Studying for the SAT

 Do high school students take the SAT anymore? Last year colleges started making it optional. It's a shame; I actually have some good memories of taking the SAT; I was one of those kids ready to go on the Saturday mornings with No.2 pencils in a bag itching to get in that test room, primed for 3 or 4 hours of releasing my knowledge onto the test. I think it was because the SAT represented a known entity in a chaotic time of my life that was high school, so many different stresses and opinions, at least I knew the SAT had equal portions of math and verbal, some fun math puzzles, and equal sections of analogies, reading passages, and "fill in the blank" sections, and then some fun reading passages about humanities, science, things going on in the world. Oh.....and I was pretty good at it. 

STUDYING for the SAT was a whole different thing......had to be systematic and delve into unknown world of words, words.....vignette, erudite, logorrhea, aplomb, predilection, paucity, gratuitious, etc.; that's why they coined the phrase "SAT words" for big words. But the thing about the SAT was, you COULD study for it, there were certain things about the test with its format, the way they ask the questions, and you could gear your studying towards those things, despite not knowing for sure what exactly was going to be on the exam as they could have any sort of reading passage about any topic in the world; but you knew they could only test for some finite bank of words. 

Forward to "studying for Jeopardy...." I don't know how many people are doing there out in the world, there's gotta be quite a few, and you can kind of tell who has or who hasn't when they get on the Alex Trebek stage and show off their knowledge to the whole world, and unfortunately you could tell who HASN'T studied that much for Jeopardy. It's like watching contestants take the SAT in front of the whole world, (even the jeopardy of losing points when you get a question wrong vs. just not trying to answer it is similar as SAT deducted points for wrong answers) especially with the Jeopardata box scores available now. Each night, I tally up my points and see how many times I "buzz in" on an answer (basically, if I can come up with a reasonable guess for an answer by the time Ken or Mayim finish reading the clue) and it ranges from about 40 to 48 on any given night (out of 60 total questions minus Final Jeopardy), less than 40 I'm really kicking myself or endured through a bunch of tough categories......it's a consistent quantity, and it's because the questions are generally predictable, running through a large array but still finite set of questions in the Jeopardy! "clue bank" (as opposed to the SAT word bank). And they'll reuse a lot of the same material over the years like the SAT runs through vocab words (garrulous, onerous, temerity....) 

When contestants get just 32 buzzes in, I just question whether they studied for Jeopardy. It's not that they're not smart, one lady was a consistent crossword solver which wins my admiration because crosswords boggle my mind, but she just wasn't familiar with what kind of questions could be on Jeopardy.... a 1789 search for this waterway is never going to be "the Styx" (her wrong answer) but Northwest Passage has definitely come up before, and surely will in the future. Similarly, "Presidential Facts" (final jeopardy) asked about one of the most common topics in trivia (and even more so on Jeopardy: American presidents: love them or hate them, you gotta know them cuz they're easy trivia fodder. Only 3 American presidents have married in the White House.. John Tyler was the first, and they ask about the last. You just have to have a rough timeline of Presidents in your head, (DATES, CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, TIME!) and Tyler was the 10th President. One contestant answered William Henry Harrison, who was the 9th President.......not even AFTER Tyler, which seems like a prerequisite for a guess. There's no penalty for guessing on FJ, except for the fact it's a little embarrassing and shows a lack of knowledge...and then the other lady guessed the 12th president, Zachary Taylor, which would have meant Tyler was the 10th, then 11th Polk just happened to do it too, then Taylor did it......ahh maybe she misinterpreted the clue? Regardless, not a good guess. The 25-year-old young man who HAD seemed to study for Jeopardy based on the clues he was giving (and a robust 48-question buzz tonight, better than me) did get the correct answer, Woodrow Wilson who came much later and who remarried while President, a fact gleaned if you've studied mostly Jeopardy-type facts over the years. It's an acquired taste; not for everybody I guess, just like studying for the SAT.