My 8th Grade Test Prep Woes

Hi! This post will document an experience I had in 8th grade and the time before it. The timeline we're looking at goes from June 2022 to February 2023.

For those who went to school with me in 8th grade (and had the same Period 3 class with me), you might remember the memoir unit. I wrote about this very subject back in May/June 2023, close to the end of my school year. I wrote it as my memoir for my English Language Arts class.

And now, for those who don't know, you now know my approximate age!

Just as a note, there is some strong language in this post. This post is also extremely long, so just keep that in mind.

8th grade was, without a doubt, by far my least favorite school year. Even with the fun stuff we did in 8th grade, we missed out on so many others, including a trip to Philadelphia to supplement US history content (thanks a whole fucking lot, curriculum changes!)

Even back then, I knew I hated it. In my end of year letter that I wrote in English Language Arts, I wrote this: "Aside from test prep, I don't find myself looking at this school year with fond memories. In fact, despite the fun things that happened in eighth grade, I think of seventh grade as my favorite year at East Brook." Seriously, my experience during the two years of high school I've had so far is much better than what I experienced in 8th grade.

During 8th grade, some of my classmates applied to some magnet high schools. There are three prestigious magnet high schools near where I live. These include Academies at Englewood in Englewood, Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro, and Bergen County Academies in Hackensack.

And now you know where I live!

Anyway, each of those schools has an admissions exam, and they also have an interview process. I'll focus heavily on those of Bergen County Academies for the purposes of this post.
BCA (I'm not gonna keep typing Bergen County Academies, ok?) and BT have very similar (actually, likely identical) admissions tests. It has a 60-minute mathematics section with 40 multiple-choice questions. None of the questions allow calculator use. Along with the math section, it also has a literary analysis essay. Students are given 45 minutes to read a short story and write an essay answering a given prompt.
On the day I started writing this post, I had taken the admissions test two years prior.

By the time I was in 8th grade, my sister and three of my cousins had applied to BCA several years earlier. However, almost all of them had made it to the interview, yet none of them got accepted.

This whole story is centered around a single tutoring center which will remain unnamed.

All of this is very important context for understanding the story I'm about to tell.
So strap in.

7th grade was (and still is) my favorite school year, and it was coming to an end. I had just discovered the Touhou Project (thanks, Bad Apple!! and the demoscene), and my parents signed me up for a test prep program at a tutoring center. For a long time, my parents wanted me to try applying to BCA, and this program ended up being the first real step towards that goal. (You'll see why I worded it like that in the next few sections.)
The thing is, I didn't really want to go there, but you'll see why in the next section.

Side note: around this time, my Animal Crossing: New Horizons town ended up going on a hiatus around this time. For most of this story, that hiatus was in effect.

There's not a lot to talk about with this, but I ended up being quite busy during the summer because of this.
My school offers a summer learning program with classes available in the morning and afternoon. Unfortunately, because of the test prep program, I was forced to axe the afternoon classes from my schedule. I don't like being too busy.

For the most part, things in the program went ok. However, I can tell that I wasn't too interested in this, as evidenced by my lack of progress from the beginning of July to the end of August. This lack of drive and thus lack of progress will become very relevant in the next two sections.

8th grade started, and my parents decided to sign me up for BCA prep. I knew that I would need the help I would get from it to have a chance at getting selected.

Side note: even if it was just for test prep, it was nice to go to Palisades Park again. There's a restaurant near the tutoring center that I've gone to kinda often since October 2022.
Also, around this time, I got a MacBook Pro from late 2008, and I've used it for most of the two years that I've had it. I've installed macOS on it multiple times since then, but for almost 11 months now, I've been able to keep my macOS installation.

Anyway, back to our quasi-regularly scheduled programming.

However, this is when something else started to become relevant. On the very first week of test prep (and the first full week of school), I got sick. Now, the tutoring center made face masks mandatory (if it wasn't clear that this was 2022, it's clear now), so this wasn't a huge problem. However, I ended up missing most of that week of school, which set me back a lot.

