Shameful joy
Jan. 25th, 2007 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinIn my third year of high school (1984-85) I attained justly brief and minor local celebrity for my performance on the PSAT.
For those of you who have not been subjected to the American educational system, the SAT (this used to stand for "Scholastic Aptitude Test" despite not measuring anything that could seriously be called scholastic aptitude; I think the official meaning has since changed) is a standardized test that most college-bound US high-school students take in their final year, which most colleges and universities consider in admissions decisions. It's been jiggered with in various ways in the past twenty years, but back in the era I'm talking about, it was an entirely multiple-choice test that was half math problems and half assorted tests of grammar and reading comprehension. It is supplied and scored not by a government agency or even an educational institution, but by a cabal of two private non-profit organizations, the College Board and Educational TestingServices Service, the latter of which charges a fee.
As with any standardized multiple-choice test, the best way to ace the SAT is to practice taking some form of it repeatedly, to become familiar with the style and with answering strategies. There's an enormous industry revolving around SAT test prep, and ETS participates as well by offering the PSAT or "Preliminary SAT", a half-length version of the SAT with similar questions that students typically take the year before they take the SAT, and often in other practice iterations before that. The PSAT is also the qualifying exam for National Merit Scholarships.
I took the PSAT multiple times, and the last time, I managed to get a perfect score. There was for some reason great interest among local media in students who managed to get a perfect score on the SAT, and I guess getting a perfect score on the PSAT was close enough, so I got written up in the Virginia Weekly section of the Washington Post (in a story with a strange accompanying photograph in which I was photographed from below, perched on top of a mailbox with arms crossed imposingly). The reporter must have been slightly nonplussed by the phone interview in which I vented the typical frustrations and resentments of a nerdy high-school kid, but fortunately none of that got into the story.
Anyway, I was then amazed and excited to learn that somebody from WRC-TV 4 news was coming to film a segment about me for the local early-evening broadcast. I wasn't sure what to expect, but when I walked into Mrs. Ferris's math class and saw the lights and cameras set up, I figured I was going to meet some sort of reporter.
Instead, they had sent their end-of-the-newscast wacky joke boy, an irritating man by the name of Steve Doocy.
I must have been Doocy's least favorite subject ever. He had a whole shtick plotted out in advance, and I mostly ruined it by refusing to go along with his gags. I did the bit where we went head-to-head solving fake gibberish math problems, but wouldn't supply him the closing line he wanted, which was me asking him "what is Leah Thompson* really like?". The experience makes me sympathize with the oddballs who play good sport to the fake reporters on The Daily Show, except that The Daily Show has well-written jokes and does not claim to be an actual news broadcast.
When the segment aired, it turned out that not only was the whole thing incredibly embarrassing, Doocy hadn't even tried for something like a Daily Show standard of factual accuracy surrounding his jokes. Most egregiously, he claimed I'd gotten a perfect score on the SAT (people insisted to me for years afterward that I had done so, having seen it on TV). In the "math showdown with Steve Doocy" bit, a textbook figure that I identified in my Poindextery voice was named in an on-screen title as, I think, a "hyperbolic parabbola".
Years and decades went by, I stopped being an easily embarrassed teenager, and Steve Doocy somehow landed a national gig as a pseudo-news person and right-wing blowhard on the Fox News show "Fox and Friends". A few days ago, Doocy got some attention for more or less uncritically repeating, and expanding upon in moronic fashion, a hit piece about Barack Obama that had appeared in Insight magazine, a publication associated with the Washington Times and, like it, owned by lunatic zillionaire cult leader Sun Myung Moon that specializes in clownishly far-right politics. The article claimed to have information from operatives associated with Hillary Clinton's campaign (like Hilzoy, I suspend judgment as to whether that attribution is true, but wouldn't bet much on it) that Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia when he was a little kid, a school scarily referred to as a "madrassa". Never mind that the story was (a) false and (b) really shouldn't have been all that alarming if true; whether it originates from the Clinton campaign or from Moon's people, it's yet another chapter in the various coded attempts to frame Senator Obama as a crypto-Muslim-scary-brown-terrorist-symp.
