withacupoftea
Are there any tips for my senior year that I should know about?
Just relax. One of my friends all through school and well beyond always got better grades than I did, but she got so worked up over tests that she'd completely bomb them. In adulthood, that translated to graduating law school with high marks, then sitting the bar exam twelve times before giving up.
I took the SAT and ACT early in the year, primarily because I knew I wanted to be able to re-take them. There was so much pressure about getting good scores, and by senior year I was so damned done with studying, I didn't expect anything from my first go-round other than getting acclimated to the process. The night before each of them, I stayed up chatting online for awhile and eventually dropped off to sleep, hit snooze a couple times in the morning and just made it in time (for the ACT, it was so close, if any of the green lights had been red on my way I'd have missed it). When my SAT scores came, I made sure to remind myself it wasn't my real score, I'd just gone for practice. Then I opened the envelope, laughed, and decided I had AP tests to worry about instead (and, honestly, those were actually tougher and ultimately more important).
I know there's tons of emphasis placed on test scores in school now, more so even than when I was going. You probably take more compulsory standardized tests in one year than I took in my entire high school career (most of the ones I took were voluntary, either advanced placement tests or golden state exams). Which means that a test is a test. You've got the drill down, don't lose sleep over it.
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