One Down, Many to Go

I disregard the stab of conscience I feel and look through the PSAT practice guide before putting it in the recycle bin. No sense holding on to it for our daughter. She's three years away from taking the test, and who knows how it will have changed by then.

I do feel slightly illicit as I flip through the pages. But I'm pleased with what I see. Turns out my $24.99 outlay was not for naught. Each and every test has been taken. There are answers filled out at every turn of the page, as well as some choice commentary throughout. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he writes on the question asking how many faces a cube has. There’s an all-caps exclamation of “Duh” next to the question of how many ounces of cocoa it would take to make enough brownies for 36 people, using a recipe that calls for ¼ ounce of cocoa for each dozen brownies.

O.K., so the boy was confident. And it turns out justifiably so. May that confidence stay with him through the many tests that remain: the ACT, the SAT, the SAT Subject Test—Math, the SAT Subject Test—Physics, the AP Biology exam, and the A++ certification exam. Whew.