Dear juniors, the PSAT might be underwhelming

October means standardized testing. Who cares that October is National Sausage Month or even Halloween — for many students, it’s all about SATs and PSAT.

Following the revamped March 2016 SAT, College Board has also redesigned the PSAT to mirror the new SAT.

And to make a long story short, for all the time I’ve spent preparing for standardized testing, the newly released PSAT practice test was a letdown.

(Note: My experiences should not influence your study habits.)

This year, the PSAT will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 24. This date is important to juniors because the top 1 percent of the highest scorers in each state become National Merit Semifinalists, who are given scholarships to select UCs and private universities.

As a National Merit Semifinalist hopeful and standardized testing enthusiast, I began prepping as soon as I could get my hands on an updated PSAT practice test. Perhaps this new PSAT could be yet another standardized test worthy of obsession.

The College Board website claims that the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section “asks you to interpret, synthesize and use evidence found in a wide range of sources.”

Using my own evidence-based reading skills, I managed to synthesize my own interpretation: adding in a graph at the end of the reading passage is not what I would call “a wide range of sources.”

The questions were watered-down versions of previous SAT and PSAT questions. No longer were there extended reasoning questions, which historically have been the most difficult.

Many of the questions come in pairs. The first part tests literal comprehension; the second part requires that the student simply report the line number in which the answer was found — essentially free points.

Also, there was no obscure vocabulary to memorize; all the vocab questions came with the context of a passage.

Math seemed more or less the same, with its logic-based word problems and lack of technical math skill beyond trigonometry.

What I do commend in this new test is the updated writing section, which has changed from editing individual, unrelated sentences to editing complete passages.

Even better is that there’s no more penalty for guessing.

If it’s not clear already, I’m an SAT/PSAT purist.

According to the College Board website, the best way to prepare for the new tests is to “take challenging courses, do your homework, prepare for tests and quizzes [and] ask and answer lots of questions.”

Contrast this with the infinite vocab cards and endless practice tests many who have taken the current SAT are familiar with. It’s kind of funny.

With the new PSAT, studying is probably much easier. And maybe this is beneficial, but for every other Saratoga High student who spent many summers stuck in SAT prep classes, this is a letdown for years of hell.

And it’s clear that a prevailing reason for the College Board to change the SAT and PSAT is to compete with the ACT, which has been rising in popularity.

The new SAT is supposedly realigned with Common Core, which has been criticized as too one-size-fits-all. It’s a sad trend that policies like Common Core champion a set of revamped standards that rarely turn out well in practice.

So maybe I’m just a sore loser, but now I don’t feel so smart for sacrificing my summers to prep for the old SAT. The new PSAT, and so then probably the new SAT as well, has become too straightforward for that type of studying. Besides, most people know that National Merit Semifinalists only get scholarships to USC.

I guess October still means SATs and PSAT, but maybe I’ll just switch to studying for the ACT.