Heartless - Ch. 1 - P. 4 - The SATs...

Heartless - Ch. 1 - P. 4 - The SATs...

The SATs...

- May 8th 2007

Today was the day that we started our SATs. We registered and then headed to the hall for the two hour Maths test, a Paper A and paper B. We were seated alphabetically, and I was in front of Amber. "Are you nervous" she said to me, as we were getting seated. I replied, "Nah", playing it cool, "I just hope they don't give us something we haven't covered".
"Hm, I get what you mean", she said, obviously just trying to hold a conversation.
Before I could say anything else the examiner began to speak. loudly, though not quite shouting, "Okay everyone! Please quickly make your way to your seats without any talking". There were still two or three people who hadn't been seated. "Write your name, and teacher's name, in the correct boxes. I don't know why but we always waited for the confirmation to write out names, as if to confirm we are supposed to, do we always need to confirmed everything? We also had to write down our center and student numbers, which were basically the school's and our numeric code, and our school was 10239 and I was 4164.
Amber kicked the back of my chair and I looked back, "When we get to the first fractions question I'm going to kick your chair" she whispered playfully, she was good with fractions and for some reason enthusiastic toward them.
The examiner then shouted "When you're ready...", and Amber quickly winked at me, as if for good luck, "...Begin", and we did.

On the first page were some examples of equations, like how to work out the area of a trapezium or the volume of a cylinder, and on the next page there were some simple questions to help us begin.
The first question was "Work out 11 x 12", which was 132.
Through the next pages we went through Pythagoras, Factors, Prime numbers etc.
Eventually Amber did kick my chair, lightly of course, and sure enough it was there.
"Work out 1/3 + 1/12", we were told to multiply the denominators by each other and then multiply the numerators by the opposite denominator. So that gave me 12/36 + 3/36 which was 15/36. Now we had to divide it by either 3 or 12, whichever worked out. 15/36 divided 12 gave me 1.25/3 so that wasn't right. 15/36 divided by 3 gave me 5/12 so that was the correct answer.

I finished the test 10 minutes later with 15 minutes to spare. Slowly I began to notice more people finishing as well. I still heard Amber flicking pages so I didn't know if she hadn't finished or just checking her answers.
With 5 minutes left I began to draw on the table. I drew my name in a stylish bubble writing, and some cartoon-like characters.

As me, the examiner, and everyone that had finished, watched the clock strike finishing time the examiner yelled "Okay pencils down!", which I already did prior to this. Almost immediately the sound of conversation echoed through the hall.
Amber kicked my chair again and said "So how was it?", as I thought of how to answer it, a kid called Blondie who was sitting beside us asked the same question.
"I thought it was alright" I said, dully, leaving the details for when we get outside.

Again the examiner yelled "Everyone be quiet. Each row will be told to leave separately". After about 5 minutes we all made it out.

Amber found me and asked again "How was the test?".
"Fine, I preferred Paper A over B" I said, "How did you find it?", and I walked while I said it to get away from everyone else.
"I did alright too, did you see the fraction question?" she asked.
"Yeah, I wouldn't of noticed it if you hadn't have kicked me" I said jokingly and she laughed.

It was now break and I had finished to Amber about the test. I headed for our year room to discuss the test with some other people.

We practically had the rest of the day off. Our next lesson was Maths, and our teacher let us screw around to "Remove stress" as he said. Art was the same, our teacher just let us relax and talk, like always. English was our only real lesson, and in that we just went through a practice test as we'd been doing for the past few lessons.

Our next SATs test was tomorrow and it was a Science paper.
I hated them, because they always socialised everything. Instead of simply saying "Look at this chart of how many birds fly in winter compared to in summer and answer the questions" they turn it into "Sanjeeb and Ellie have decided to compare the amount of birds in the sky in winter compared to in summer" for an unknown reason "look at their recordings in this chart and answer the questions".
There was always a Sanjeeb, Ameer or some sort of Indian sounding name as well.
It was an unnecessary waste of time, and it also made the question more confusing sometimes.

So now school was over, and we were reminded again of tomorrow's test and how we were not to come late and that we needed all of our equipment. As I walked home, I thought of the test today and wondered if it was really as important as they said it was...