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good guys always win contents: chapter 1 | chapter 2 | chapter 3 | chapter 4 | chapter 5 | chapter 6 | chapter 7 | chapter 8 | chapter 9 | chapter 10 | chapter 11 | chapter 12 | chapter 13 (12.06.02) Chapter 12 The ping pong table was spacious and afforded each one of us the opportunity to place both our elbows on the table as we filled in the bubbles. My feet were getting cold from the tile floor, the flat white kind that you find in many basements. I filled the last bubble and looked up to see Head already done with his section. The others were still working at it. Fat Boy carefully pressed the numbers on his calculator, hoping his thick fingers wouldn’t accidentally press any adjacent keys. Fanman wrote out his work furiously, crossed it out and sped up his writing; his sheet was a mess. Nigi looked up at the ceiling, looking like he was seeking divine help, but at the same time exuding a cluelessness that matched well with his half-blank set of answers. “Time’s up,” I said, looking at the clock as it approached the 30-minute mark. We picked up our answer sheets and traded it among each other. “Number one, B. Number two, C,” Head began to read off the answers as everyone looked to mark the papers. Fat Boy nervously eyed Fanman, who began to make slight marks on Fat Boy’s paper. I looked at Nigi’s paper and saw that there wasn’t much to do as he had left a great deal unanswered. Welcome to our SAT Club. This was how we spent several Saturdays during our junior year, chasing the dream of a decent SAT score. The number 1600 was immortal and we hoped that our nerdy weekend efforts would bring us closer to the apex of intellectual accomplishment. Screw what the educators or white kids’ parents said about how the SATs didn’t really measure smartness or how people shouldn’t put too much of an emphasis on its importance; our Asian parents, who came from educational systems that placed the futures of students solely on a single test, felt no different about the SATs. For our parents, doing well on the SATs meant everything: entrance into an Ivy League school, boasting among other Asian parents, and an indication of how smart their kids really were. President of your class? Who cares if your SAT score was a paltry 1400? All-state track athlete? Unless you’re black, a 1350 renders all medals and records irrelevant. Over a thousand hours of community service? Why didn’t you take about 200 of those hours and improve on your pitiful 1280? My friends and I felt the pressure to succeed on this test, and our SAT Club, begun towards the winter of our junior year, was a starting point. Head and I were usually the top scorers of our group. We logged high 1400s to low 1500s on every test. We used the Princeton Review’s Ten Practice SAT Tests to perform our mock test sessions. Nigi was usually the lowest scorer, but he worked hard to improve. Fat Boy and Fanman were erratic. One time, each requested if they could take a test at home and do it themselves because they couldn’t make it to a practice session. When I asked for their scores for my weekly on-line post, they reported scores in the mid-1400s range. Head was very skeptical that Fanman and Fat Boy could jump about 150 points each on one test. “Fat Boy, did you give yourself like ten hours to do this or something? Did you actually cheat on it?” I asked in a jokingly manner. Fat Boy denied such implications and asserted his honesty. Head would feel vindicated when all of us assembled at Fanman’s basement a week later. Sitting around the ping pong table, we carefully timed ourselves and took the test with all the solemnity of a real SAT. When all the answers were marked and the scores compiled, Fanman and Fat Boy experienced 200 point drops in their scores, raising further suspicions to the point of invalidating their take-home endeavors. Only a year later, when everyone had taken their tests for the final time, would we know the “true” measure of these guys. When December rolled around, we all received back our PSAT scores at school. Head had scored very high in all three sections – verbal, math, and writing – to earn him a National Merit Scholarship. Warren and Wally also did well with 1500+ on their tests. I was less fortunate and shamefully admitted to my 1430. My verbal score had actually gone down from my sophomore year, and I felt very stupid, considering my parents had dropped a thousand dollars that summer for me to attend Princeton Review for SAT tune-up. Instead, I wasted my time there skipping classes, making friends with unruly Korean kids, and playing basketball in the gym of the JCC, where the classes were also held. Had I been a samurai, a hara-kiri may have been appropriate for the disgrace I had wrought upon myself.