One thing about this program is that there are different levels depending on what your scores on practice tests and homework assignments are. Those levels are HH, A, B, and C. For the entire first phase, I was in the B level for math and the C level for English.
Every three weeks, each student's performance is evaluated and their level is determined based on this evaluation. They called this a shuffle.

I could tell as soon as I looked back at my essay scores that I didn't care about going to BCA. Every single essay aside from the first one was consistently late.
In the second shuffle, I got moved from the C class to the B class for English. You can see when this occurred because, first of all, I marked it for you, but also, my essay scores went down noticeably.

For math tests, I had a practice test for every single lecture. For most of Phase I, it was a mock test, but on 11/8 and all of Phase II, it was a past BCTS admissions test.

Around October 2022, we had to write a draft of our BCA application essay. I remember doing almost all of it in one night, and I ended up going to sleep at 11:30pm, over an hour later than I normally sleep.

In case you're curious, here were my scores. The dates on these are based on the date I took each math test. English lectures happened the next day.
(math/40, essay/6, name of story used for essay)

• Math B, English C (initial levels)
• 9/13/22: 30/40, 2.5/6, "Lather and Nothing Else" by Hernando Tellez
• 9/20/22: 29/40, 3/6, "A View From The Bridge" by Paul McDonald
• 9/27/22: 35/40, 4/6, "What You Pass On" by Stephen King
• Math B, English C (1st shuffle, no change)
• 10/4/22: 29/40, 4/6, "The Sniper" by Liam O'Flaherty
• 10/11/22: 28/40, 4/6, "The Interlopers" by Saki
• 10/18/22: 32/40
• Math B, English B (2nd shuffle)
• 10/25/22: 26/40, 3/6, "A Game of Catch" by Richard Wilbur
• 11/1/22: 33/40, 3.5/6, "Seeing Eye Dog" by Brad Watson
• 11/8/22 (2015-Sunday): 22/40

On the day after November 8, I went in earlier than usual because I thought the Phase II schedule had gone into effect. But I arrived an hour early because my guess was wrong. So I went into a study room. Someone else came in a few minutes later, and he knew someone who had gotten accepted into BCA. That person told him that BCA was quite stressful.
Back then, I could see why they would think that. Going from being one of the smartest people in middle school to being in a place where everyone is smart can put a lot of pressure on someone. Suddenly, they likely won't feel so smart anymore.
This had a massive effect on how I approached BCA test prep, and it decreased my interest even more.

Phase II started on November 15, 2022. On previous math tests, I could write on the same packet I used to take the test during the lecture. I couldn't do that anymore. So I brought sheets of loose leaf paper to take notes on. That's how I got the information about the actual BCTS admissions tests used on the practice tests.

Now, remember what I said about the essay on the BCTS admissions test? Because we weren't sure how the test would be administered yet, we had to hand-write the essay. Imagine reading a story and hand-writing five paragraphs of an essay in just 45 minutes. Often, I would finish with a crap essay and with only a minute or two remaining.

Now for the most memorable part of my memoir.
On the fourth shuffle, I moved up from the B class to the A class for math. Unfortunately, that also involved getting a different teacher. The teacher I had in the B class was a teacher I actually liked. The A class teacher was a very different story, though.
When someone made a silly mistake on a practice test that caused them to get a question wrong, he would have them do twenty pushups. And he wouldn't continue on until they finished.
This isn't what a math teacher does; this is what a gym teacher does. In fact, when I told this to my friends, one of them said that that's what a teacher at my school would do if she were a gym teacher.

