This Saturday, I took the digital SAT for the second time. As a student in the class of 2025, I was in the test group for the switch from paper to digital. I took the PSAT last year as the first digital test in the SAT suite of assessments in the United States. In early 2024, I took a dry run of the dSAT from home, which was great practice. In May, I took the SAT for an actual score for the first time. Then, as I said, I took it for the second time on Saturday.
In this post and following, I want to share my experiences with the dSAT, along with some tips and advice I have learned along the way. As I started writing, I had a lot more to say than I could fit in one post, so I decided to break it into two or three posts. This will be the first part.
Staying Focused When You’re Sick
The first time I took the dSAT, I woke up with a cold about 2 days before the test. I did everything I could think of to try to get better before the test. Unfortunately, test day came and I was blowing my nose more than ever. Despite having a slight headache and a feeling of exhaustion, I had already signed up and paid for the SAT.
Going into the test morning, I did whatever I could to make myself more comfortable. I packed some extra tissues and took ibuprofen. When I arrived at the school, I did my best to forget about how I felt and just focus on testing.
In the beginning, that worked a little bit because I was able to find some people I knew from church and the pool. Talking to them helped me take my mind off my cold for a little while I waited for the test to start. But once the test started, it became increasingly hard to focus. I was blowing my nose as little as possible, which was still about every two minutes. Once, the proctor even handed me a new Kleenex box because of how rapidly I was using them.
It became clear to me very early on in the test that this probably was not going to be my best performance on a standardized test. But I also knew that if I was going to have to be in a miserable state for three hours at an unfamiliar school, the least I could do was try my best.
I tried to get into a routine- read the questions, blow my nose, study the answers, choose the best one. I tried to be as mindless as I could in thinking about my cold. My brain felt so foggy that I needed all the brain power I could muster to answer the questions. I couldn’t spend time thinking about other things.
In one way, this worked to my advantage: I was able to completely tune out the classroom around me. For the first (and only) time since I started taking standardized tests, I didn’t think about anything going on around me. It was just me and the computer, which was helpful. As someone who usually can get easily distracted by what’s going on around me, the current ability I had to focus on only one thing helped me stay concentrated on the test.
I usually remember test questions for days or even weeks after I take the test. When I got home from the SAT, I only remembered one question. And because I was so exhausted, I didn’t even have a clear memory of what it asked. All I know was that it was student response on the math and I had officially used all my energy on the rest of the test. I did my best, but in the end I had to guess. But it’s always better to guess than to leave it blank!
If you find yourself having to take the SAT (or any standardized test) while sick, just remember to stay calm. It might take every last bit of your energy to focus and you might feel a bit miserable. But if you try as hard as you can, it might not be a total waste of a test, and you might even do pretty well. And if you can only focus on one thing, use that to your advantage and focus only on the test.
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