You can read about all that elsewhere, but right now I'm just enjoying watching the office of Barack Obama rip Steve Doocy a new orifice.
* The mid-eighties six o'clock WRC anchor, not the similarly named actress.
For those of you who have not been subjected to the American educational system, the SAT (this used to stand for "Scholastic Aptitude Test" despite not measuring anything that could seriously be called scholastic aptitude; I think the official meaning has since changed) is a standardized test that most college-bound US high-school students take in their final year, which most colleges and universities consider in admissions decisions. It's been jiggered with in various ways in the past twenty years, but back in the era I'm talking about, it was an entirely multiple-choice test that was half math problems and half assorted tests of grammar and reading comprehension. It is supplied and scored not by a government agency or even an educational institution, but by a cabal of two private non-profit organizations, the College Board and Educational Testing
As with any standardized multiple-choice test, the best way to ace the SAT is to practice taking some form of it repeatedly, to become familiar with the style and with answering strategies. There's an enormous industry revolving around SAT test prep, and ETS participates as well by offering the PSAT or "Preliminary SAT", a half-length version of the SAT with similar questions that students typically take the year before they take the SAT, and often in other practice iterations before that. The PSAT is also the qualifying exam for National Merit Scholarships.
I took the PSAT multiple times, and the last time, I managed to get a perfect score. There was for some reason great interest among local media in students who managed to get a perfect score on the SAT, and I guess getting a perfect score on the PSAT was close enough, so I got written up in the Virginia Weekly section of the Washington Post (in a story with a strange accompanying photograph in which I was photographed from below, perched on top of a mailbox with arms crossed imposingly). The reporter must have been slightly nonplussed by the phone interview in which I vented the typical frustrations and resentments of a nerdy high-school kid, but fortunately none of that got into the story.
Anyway, I was then amazed and excited to learn that somebody from WRC-TV 4 news was coming to film a segment about me for the local early-evening broadcast. I wasn't sure what to expect, but when I walked into Mrs. Ferris's math class and saw the lights and cameras set up, I figured I was going to meet some sort of reporter.
Instead, they had sent their end-of-the-newscast wacky joke boy, an irritating man by the name of Steve Doocy.
I must have been Doocy's least favorite subject ever. He had a whole shtick plotted out in advance, and I mostly ruined it by refusing to go along with his gags. I did the bit where we went head-to-head solving fake gibberish math problems, but wouldn't supply him the closing line he wanted, which was me asking him "what is Leah Thompson* really like?". The experience makes me sympathize with the oddballs who play good sport to the fake reporters on The Daily Show, except that The Daily Show has well-written jokes and does not claim to be an actual news broadcast.
When the segment aired, it turned out that not only was the whole thing incredibly embarrassing, Doocy hadn't even tried for something like a Daily Show standard of factual accuracy surrounding his jokes. Most egregiously, he claimed I'd gotten a perfect score on the SAT (people insisted to me for years afterward that I had done so, having seen it on TV). In the "math showdown with Steve Doocy" bit, a textbook figure that I identified in my Poindextery voice was named in an on-screen title as, I think, a "hyperbolic parabbola".
Years and decades went by, I stopped being an easily embarrassed teenager, and Steve Doocy somehow landed a national gig as a pseudo-news person and right-wing blowhard on the Fox News show "Fox and Friends". A few days ago, Doocy got some attention for more or less uncritically repeating, and expanding upon in moronic fashion, a hit piece about Barack Obama that had appeared in Insight magazine, a publication associated with the Washington Times and, like it, owned by lunatic zillionaire cult leader Sun Myung Moon that specializes in clownishly far-right politics. The article claimed to have information from operatives associated with Hillary Clinton's campaign (like Hilzoy, I suspend judgment as to whether that attribution is true, but wouldn't bet much on it) that Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia when he was a little kid, a school scarily referred to as a "madrassa". Never mind that the story was (a) false and (b) really shouldn't have been all that alarming if true; whether it originates from the Clinton campaign or from Moon's people, it's yet another chapter in the various coded attempts to frame Senator Obama as a crypto-Muslim-scary-brown-terrorist-symp.
