The classroom was dead silent. Well, almost. I sat in the middle of the room, fiddling with my stubby number-2 pencil as my eyes scrutinized the proctors silently gossiping about some students. To my left was an unconscious student who—in my eyes—dreamt of being anywhere but in this confined cube. His loud yet soft breaths covered my ears, rattling my brain to the extent of insanity.

Was I going to let these factors impede my SAT?

No—colleges look at this test score. Shaking my head, I toggled my gaze back to the test paper covered with paragraphs of 14-font-sized words smashed together so closely that it looked like an ancient inscription.

Forty-five minutes were left, and I was only halfway into the second passage. I scrolled through the questions, progressively realizing how subjective each question was. One in particular strangled my mind: Why did the narrator keep the woman’s hairpin?

I scanned through the answer choices—not once, but five times. Each option could be theoretically correct: the narrator hoped that the woman would return from her travels, the narrator was fond of the hairpin, or the narrator’s family planned to visit the woman someday. How could I know what the narrator was thinking about at that exact moment?

This question was, without a doubt, designed to test my analysis skills, but what if my analysis pointed me toward a different option? What if I thought the narrator kept the hairpin because it reminded her of the wealthy life she was missing out on? After all, the passage pointed out that she and the woman lived in completely different financial situations, so why isn’t that an option? To answer this question, I remember re-thinking it as, “What would they think is correct?” rather than “What do I think is correct?”.

In the end, I chose the first option. Not because I agreed to it but because I thought it had the highest probability of being correct. This question made me realize that the SAT wasn’t testing my analytical capabilities but rather how well I could reason and predict framers’ thoughts. In other words, the SAT completely missed the mark on what analysis and critical thinking truly entail—which is not to arrive at an absolute conclusion but to be able to draw up a plausible interpretation that is reinforced by your own reasoning.

We’ve all been encouraged to think outside the box—especially in STEM where every problem could be solved differently—so why does the SAT go against that? If the purpose of the SAT is to quantify our college-readiness, why is it testing us on passages that have no application to the real world? Considering how engineers rely on the diversity of perspectives to further their developments, the nature of this national test hinders that need by forcing students to think alike: in the shoes of the framers. Besides testing material, the grading laws behind the SAT are extraordinarily monochrome: if you get it wrong, you get nothing; if you get it right, you get one point. The system alone portrays the SAT as an authoritarian who strikes down any new opposition, suggestion, or discussion.

The narrow-mindedness of the SAT indicates that it is not a reliable source to reflect my real potential in college. Teachers, counselors, and my own parents tell me to show college admissions committee who I am as a three-dimensional person, but how could I do that if a two-dimensional test paper first determines my qualifications? Why should we, students, have to rely on a flat paper to credit and show what we have and can achieve?