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Head had impressed everyone with a 1550. His score would be by far the highest out of my friends. Yale didn’t seem too much of an impossibility now, if only he would raise his school grades a bit. But it was confirmed that Head was the smartest of the group as the numbers never lied. Wally and Warren did well, scoring 1530 and 1540 respectively. Warren rode his 800 math section while Wally excelled in the verbal. I was just about basically even, and felt it was a good indication of my own abilities. The second time I took the SATs was agonizing. I found many of my friends at the testing site and we all sat near each other in the auditorium. Warren sat right near me as he decided to retake the test in order to improve his verbal score. The test was much harder than my first one, and by the middle of the test, I knew my score would be lower on this one. The short bathroom break we had allowed me to exchange several answers with my friends, and I made the necessary changes to my test while the proctor looked away. During one of the small stretch breaks, Warren came over and looked for answers to copy on some questions he had forgotten to answer. The level of cheating was fairly low as I made a total of five or six changes from outside resources. At one point during the test, I wondered if it would ever be possible to conduct a full-scale cheating operation on the SATs. The only possible scenario was a West Coast-East Coast collaboration that would capitalize on the three-hour time zone difference. One kid on the East Coast would have to go in and take the test with the intention of retaining test questions. Since the SAT is structured in a way that the hard questions are all towards the end of each section, the kid would have to take the last four or five questions of each analogy and sentence completion section and memorize them along with their answer choices. When it’s time for the math section, the kid would have to quickly type the memorized verbal questions into the graphing calculator before they are forgotten. Then the kid would have to do the same for some of the hard math questions. Only the passages on the verbal would have to be left out. Then, after the East Coast kid has finished with the test, he would have to hurry home, upload his graphing calculator information on to his computer, and send it via e-mail to the West Coast, where the recipient of the questions would have an hour or so to figure out the questions and ask for any help before taking the real thing. Such a feat would mean that the kid on the East Coast would have to be really fast at taking the test in order to simultaneously type in the questions. I thought this was a cool idea, although very desperate and impractical. A few weeks later, I found out that my score had gone down to a 1480 on the second test, and told my mom that there was no way I was taking the test again. She resigned to my mediocrity and wondered if I would ever get into a good school. I wasn’t too worried about it; my SAT II scores were solid and my school grades were improving. Senior year was still eight months away, but my class was abuzz with college talk already, with kids taking the initial step in deciding which schools to consider. Warren was still undecided, but was leaning towards an engineering school, I maintained my first choice as Columbia, Head and Wally eyed Yale, and Fat Boy dreamed of Wharton. Fanman hoped to find himself in Texas, at either Rice or University of Texas, and Nigi wondered if he had a shot at Carnegie Mellon. Ligi, whom everyone overlooked because of his semi-retarded behavior and silliness, surprised everyone with a 1500 SAT score and was also legitimately interested in an Ivy League school.
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The papers were slowly passed back and immediately, the students began to make their answer selections. I quickly browsed the content of the test. What kind of a structure is the queue? What can happen if too many recursive calls occur? What type of linked list uses two pointers per node to allow traversal in two directions? My right eyebrow found itself pointed up as an expression of my ignorance. I shook my head and slyly pretended to write down answers. I then looked out the window as if I was thinking deeply about a question. While turning my head, I was able to spot Benson’s test in a very visible position. I looked up to see my computer teacher working on the computer. I leaned back slightly so that Benson would not be able to spot me with his peripheral vision. I squinted hard and focused on his answer selections. I took a page from Warren’s manual and engaged in casual cheating. I copied Benson’s answer choices without worrying too much. Benson finished first and handed in his test. I had also finished, but I pretended to be working hard and “checked” my answers over and over again. I waited until more than half the class handed in their tests, and I finally pretended to make my last answer selections before handing mine in. I was relieved that all had gone well. Just a year ago, Benson was the rat who told on me and my friends for cheating; a year later, Benson would become the pivotal contributor to my computer science grade recovery. A few days passed by before we received our tests. Benson rejoiced in his 100 and confidently answered questions for anyone who didn’t know why they answered incorrectly on a question. My heart pounded with great joy as I received a 97, my first A+ of the year. I played it off so that my reaction looked accustomed to receiving such a score. I even asked Benson to explain why I got one question wrong. I had no interest in what he said, but it amused me to be asking him for help after he had already been of great assistance. The three or four more computer tests that followed were all accomplished in similar fashion. There were instances when I would actually score higher than Benson, due to a fluke case of luck resulting in my one or two solo attempts on questions on each test. I received A’s in computer science the last two marking periods and pulled my final grade to a B+, helping me to keep my GPA intact. If I had any animosity towards Benson before these tests, they were all gone at this point. I became very nice to Benson and stopped making fun of him. I picked on the other nerds in class, but left Benson alone. I pleased him by making positive remarks about Apple computers and even feigned interest in Star Wars. Little did he know, I was merely expressing my gratitude.
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To show you just how casual and easy-going junior year was for me, you need not look beyond the junior prom. I had asked three different girls to go with me, and the first two could not go because of circumstantial conflicts. The third one flat-out rejected me by choice. I was frustrated because the third one was actually the one I really liked, but she preferred that she not go to the prom at all rather than go with me. She went with some senior dude to his prom, and made me slightly bitter. To see this as my greatest failure during junior year says a lot about the overall great luck I enjoyed at school. I spent my summer training hard for my last football season. I lifted with Warren four times a week early in the morning and ran sprints during the afternoons. During my long summer days of little academic activity, I thought about school and my friends. Sophomore year was a handful, with the history cheating incident and the low grades. As juniors, my friends and I were able to mature. By being apart from each other in many classes, we were able to fine-tune our individual cheating skills. Also, as we furthered in our studies, we began to develop a clear sense of which subjects we were good at. Junior year was a time for independent growth. We all remained good friends, but we spent enough time away from each other to have success on our own. Now all that would remain would be for us good guys to come together.
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