The SATs may determine a student’s future, but what do they really measure? Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Taking the SATs is not something to do lightly. Nevertheless, on a frigid Saturday morning not long ago, I found myself filing into a classroom with twenty sleep-deprived teen-agers. One of the girls was carrying two giant SAT review books studded with pink Post-its. I couldn’t decide whether she’d brought them along to do some last-minute studying or to intimidate the competition. We’d been assigned to a chemistry classroom, and its walls were covered with placards offering a variety of emergency-evacuation instructions and motivational sayings.

“If you aim for nowhere, that’s just where you’ll go,” one poster observed.

“Some days you’re the pigeon,” another, written in runny, guano-colored letters, said. “Some days you’re the statue.”

The proctor, who herself seemed oddly nervous, handed around the tests and the answer booklets. After issuing a series of warnings, which she read word for word from a script, she told us that we’d have twenty-five minutes to complete the first section of the exam—the essay question. The last time I took the SATs, there was no essay. Fortunately, though, I’d been warned about this development, along with many others, by Debbie Stier, the author of “The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT” (Harmony). At the age of forty-six, Stier decided to devote herself full time to the test, with the goal of achieving the maximum possible score of 2400. My hopes were modest: I was looking to avoid humiliation. What this meant in numerical terms, I’d resolved to leave unspecified.

On this particular day, the essay question involved progress—does it require struggle and conflict? According to Stier, the key to scoring well on the essay is a clear thesis. “Declare, don’t waffle,” she counsels. Pick a position and then bang away at it, the way you might at a piñata, or a rabid dog.

I considered my options. I wanted to argue against the question’s very premise; who can even really say what progress is? Then I realized that everyone else was already scribbling away, so I ditched that idea and went with the obvious: “No pain, no gain.” I ended up writing on the Manhattan Project, despite my misgivings about whether the prospect of nuclear annihilation should count as an advance. When I got to the point of quoting Robert Oppenheimer’s famous line “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” I couldn’t remember exactly how it went, and so, heeding Stier’s advice—“Details count; factual accuracy doesn’t”—I made something up.

Next there were some vocabulary questions, and then a math section. The girl with the review books was sitting directly behind me. We must have been given different tests, because, whenever I was trying to read, she was clicking away loudly on her calculator. By around the fifth section—grammar for me, more math for her—I was starting to flag. I felt increasingly at a disadvantage, and not just because the last time I reckoned the surface area of a cylinder my fellow test-takers had not yet been born. As the morning wore on, they seemed to be growing perkier, while I was suffering from caffeine deprivation. My sixth section was math, with free-response questions of a sort that also hadn’t existed when I went to high school. One problem involved finding the coördinates of the point where two lines on a graph would intersect. Only one of the lines had been drawn, and I knew that to answer the question I needed to figure out the slope of the second. But I couldn’t, and I had to leave the answer blank. Then I had to leave another answer blank. Soon I came to a reading section, with a long passage about writing and running by Haruki Murakami. Was this passage “analyzing an activity” or “challenging an assumption”? Both seemed valid. Was a phrase in a second reading passage “speculative” or “ironic” or “defensive”? Damned if I knew. By the time I got to the tenth section, I was zonked. That’s when I made a dreaded bubbling error. I started to fill in my responses in the part of the answer booklet reserved for section nine. I went to erase the errant marks, but then I wasn’t sure how many I needed to get rid of. In the confusion, I felt my chances of getting into the college of my choice slip away, which, considering the circumstances, says a lot about the power of the SATs.

Stier, a divorced mother of two who lives in Irvington, New York, decided to take up the SATs for the same reason we all do foolish things: out of love. Her oldest child, Ethan, a B student with modest athletic abilities (yet several minor concussions), was a sophomore in high school. Stier, in her words, was “beginning to feel frantic.” Ethan would soon be applying to college, but what were his chances of getting into a good one?

“A possibility presented itself,” she writes. “Ethan could study for the SAT, earn high scores, and get a scholarship at a decent school.” There was just one hitch: Ethan wasn’t interested in studying for the SAT. He preferred playing Halo. So Stier thought she would model the behavior she was hoping to inspire: “I thought maybe I could motivate Ethan to care about the SAT, just a little, if I climbed into the trenches myself.” Initially, she intended to sample a different test-preparation method each month, but her “project” kept growing, or metastasizing, until she determined to take the SAT each of the seven times it was offered in the course of the calendar year. She’d try taking the exams at seven different schools, to see if desk size or classroom configuration had any impact on her results. “Not too far into it I got a teensy bit crazed,” she writes.

Before embarking on her quest, Stier’s only experience with the SAT was the sort that most students have, or at least had: she’d taken the exam just once, in 1982, when she was in high school. As almost anyone Stier’s age will recall, SAT scores then came in two parts—verbal and math—with a maximum combined value of 1600. (The three-part test, with a top score of 2400, was introduced in 2005.) Stier had received a 410 on the verbal and a 480 on the math, scores she characterizes as “very bad.” Still, she attended Bennington College and went on to a successful career as a book publicist. That Ethan might try to follow a similar trajectory is precisely what has her concerned.

“The land I would be sending my little tadpole into was a different place,” she writes. No longer, she’s concluded, can a kid from an affluent suburban community expect to waltz his or her way into a decent college, and from there back into an affluent suburban community: “The days when you could la-di-dah your way out of Bennington” and into “a guaranteed starter job in the industry—a job, not an internship—were gone.”

Stier’s worries about Ethan are quickly transferred to the exam he’s not worrying about. She signs up for a Kaplan online course, which she ends up hating “every minute of.” She buys a Barnes & Noble’s worth of review books: “Dr. John Chung’s SAT Math,” “A-Plus Notes for Beginning Algebra,” “The New Math SAT Game Plan,” “Kaplan SAT 2400,” “Kaplan SAT Strategies for Super Busy Students,” “Kaplan SAT Strategies, Practice & Review,” “Outsmarting the SAT,” “The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar,” “PWN the SAT: Math Guide,” and the College Board’s “Official SAT Study Guide,” which is known as “The Blue Book.” She Skypes with a tutor named Stacey in Seattle; undertakes a regimen called Cogmed, which is supposed to improve her memory; and meets with a tutor named Erica in New York City. Throughout it all, she frets.