to cheat by looking at the answer sheet of the person next to you (which you shouldn’t have even thought of doing!), you should know that while all the tests on a given test date have the same sections, they are in different orders. While your first section may be a math section, the first section of the person next to you may be a verbal section. The ETS devised this plan to thwart cheaters.

Cheating by glancing at a neighbor’s answer sheet is likely to be a losing proposition; not all tests have the sections in the same order.

Cheating by getting answers from other people is clearly wrong. The most common form of cheating, however, does not involve getting answers from others. The most common method of cheating is working on a section of the test after the time allotted for that section is over. At the bottom of every section the Evil Testing Serpent warns you in big, bold letters:

STOP

IF YOU FINISH BEFORE TIME IS CALLED, YOU MAY CHECK YOUR WORK TO THIS SECTION ONLY. DO NOT TURN TO ANY OTHER SECTION IN THE TEST.

At many test centers, no one checks what section you are on. We would estimate that about half the kids at our test center cheated by using this method. The five of us were good kids and didn’t. But after the test, when we realized how many of our friends had done this, we felt we were at an unfair disadvantage for not having done it.

Clearly, this kind of cheating is not as bad as getting answers from other people. You could argue that when your future is in the balance, why not borrow a minute from the math section to work on the verbal section that you didn’t quite finish, especially if half your classmates are doing it? On the other hand, it’s still cheating.

Note
: The parents of one of our past guest editors dabbled in the dark art of proctoring and would like to point out that the Evil Testing Serpent instructs all proctors to expel from the testing center anyone who cheats using this method. Also, doing so is immoral and will outweigh the advantage garnered by high SAT scores when applying for admission to heaven.

Robert Southey, the author of
The Three Bears
and arguably the worst poet ever, once said, “The desert circle spreads like the round ocean.” He was referring, of course, to the metaphorical relationship between circles and the SAT.

Circles are quite significant in that there are many of them that you will have to fill in during the course of the test. This is about how to fill in those little circles. (Actually, they’re not really circles, they’re ovals.)

Undoubtedly, you’ve had to fill in lots of little circles in your life. You probably never gave much thought to technique or speed. In fact, until the publication of
Up Your Score,
no one had ever researched the science of filling in circles. We were the first.

Our original groundbreaking study showed that some students spend an unimaginably wasteful 2.3 seconds per circle. At that rate, they will spend 7 minutes and 4 seconds of their total testing time filling in circles. For O-lympic competitors, we
developed the In-to-Out Circle Method, which enabled students to reduce their time to an unprecedented 0.4 seconds per circle, saving almost 6 minutes of time to spend working on the test.

In-to-Out Circle Method

So how obsessive do you have to be about filling in the circles? As it turns out, optical scanning machines are far more advanced than anyone could have possibly imagined. Advances mandated by Congress after the 2000 Florida election fiasco have created machines capable of reading people’s minds before they even select an answer. One such machine narrowly missed being elected president of Bolivia. The machines used to grade SATs employ a similar technology. They scan through your answers and search for a pattern—for instance, if you decide to fill in only the left half of every circle, the machine will recognize this pattern and realize that it is your way of marking an answer. As long as you are consistent, you could draw a phallic picture in every little circle and the machine would not give it a second thought. Still, doing so drastically increases your likelihood of ending up in prison, so we wouldn’t recommend it.

Whatever you do, avoid the following time-wasting methods of high school students who are not familiar with our groundbreaking research:

Vertical Lines Method