How to be a Beastly Test-taker

Goodness. It's been several weeks since my last post, so in order to recapture my dear readers' attentions and perhaps convince several others to become faithful followers, I will be instructing you in the fine art of test-taking. Specifically, you juniors, how to ace the PSAT tomorrow. IF you ace the PSAT, you will be receiving at least five college letters per day, with an average of one full scholarship a week. Unfortunately, these scholarships are to schools like OU,Kings' College, University of Nebraska, and itty-bitty Methodist all-girls' schools in the middle of Iowa. Now, some of these might stir your innermost dreams, but really, I would appreciate a letter from Harvard or Yale a bit more...

Anyways, it's good to be recognized, and if you go to Lynch, then you're also treated to a breakfast complete with cake and a little flag with your name on it. Very much worth the extra effort.

Here are some tips that you will not regret following:

1) Sleep a bit. If you don't, then that impromptu nap you indulge in during that fascinating critical reading section(astronomical observations about the innermost ring of Saturn definitely has been my favorite) might result in some slobbering that will smudge your answers.

2) Eat breakfast. Otherwise everyone in your testing room will hate you by the end of the four hours after listening to your stomach growl incessantly. Believe me, I could have boosted my score by at least three or four points if not for the distractions from my fellow test-takers' bodily noises.

3) Drink coffee. This especially helps if you ignore step 1. However, either make sure you have a strong bladder or abstain from more than one cup. Calculating the weight of twenty-three storage bins full of confetti is much more difficult when a much heavier load is sitting in your bladder. Just fyi-ing all that obvious stuff.

4) Get assigned to a classroom with a cool teacher. Yes, I realize this is not technically under your control, but use some telepathic skills to communicate your wish to your counselor. Perhaps it'll work if you're REALLY as smart as you pretend to be. Anyways, with a cool teacher you can skip most or all of the hour set aside for teaching you how to bubble in circles and spell your name, and instead you can just take the damn test already.

5) Bring a calculator. "All of the problems on this test can be completed without a calculator." Yeah, RIGHT. SURE. If you can multiply 1327.5 times 6 to the fourth power within the 25 minutes set aside for the math section with time left over to do the other 20+ problems, then I hope you plan on applying to MIT (which most definitely DOES NOT stand for the Massachusetts Institute of Theatre).

6)Don't sit in an uneven desk. A recent study has shown that a wobbly desk psychologically screws with your head, and as your desk vibrates, your head mixes up all the information, creating a big alphabet number soup that translates onto the page as eraser marks and lost hope. Seriously.

7) Don't get a song stuck in your head before the test unless it's a catchy math tune that helped you to memorize the equations for semi-circles and twenty-two sided figures. Oh wait. They provide all the equations anyways. Way to waste time, dude.
Here, I'll help you give your opponents an advantage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgkHd6eBfoE&feature=related
Good luck with those problems!

8) Guess only if you can eliminate one or more answers, and therefore, one or more percent of the 1.5 million students taking the test. Duh.

9) Be smart. If you're not, then you're sunk. Blame your parents, you inherited a good portion of their intelligence.

10) Remember, even when you're being bullied for your glasses or made fun of for breaking the curve, just remember, it's cool to be smart. Look at me.
'Nuff said.