Testing

Today is PSAT testing day for lots and lots of highschoolers (including Isaac).

I have only vague memories of PSAT and SAT testing.

But I remember GRE testing very clearly.

The second time I took the GREs, it was in France, and they only had the computer option (not the paper option).  And it was weird.

I can remember having to go to a section of Paris we hadn't visited before, and I can remember thinking that the building looked like a US public school that was built in the 70s, and I can remember the insufficiently lit room and the bank of computers for the All New That Year computer test.

I remember feeling like I was doing really well, especially in the verbal section.  I kept getting progressively harder words, which was good, because it was an adaptive test--getting an answer right prompted the program to give you harder words.

And I was getting harder and harder words, right up until, like, the third-to-last question, when the word it gave me was "nice."

I sat back in my chair in the testing room and laughed out loud.  Then I looked around to see if I was being pranked or something.

And then I realized that I was going to get myself a talking-to if I didn't play it cool, so I went back to the test.

I realized that it was asking for the secondary (Jane-Austen-era) definition, and I tried to remember how Jane might have used it.  I can't remember what the answer options were, and I can't remember what I decided to pick. I hope I got it right.

The first time I took the GREs--well, that's a story.

Stephen and I were supposed to be at a church retreat in the mountains in Virginia on GRE weekend.  The retreat center was about an hour and a half away from a testing site at James Madison U, so we decided to go to the retreat anyway, and to skip the morning sessions on Saturday to go take the test.

I can't remember why--whether we were changing time zones or changing from Daylight Savings to Standard Time or something--but for some reason, we set our alarm wrong.  And we woke up a full hour after we had planned to leave.

So instead of getting there half an hour early, we were looking at getting there half an hour late.

I'm only admitting this because I'm pretty sure most traffic violations have a pretty short statute of limitations, and because we'd absolutely never do such a thing now, but . . . um . . . well, we weren't half an hour late.  We ended up being only about five minutes late.

But we were still five minutes late, and the testing had begun.

We were in the intake room, looking our most desperate and harried and flustered (as if we had just, say, driven fast enough to cut twenty-five minutes off an hour and a half journey) and furious with ourselves for possibly making it so that we would lose the $150 we had paid for the test.

The intake coordinator looked very sympathetic, but she had "My hands are tied" written all over her face.

We hadn't even finished our "Please, isn't there anything you could do?!?!" speech when, all of a sudden--I swear, I am not making this up--one of the proctors came bursting into the room, harried and flustered and out of breath and looking like she had been driving rather fast herself.

She said, "I am SO SORRY to be late.  I feel just awful, since I was supposed to be a proctor.  What should I do?!?!"

The intake coordinator looked at her, looked at us, and said, "Well, it looks like we have a proctor.  Go take your GREs."

For some people, the stress of the drive, the not knowing, the worry--all of that would have knocked them just a little off their game.

But I swear, I was smiling all morning. I think I even splurted out in giggles a couple of times.  I don't think I've ever done better on an exam.  Because, I mean, how utterly awesome, right?

I hope Isaac had a less stressful build-up to his PSATs today than we had that morning.  (I dropped him off myself, and I don't remember, you know, a police chase or anything.)  But I hope he also found something to smile about, something to help him relax and take some of the stress out of the process.