I had no idea what a PSAT was until I showed up in the morning one day and they shoved it in front of me at 7AM in the morning. I'd gotten 2 hours of sleep and

I had no idea what a PSAT was until I showed up in the morning one day and they shoved it in front of me at 7AM in the morning. I'd gotten 2 hours of sleep and was a wreck because of my difficult home life and felt like I was going to throw up. I later found out that I'd missed national merit by 2%, and that the PSAT was something that people with supportive families were not only told about ahead of time, but actively prepared for, sometimes even taken the -real- SAT as practice. I wish I'd known, or that the counselors had told me that it was something important. I do very well on standardized tests, and I'm sure that if I'd gotten at least 4-6 hours of sleep I'd have made NMS quite easily.