Post about the test (yes its long and no you don't have to read it if you dont want to!):
----------------------------------------------------------------
After tossing and turning all night (kept having nightmares of showing up late for the exam), my alarm goes off at 5:20 am and I drag myself outta bed, shower, get dressed, and thank the Lord for the Starbucks down the street. Finally arriving at the school, I barely have time to get my backpack together when Marcus drives up beside me.
Rolling his window down he's like, "Hey, girl....don't I know you from like the AC program?!?" Jumping outta his car and into mine he's all, "I took three days off to study" and we swapped horror stories of problems we still didn't get and he called another intern friend of ours. We started laughing talking about all the prayers we said ahead of time/what we'll do during the test, etc. Finally, he looks at me and says, "you ready ash...." Smiling, I get outta my car and lock it and we head inside to the massive auditorium at seven am (which was a good thing because I got a sweet parking spot as a result of it). We find a spot down in front and like truth math people who freak out before a state exam that determines the course of your future, we reviewed some more from the THREE practice tests we had: not even similar ones.
Finally, we are dismissed to the rooms by seat number (Marcus hugs me goodbye and gulps) "this is it ash.....wish me luck!". Getting to my room on the second floor, I notice it's an old Latin room.....heh (got the latin award in high school: I LOVED that class.....it was awesome). I was like smiling, "ITS A SIGN" I thought to myself. Going over the "thou shalt not have thy cell phone or any electronic device on" again or your scores will be voided crap, she FINALLY registers us/hands out the crappy scientific calculators along with the test.
Given permission to start, I take a deep breathe, pray for mercy and open the test. The first twenty or so weren't that bad: basic given a graph representation of a problem/figure out the rule or whatever. Heh.........then the nightmare began. They didn't ask normal stats or proportion related questions: it was all warped i.e. a guy looks at an inverted image of himself, find the proportion that accurately describes the inverted image, not to mention inequalities. INEQUALITIES: three practice tests and NO mention of them. Wanna know what I spent the whole three weeks studying? Geometry...it had ONE geometry construction problem, thats it! No other problems from the practice test either.
The test also had some really weird graph problems. Some weird cartesian graph and ask what it represents: circumference of a circle to its diameter, volume of a sphere to its radius, etc. I was never the best of those......
BUT WAIT......I had like three places where an answer repeated for three rows and i was like, 'oh my gosh, the patterns warped" so I doubled checked them and changed like two answers.........The hardest one was the second to last.......I listed all the numbers out from 1-100 and still couldn't see that much of a pattern....grrrrrr!
So, before turning in the test I tallied up the ones I was unsure about along with the estimated 1.1 points off for each problem. There were 17*1.1=18.7-90=71.3. Yeah really comforting considering we need like an 84 to pass..........what a waste of time. Seriously....I coulda just done nothing and gotten the same score....total frustration.
After turning my test in (yeah the thou shalt raise thy hand before thy get up), they wouldn't let us leave the way we came in. Thus, I had to hike around the entire HUGE MacArthur High School. On my journey I hear this strange, familiar voice, "OH MY GOSH ASHLEY!!!!!!!!! Don't I know you?" Hugging me, Jonathan M. was like, "it was so easy." I almost slapped him: EASY!!!!! Far from it: I took the math 4-8 and was ticked off at how the test went and he took the 8-12.....grrr! I shoulda taken that: probably would have aced the harder stuff. It's always the easy things that give me trouble. After finding out about his baby/new house/school, I was left feeling frustrated. Was I the only one who was going to email our specialist saying, "WHY DIDNT YOU WARN US: tell us to review old TAKS questions from like high school or whatever." Woulda been an awesome way to review....grrrrrrrs!
