SAT Story

Posted by

Heather Nowlin

Asst. Marketing Director

When I was a high school senior, most things school-related had escaped my attention up to that point – except for a few extra-curriculars: drama club, forensics team, drama club… and (after 3 humiliating years of fruitless auditioning) Show Choir. (GLEE-ky? Yes, indeed.)

When my mom made it her mission to get me to take the SAT, I dutifully signed up and then promptly forgot about it – until she pointed out that the test would coincide with an out-of-town Show Choir competition! Study? Yeah, right. My biggest concern was how to satisfy my mother’s prudent insistence that I focus on my education and still make it to the Big Show.

I luckily found a choral comrade in the same SAT situation. We planned to travel to the test-taking site (i.e. high school cafeteria) together, and then high tail it to our Show Choir Competition, two hours away. This inevitably led to some bad decisions, being distracted throughout the entirety of the Most Important Test I Would Ever Take In My Life being one (and driving 20 miles per hour beyond the speed limit for two hours afterward being another - do not try this at home!).

Needless to say, my test results were far from inspiring. I ended up taking it again, mostly to satisfy Mom, and though I scored (somewhat) better the second time around, the test-prep process still didn’t preoccupy me as much as it deserved to – and it certainly never occurred to me to do anything as drastic as hire a tutor. But I eventually made it into a small liberal arts college (which is where I wanted to be anyway) and my life doesn’t seem to be all that damaged from such nonchalance in hindsight.

But this outcome for lackluster college admissions test performance is simply not the case for high schoolers anymore. All of us adults (meaning those who attended college in the 70s/80s/early 90s) came from a generation when getting into an Ivy League school was still difficult, but getting into just about anywhere else was not. If you were a high school graduate from Utah, for example, you were guaranteed admission to the U of U. That is no longer the case. But today, getting into a Harvard or Stanford is nearly impossible, and getting into anywhere else is just plain difficult! (*Some surprising observations on that topic to come tomorrow.*)

The current production of In by Bess Wohl here at Pioneer Theatre Company deftly explores that very topic.

What was your college admissions test-taking experience like? Feel free to share or comment.