I thought it said "math ring," and I thought students were cheating on the SAT or GRE somehow. When I discovered it was meth, I lost interest. Boring. Math is the more interesting subject by far. Meth rhymes with death for a reason.
If the above article holds no interest for me, at least it jogged my thoughts on the subject of test-taking. My score on the SAT was not great. I made a 1200 on the second attempt, after months of practicing. Meanwhile, some of my friends scored in the 1300s. I even heard of a neighbor who scored pretty close to 1600, which used to be the perfect score, although the test has changed over time. On the strength of his SAT score, he went on to win a four-year scholarship to an Ivy League college, complete with a stipend to cover living expenses.
Although my score was high enough to allow entry into a state college, it precluded the Ivy League and any kind of scholarship. After a period of disappointment, I moved on. We can't choose our fate. Besides, brains aren't everything. Then, too, I thought about the majority of people who scored less than 1200. Did my score make me any better than them? If that were so, then my score also made me less than all those people who scored higher. So I put the number out of my thoughts.
When I was in middle school, I took a test in order to get into the gifted program. I squeaked by with a 89.7% score, where the cutoff was 89.5%. My best friend failed to get in, because he only scored an 89.3%. This was a huge disappointment for him, because he had ambition like I have philosophy. However, it was not as great a matter as he feared at the time. Thirty years later, he had established a successful career in law and is now a millionaire.
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