Scores! For Real, This Time.

After refreshing my collegeboard page for a few consecutive hours (having forgotten about time zones) my scores finally showed up. Here they are:

Reading: 740 Not too shabby at all.

Math: 650 Not good enough for the schools I'm after.

Writing: 580 I did explain about my essay, right? Worth 30% of this score.

I read a lot. I mean a lot. A whole bunch and almost constantly, so my reading score isn't a surprise. I should have done better on math, though, and since I bought a score report, I got to look over the questions I got wrong and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Apparently, I don't know what an integer is, I can't do conversions, and don't know how to find the area of a square. Wow, I feel like an incredible idiot. I could have done so much better. On the other hand, there were questions deep in WTF territory, but only about two, and thus this is not an acceptable excuse.

Writing has its reasons, if we accept the premise that I lost most of my points on the essay, on which got a score of 6 (highest score is 12), so it's a pretty stable premise. I don't get much of a chance to write it English, at least not essays, and not in under 25 minutes. My English teacher sometimes asks for short essays, but we get a full week to turn them in. Hell, I'm not used to writing fast in Spanish. The ministry test requires an essay, but we get to chose one of 4 topics, and 3 or 4 hours to write it (yeah, it gets hard to sit still that long). Basically, I've never had to write a coherent English essay in a short time on a given subject. I suppose I'll do better on that next time, now that I know how to prepare.

An interesting (if often depressing) statistic on CollegeBoard is the "How Do I Stack Up?". It lets you put in some information (mainly GPA and SAT/ACT scores) and then tell you how you compare to the middle 50% of a college's incoming class of last year. Mine was pretty interesting, my reading score was above average, by math score average (except MIT, more on that later) and my writing score low. I forget what my GPA was, but it's something like 3.75 or 3.8, which is mainly thanks to ninth grade, where I got straight As, while I dropped to mostly Bs and some Cs last year, due to my change of school from normal public to Nerd Academy. Not too bad, anyway.

About MIT. The middle 50% were somewhere in the range of [something]-800. Which means that more than a full 25% of last years freshmen got 800s on math. Holy freakin' cow, do my grades pale and faint in comparison.