#I got near perfect SAT and PSAT math scores despite being kinda bad at math

[osterby]

Not all of this is actually completely useless in real life.

Reading carefully and taking special note of any easily skippable words that flip the meaning is how you should be reading rule lists and legal documents anyway; I first encountered that in test prep, but I use that skill requently in real life.

Knowing how to identify a trick question that is trying to trap you into giving and obvious but technically wrong answer will save you a lot of headaches on social media.

Recognising how people set up patterns they think are randomised is less practically useful outside of multiple choice tests, but is a great thing to know if you're trying to get a specific result on the latest uquiz.

Other test taking skills, like process of elimination and looking elsewhere in the same source for an answer, are broadly applicable in their rarified forms.

But yeah, it's silly that people learn all these as test taking skills; close reading and pattern recognition should be taught for its own sake and you shouldn't have to reverse engineer it out of a guide for gaming a score on a standardised test.

Every single time I say the phrase “I was classically trained in the art of multiple choice tests” everyone in the room who’s not a millennial laughs at my joke while all the other millennials in the room immediately look like they just walked in on a funeral by accident.