You can read about all that elsewhere, but right now I'm just enjoying watching the office of Barack Obama rip Steve Doocy a new orifice.
* The mid-eighties six o'clock WRC anchor, not the similarly named actress.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 06:56 am (UTC)predictably, I take this opportunity to talk about myself
Date: 2007-01-26 07:09 am (UTC)Medium-small fish in a teeny-tiny pond, that's me! Is it any wonder I went on to excel at A&M?
Also, rock on Obama. I hope he and Clinton eviscerate one another in the primaries to make room for Edwards or Richardson or some other crazy surprise.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 09:30 am (UTC)I don't even know what I got on the PSAT! No one told me that it was the number that mattered; all I remember is the percentage. It said I did better than "99.8" percent of test-takers, whatever that means.
Actually, I never had much luck with the SATs. I overslept the first time the PSATs were held; when I took the SATs the first time around I had little sleep and wound up with 1270 (about 770 of which was verbal); I overslept the second time; the third and final time, someone told me he'd come around and wake me. He didn't; I overslept.
Actually, this is pretty much how high school went in general!
percent-ILE
Date: 2007-01-26 10:50 pm (UTC)though actually
Date: 2007-01-26 10:59 pm (UTC)Re: though actually
Date: 2007-01-26 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 04:34 pm (UTC)Also, this gives me an excuse to complain about idiotic multiple-choice tests.
See, in Finland, the test for the driver's license includes a multiple-choice test. In the form it existed back when I took it (it's changed since, I'm pretty sure), it was a thirty-question test, and you were allowed to get only three wrong. Of course, we trained for this in driver's school.
The first one I tried, I got eight wrong. This resulted in a long argument with the teacher, who even managed to explain why I was both wrong and right on one question (he accidentially explained it the wrong way around at first). I quickly picked up the hint that this was not a test of any kind of logical abilities or actual useful knowledge, but a test of being able to think like the people who made the test.
So when I took it for real, I aced it. I did this mostly by remembering some facts that would likely be asked, and then constructing a basic set of rules for picking the answers to other questions - I don't remember them any longer, except for the one that said that when presented with a question like "How long does it take to stop when moving at speed so-and-so", always pick the worst answer. I think I found a single contradiction to that rule in a set of twenty or thirty tests.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 05:05 pm (UTC)Also, you had Mrs. Ferris for math? What a coinc-- naw, I'm kidding.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 11:27 pm (UTC)Yeah, I saw that news story
Date: 2007-02-15 03:45 am (UTC)In another comment, I mentioned that I was talking to my kids about you - which was this story. My oldest is now in high school, and starting to think about these tests. My youngest is in the 7th grade, but just took the ACT - because they think he is smart or something. Funny that you brought up your teenage voice - I have a confession to make. When I pretend to speak for the dog - I mimic that voice. It doesn't even make sense, because the dog is female. Obviously, you made an impression on me.
I am glad to see someone who did well on a standardized test be appropriately critical of the perceived value of these scores. From the other side, it is somewhat laughable how unimportant these scores are in isolation. A good score can open a door, but that is all. I didn't even know what the PSAT was when everyone was talking about it. Obviously, those HS counselors make up their minds early on who has talent, and who doesn't. I never saw a preparatory book, sample questions, nothing. I went in cold, took the SAT, scored a 990, and thought I was a loser.
Some day I hope we meet again. Hey, aren't you in the Boston area? I have a Geography conference there in April 2008.
--gh
P.S. How come we never hear the story about what your SAT score was?
Re: Yeah, I saw that news story
Date: 2007-02-19 07:36 am (UTC)Yeah, I've been in the Boston area since I entered grad school in 1990. Actually, now I'm out at the far northern end near the New Hampshire border where the real estate is cheaper. (The idea was supposed to be that I'd also have a shorter commute to work, but I lost that job after just a month at my new house, and got a job that is better but also, for the time being, further away.)
I don't actually remember what I got on the SAT. It was something in the high 1500s; I probably only missed a couple of questions. By that point I had gotten really, really good at taking standardized tests, a skill that is completely useless after you leave school but really comes in handy while you're there. I'd probably score lower now because I'm out of practice.