On October 12 of the current school year, middle and high school students from St. Augustine Preparatory school took their PSAT exam. So we took it upon ourselves to interview students of 8th and 9th grade to see their opinions, feelings, and test taking skills surrounding the PSAT’s. In this article we will compare our answers using charts and explain our findings in the matter.
We started by interviewing students from 9th grade and later proceeded to interview 8th grade and noticed that their answers were pretty similar. Our first question was How did you feel about taking the PSAT? Were you unfulfilled or satisfied with your outcome?
In the diagram it is shown that more than half of the people have a negative outcome due to some feeling insecure about their answers and other students left blank spaces since they were not sure what to answer, or ran out of time. Many felt like they didn't have enough time to finish the different tests, they also argued that they thought that there was too little time between testing. One thing that they had in common was that both sides of the students felt mentally drained once they finished the tests. On the other hand, there were students that felt confident about their answers, they stated that they remembered a lot of the content that was on the PSAT, and they were expecting a positive outcome.
We continued with our second question which indicated the following, Do you think that the PSAT helps you in any sort of way?
The statistics in this diagram read that most people think that it does help, since they thought that the PSAT helps them build knowledge for the real test and that it allows them to practice for future exams that will help them enter University. It was also said by the students that they were able to see where they stood at their academic level based on the teachings of the school. The people that said no, as a justification to their answers stated that they found the MAP test better because they were more logical opinions and it is also better because it is an online test rather than using a pencil and paper to complete the test.
Last but not least, we asked the students Which test they found to be the hardest?
For this quest we took the three tests that were presented to us in the PSAT’s, and asked the students which one they found the hardest to answer. The majority, as it is presented here, was Reading. They justified their answer by telling us that they left many in blank due to lack of time, others complained of not being able to read fast enough to answer all the questions. One of the second hardest to try to complete was math, because the equations and content, for the students, were very hard to understand and complete. Impressively nobody chose Grammar, they said that between all three of them Grammar was one of the easiest ones compared to the others. Students say they felt more confident with this test and that they had a better understanding of the subject.
In conclusion, you can observe how the first and third questions have about the same percentage: How did you feel about taking the PSAT? Were you unfulfilled or satisfied with your outcome? Increased from 46% to 54%. Which test they found to be the hardest? up from 44% to 56%. Furthermore, we realize that the responses were rather variant, as some students had distinct particular opinions about taking PSAT’s while others had the same perspective.