Overview
The PSAT, short for Preliminary SAT, is a standardized test administered by the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation and taken by millions of American high school sophomores to gauge their level of academic aptitude and prepare themselves for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the most widely used standardize test for college admissions in the United States. While the test has been administered in the United States every October since 1993, it became a viral discussion topic in October 2014 as students began sharing inside jokes about memorable questions from the test on Twitter and elsewhere in the social media.
Background
Students in the United States took the 2014 PSATs[1] on October 15th, 2014. The same day redditor NO_USERNAMES_FREE added a thread to the r/teenagers[2] subreddit titled “Hey guys let’s illegally discuss the PSAT.” Many students added their impression of the test to the thread, asked question about what answers other students got and creating inside jokes around the questions.
Notable Developments
Many high school students used Twitter to discuss and poke fun of the SATs. Within 24 hours of the test being administered the hashtag #PSAT[3] was tweeted out over 330,000 times. One joke made fun of a question which compared children to dolphins.
Another popular joke involved the extreme stress students are under to both remain seated while taking the test and to perform well.
Also on October 15th, USA Today[4] published a post which included tweets about the PSATs. The same day the Twitter account PSAT2014[5] was created. Describing itself as “Recapping the 2014 PSAT. Original Parody Account” the account sent out over 3,000 tweets and gained over 60,000 followers in less than 48 hours.