Now, I could stop there, but I'm not gonna because this teacher's awful teaching style just gets funnier the more information you have!
In the B class, the teacher went over all forty questions on the test, and we were always able to finish by the end of the 2-hour class.
However, in the A class, we only reviewed the problems requested by students, and yet we were never able to finish. So during the next lecture, we would have to finish reviewing last week's test before we could move on to the test we just took, thereby reducing the amount of time we had to review that test.
I didn't really like his attitude when he was handing back score reports either. When he handed back reports, I remember him taking a quick look at some and laughing. I also remember him remarking, "This guy answered C to the last 6 questions. Only one of those was correct!" I just found that to be insulting.
Why should I work so hard on my practice test every single week just for this old bloke to deny all of it?
And to add yet more insult to injury, he lengthened the January 3, 2023 class by 30 minutes, so we got out at 9pm instead of 8:30.
Look, I get that your class is horribly inefficient and you can't review 40 math questions in just two hours, but you've gotta respect our time too.

*sigh*
In case you're curious, here were my scores. The dates on these are based on the date I took each math test. English essays were written the next day.

• Math B, English B (3rd shuffle, no change)
• 11/15/22 (2015-Saturday): 34/40, 2/6, "Secret Life of Our Trash Can" by Heather O'Neill
• 11/22/22 (2014-Sunday): 29/40, 2/6, "Field Book of Ponds and Streams" by Annie Dillard
• 11/29/22 (2016-Saturday): 34/40, 3/6, "Grammy Rewards" by Deborah Dalfonso
• Math A, English B (4th shuffle)
• 12/6/22 (2016-Sunday): 33/40, 2.5/6, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver
• 12/13/22 (2017-Saturday): 25/40, 3/6, "My Secret Pepsi Plot" by Boris Fishman
• 12/20/22 (2018-Saturday): 38/40, 3.5/6, "Time and Distance Overcome" by Eula Biss
• 12/27/22 (2019-Saturday): 33/40, 3.5/6, "Speaking of Nature" by Robin Kimmerer
• 12/29/22 (2018-Sunday): 30/40, 4/6, "Firefly Forest" by Vanessa Gregory
• 1/3/23 (2019-Sunday): 32/40

I'll be honest, even today, reading the score reports for the essays was like getting slapped in the face. These were not fun to look back on. Basically all of the reports had comments that basically boil down to whoever was grading my essay saying, "It's shit."

I was absolutely unwilling to improve my scores, as evidenced by my score not improving (well, ok, it did marginally) and me being absolutely unwilling to even take a quick glance at my graded essays.

You might be thinking, "Well, if you hated this program so much, why didn't you just withdraw from it?"
Well, that's what quitters do.
Well, ok. That sounds quite cliche, and it sounds like something every teacher or parent would say. But, probably because of that, that was likely my mindset back in 8th grade.

On Saturday, January 7, 2023, I took the official BCTS admissions test. It felt slightly easier than what I was used to seeing on test prep, but I knew that the essay I wrote would destroy any chances of securing an interview.

However, test prep took quite a toll on my academic performance in school (more than it should have). I just didn't want to do work in some of my classes, leading to me finishing the second quarter with two Cs.

I was sure that I wouldn't make the interview. Why would I? Two of my grades had tanked in the second quarter, and I had expressed a complete lack of interest in going to BCA.
Sure enough, on Thursday, February 16, 2023, I received a letter from the Bergen County Academies Admissions Office which was sent on Valentine's Day.
It read, "Based on the strength of our applicant pool and school district limitations for our campus, it is with sincere regret that we are unable to offer you admission to our Class of 2027."

What a relief.

I pretty much just wanted to get the experience of taking an admissions test, and that's what I got. Even if I had gotten through the interview, I would probably have turned down the offer.

As I'm writing this, it's Tuesday, January 7, 2024. Two years prior, I had taken the BCTS admissions test.
I was looking for some more loose leaf paper (it's apparently East Coast slang for lined paper), and I dug out the math binder I used for BCA test prep to look for some. Curious, I decided to look through the rest of the binder.

Even if quite a bit of my dissatisfaction towards BCA test prep was my fault, this experience mostly made me weary of doing future test prep programs.
One thing I've learned is that the teacher plays a huge role in shaping how people view a class.
A good teacher can make an otherwise bad course quite interesting. However, as was the case for my level A math class, a bad teacher can make an otherwise good course absolutely excruciating.