I’ve just finished a long round of testing at school. First there were the MCAs, the Minnesota Comprehensive Assesments that all students in Minnesota take. I had first hour Orchestra, so we had to move to Mrs. Andrew’s art room to test. First came Reading, which I think went fine. Mrs. Johnson, the 7th grade CILA teacher gave everyone candies because they’re supposed to improve your concentration. That went on for 2 hours in 2 days. Then the very next week, we were tested on math. I mostly thought it was pretty easy and felt good. I don’t really like the MCA’s because they’re written and we have to right short essays on some of the questions. Then, I think the next week we started the NWEA testing, or MAP testing. I think they’re much funner because they’re on a computer, they’re multiple choice, and you get your score right away. We did reading first again. The first day, I only got to question 17 out of 42 because a lot of the questions were really hard. One of them had an excerpt from The History of Modern Philosophy. It was really confusing and talked about metaphysical theories and stuff. The second day went  a little faster and I  felt I kept on getting easier questions. The NWEA testing sorta narrows down your score. If you get a question right, it gives you an harder one, and if you get one wrong it gives you an easier one. Since I kept getting fairly easy ones, I thought I was failing. Finally I answered question 42 and I guessed that I would get 234, which is pretty bad. I pressed “Go On”, and I was shocked to see a 257 as my score! That was pretty cool, and I tied Christian Oswood’s score. The very next Monday was when I started my Math NWEA. That test had 52 questions.  Last year, I happened to get 293, which is really good. This year I was aiming for 300 or more, which would be awesome. The first day I moved sluggishly along again, and I think I only got to question twenty something. The next day, I went a little faster again, but managed to still have 4 questions left at the end of the period! I had to finish the test on Thursday since my period dropped on Wednesday. I went through the 4 questions on Thursday, and I guessed I would get a 310 or something. I was pretty disappointed when I got a 293 again!! It wasn’t too bad though, and I had another test that same day. That test was and UMTYMP test which was a full two hours long. I expected it to be long and hard because it was the last test of the year and UMTYMP always makes us fail. They announced that we would be taking the 15 minute  calculator portion first. It had 4 really hard questions with many subsections and by the end of 15 minutes nobody was finished.  Our Teaching Assistant, who was giving the test, was really nice and gave us an extra 5 minutes to finish. Then we had the non calculator portion for 100 minutes. That packet was monster and had like 8 pages printed back to back. We started on it and moved slowly through it. I had to skip a lot because I forgot how to do some of them. When I got to the end, there was 10 minutes left. I still had a lot of unanswered questions, and I went to show some effort on them to get partial credit. I figured some of them out, but I still had about 8 points out of the 110 possible missing. So I turned it in, and hoped for a good score. Getting over 90 on these tests is really good, and I had a friend who got a 44 once, so I felt fine.