The terrible day dawned this past Saturday at 6:20. I managed to drag myself out of bed at that unseemly time and got dressed. I went to Mom & Dad's for a spare calculator and buzzed up to WKU to take the ACT test.
It was an awful experience!!!! Not only did I stand out as the only Mennonite, but the majority of the people were little teenyboppers that acted like they were there just to have a good time. They were as young as 7th grade, mind you. So we proceeded to our assigned rooms, the instructions were given and the time began to tick away. The first test was the English test. I pretty well buzzed through that one without a hitch and even ended up with some time left over so I went over the few that I had marked as being "not sure". "This isn't too bad", I thought, not realizing the terror about to come.
Next was the math. I started out with the story problems okay but about the 10th question in (maybe less), I realized that most of the questions were becoming much harder. And then I lost all sense of intelligence. Some of the stuff looked like I might have touched on it when I was in 8th grade, but, good grief, that was 11 years ago!!! I proceeded to try to make an appearance of figuring the problems out (I didn't want people to think that I didn't know how to run a calculator), only to fill in a bubble and mark it "TG" in the book, TG standing for Total Guess. I thought that if I ended up with some spare time I might be able to come back and take extra time on a few ofthe more solvable-looking questions. Hah!! Not a chance!! "You have five minutes remaining" came the call and I still had probably 15 to 20 problems left. So I went down thru there trying to pick the likely bubbles by chance, trying to be just random enough to not have a pattern and maybe get a lucky guess or two. By this time, I was feeling extra dumb, especially when I had seen the sniffling guy across the room close his book at least 8 minutes early. Geek!! Trying to make me feel dumb and all....
After a 10 minute break, we proceeded onto the reading and I think I might have done ok except that once again I ran out of time. I quickly filled in the last 10 or so randomly then used my remaining minutes to try to get those questions right. Amazingly enough, some of the random answers I picked were right. I may not have gotten to one or two of those in the long run.
Then came the science...I think I might have gotten some of those right but the analysis took me so long that once again, I ran out of time. The last two science experiments were pretty well guesses. That was annoying because at least those I could have partly figured out if given enough time. Before I took the test, I thought that I'll give it a shot and if I don't score so well, I'll just take it again but that math was such a horrible experience that I might be willing to settle for anything passing. Hopefully the English will be a high enough score to pull me through. Or maybe I got some Divine Bubbles. Wouldn't that be great!!
