Family Tree by Signe Wilkinson for December 09, 2023

Back in 1961 when I took the PSAT, I don’t remember if we were even told about it until a day or two before. I took it and got in the top 2 percent. In 1962 I took the SAT, which required an entire Saturday morning spent at a college about 40 minutes away. At the time we didn’t do any prep for it, in fact, I don’t know if that kind of prep existed! Anyway, I got in the top 2 percent again, which was enough to get me into the UCal system, so I was satisfied.

Decades ago, I did about an hour of prep work and scored high enough on the SAT to get into an elite technical college. Today, that same score wouldn’t get me into the State U that’s a drunken jockocracy.

The basic PSAT and SAT are based on 9th grade math and English. The difficulty is not the problems, it’s deciphering the language they use. It looks and sounds like English but it’s not. The specialized tests are more difficult, you have to really know the subject matter there.

It pays to prepare…….

When I took the SAT the official advice was that no preparation was possible. There was no test prep industry at the time.