Patch Offers Truly Awful PSAT Tips

Hi, kids. It's PSAT season and Patch has some truly awful test-prep advice for you. Follow these tips and not only will your score be lower than Sylvia Plath on a rainy day, but you will never understand that joke.

The PSAT is an optional test juniors take to practice for the SAT. The College Board also sends the scores to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation for use in determining honors and about 8,400 scholarships.

Tinley Park High School took their PSAT on Wednesday and Andrew is taking its tomorrow, but it's never too late for some truly wretched advice.

(Editor's note: Aside from this sentence, take absolutely none of this advice.)

Step one:

Put a huge amount of pressure on yourself in the weeks and months before the test. Push past the point where the pressure moves you to study and prepare in a rational fashion. Go to the zone where it just paralyses you with fear and images of eating beans from a can with boxcar hobos if you get less than a 46 in Critical Reading.

To prepare, think about Pablo Picasso, Gwendolyn Brooks, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman – all the people whose lateral thinking and genius changed the world but could not be quantified on a standardized test. Think about what became of them.

That's right, they're dead. All of them. And so will you be if you score one quarter of an eighth of a 32nd of a point lower than your older sibling did before moving on to college and a life beyond your ken, you bean-eating hobo.

Step two:

Think of the human brain as a refrigerator, crammed with everything you've ever learned. If you want to get something out of the fridge, do you put it in the back, where you have to push past the old mustards, leaky bags of chard and everything else you put in since then? No. You put it in the front, where you can get to it right away.

Following this theory, do all your studying at the last minute, the night before at soonest and, if possible, on the car ride to the test.

Step three:

If you don't know the answers, try to write a little story with the letters you fill in. Granted, since most of the responses are A, B, C, D or E, your stories will mostly be about cabs, beds, things that are bad or acceded decades.

Step four:

Although you can bring a calculator to help you with the math questions, bring an iPod that looks like a calculator instead. No reason to go through a couple hours without some tunes, right? Mumble something about an orthodontist if the proctor asks why you're sticking wires from the "calculator" into your ears. Adults will believe anything about the stuff those guys stick in your faces.

Step five:

In the comparisons, : means "is to." So if you come across the question, "Puppy : Dog :: Kitten : _____," that means "Puppy is to dog is to is to kitten is to long line." Then choose D.

Step six:

Practice vocabulary words by putting them in usage. Tell your friends you're having an ambidextrous (good) day at your sesquipedalian (after-school) job. Tell that cute classmate he or she is looking as sacerdotal (lovely) as a painting of finest prosciutto (a watercolor technique popular during the late Italian renaissance). Learning can be fun!

Step seven:

Number 3 pencil.

Remember, kids: Even if you tank this completely optional test designed to give you a leg up on the SAT, there are still some career paths available. You could eat glass at the carnival or be a journalist. It's not a bad life. Sometimes, it can be positively antimacassar.