Margin of Error
Christina
Carefully. Deliberately. Meticulously. I placed my pencils neatly in a straight line on the desk in front of me. I tucked the rest of my belongings on the floor below me, and I straightened my spine in anxious anticipation.
As the proctor distributed the SAT test booklets, I laid the dense packet of paper labeled with the daunting words College Board on the table, face-up yet closed.
It was apparent that the room buzzed with tension. No one spoke a word, but our body language revealed our underlying agitation as we all stared down at the table and restlessly shifted in our seats. In the background, I could hear the proctor droning on about the testing policies; meanwhile, I was mentally reassuring myself that I was adequately prepared.
Then, from my trance of self-motivation I heard the proctor’s voice pierce through.
“Are there any questions?”
Silence followed.
“Then your time starts now.”
There was a frenzy of rustling as everyone hastily flipped open their test booklet in unison. Idle nerves instantaneously transformed into determined concentration, and for the next 65 minutes, I was immersed in the passages of the SAT reading portion. Nothing else mattered other than the articles about gold found in trees, glaciers melting at the poles, a new teacher in a small and neglected town, and electrical impulses traveling through the fatty myelin sheaths surrounding the nerves.
In what felt like the blink of an eye, 65 minutes had passed, and our time was up. We were instructed to close our test booklets to prepare for the next writing section of the SAT, and as I followed these directions, I could feel the color draining from my face. I did not even finish the reading segment of the test, and that was not a promising sign.
“The time seemed to have passed too quickly, almost as if we had less than the full allotted time,” I thought, so I glanced down at my watch just to verify that we did get 65 minutes.
However, to my surprise, my stopwatch only displayed 55 minutes (10 less minutes, enough to finish a whole passage!). Almost involuntarily, I raised my hand to bring this to the proctor’s attention; however, she nonchalantly dismissed my concern by saying that I had deliberately started the stopwatch ten minutes later. A few others in the classroom shared my concern but had no proof, and the rest of the class did not utter a single word. (To their defense, most of them had flown in from foreign countries just to take the SAT, and if College Board had been notified of a testing procedure error, then all of our scores would be cancelled and the test would be rescheduled. By that time, they would no longer be in the United States, and their efforts would have all been in vain.)
Thus, without definitive proof, it was my word against hers, and I knew that hers would always triumph in the end because she was an adult with more credibility.
For the remainder of the test, I could feel my concentration waning. All I could think about was how my score would not reflect my true capabilities solely because I had run out of time. I just wanted to leave, to go home, but no, I had to endure through the writing, the no calculator math, the calculator math, and the essay section, all while knowing that regardless of my performance on the rest of the test, I would be unsatisfied with the result anyways.
Finally, after four more painstaking hours of testing, I was finished, and I felt discouraged and honestly, quite devastated. While I overheard students in other classes express their confidence, I fought to bite back tears.
Later that day, after my parents tried consoling me by taking me out to watch Crazy Rich Asians in theaters, I started thinking rationally again. Subsequently, I contacted College Board and cancelled my score while filing a complaint. Unsurprisingly, I never got refunded nor were there any reparations for the proctor, but at least, there would not be an unsatisfactory score permanently linked to my name.
Come October, I returned to the same testing center to retake the SAT, and this time, things went much more smoothly (as they should have the first time). So in the end, this story does have a happy ending, just not through the process that I was expecting.
Through this trying experience, I have inadvertently discovered that Murphy’s Law does apply to real life: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Well, I suppose everything comes with a margin of error.
Carefully. Deliberately. Meticulously. I placed my pencils neatly in a straight line on the desk in front of me. I tucked the rest of my belongings on the floor below me, and I straightened my spine in anxious anticipation.
As the proctor distributed the SAT test booklets, I laid the dense packet of paper labeled with the daunting words College Board on the table, face-up yet closed.
It was apparent that the room buzzed with tension. No one spoke a word, but our body language revealed our underlying agitation as we all stared down at the table and restlessly shifted in our seats. In the background, I could hear the proctor droning on about the testing policies; meanwhile, I was mentally reassuring myself that I was adequately prepared.
Then, from my trance of self-motivation I heard the proctor’s voice pierce through.
“Are there any questions?”
Silence followed.
“Then your time starts now.”
There was a frenzy of rustling as everyone hastily flipped open their test booklet in unison. Idle nerves instantaneously transformed into determined concentration, and for the next 65 minutes, I was immersed in the passages of the SAT reading portion. Nothing else mattered other than the articles about gold found in trees, glaciers melting at the poles, a new teacher in a small and neglected town, and electrical impulses traveling through the fatty myelin sheaths surrounding the nerves.
In what felt like the blink of an eye, 65 minutes had passed, and our time was up. We were instructed to close our test booklets to prepare for the next writing section of the SAT, and as I followed these directions, I could feel the color draining from my face. I did not even finish the reading segment of the test, and that was not a promising sign.
“The time seemed to have passed too quickly, almost as if we had less than the full allotted time,” I thought, so I glanced down at my watch just to verify that we did get 65 minutes.
However, to my surprise, my stopwatch only displayed 55 minutes (10 less minutes, enough to finish a whole passage!). Almost involuntarily, I raised my hand to bring this to the proctor’s attention; however, she nonchalantly dismissed my concern by saying that I had deliberately started the stopwatch ten minutes later. A few others in the classroom shared my concern but had no proof, and the rest of the class did not utter a single word. (To their defense, most of them had flown in from foreign countries just to take the SAT, and if College Board had been notified of a testing procedure error, then all of our scores would be cancelled and the test would be rescheduled. By that time, they would no longer be in the United States, and their efforts would have all been in vain.)
Thus, without definitive proof, it was my word against hers, and I knew that hers would always triumph in the end because she was an adult with more credibility.
For the remainder of the test, I could feel my concentration waning. All I could think about was how my score would not reflect my true capabilities solely because I had run out of time. I just wanted to leave, to go home, but no, I had to endure through the writing, the no calculator math, the calculator math, and the essay section, all while knowing that regardless of my performance on the rest of the test, I would be unsatisfied with the result anyways.
Finally, after four more painstaking hours of testing, I was finished, and I felt discouraged and honestly, quite devastated. While I overheard students in other classes express their confidence, I fought to bite back tears.
Later that day, after my parents tried consoling me by taking me out to watch Crazy Rich Asians in theaters, I started thinking rationally again. Subsequently, I contacted College Board and cancelled my score while filing a complaint. Unsurprisingly, I never got refunded nor were there any reparations for the proctor, but at least, there would not be an unsatisfactory score permanently linked to my name.
Come October, I returned to the same testing center to retake the SAT, and this time, things went much more smoothly (as they should have the first time). So in the end, this story does have a happy ending, just not through the process that I was expecting.
Through this trying experience, I have inadvertently discovered that Murphy’s Law does apply to real life: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Well, I suppose everything comes with a margin of error.
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