Tweet with distorted dolphin-like human face and caption about positive reinforcement tagged psat

PSAT

2014eventclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Every October since 2014, American high schoolers flood Twitter with jokes about the PSAT within hours of finishing the exam, openly defying College Board rules that ban discussing test content. What started with a Reddit thread called 'Hey guys let's illegally discuss the PSAT' turned into an annual internet ritual of question-specific inside jokes.

annual tradition memes classroom memes twitter memes subreddit origin memes student life memes

Overview

PSAT jokes are an annual October Twitter tradition where American high schoolers post reaction images, video edits, and captioned jokes about weirdly memorable test questions right after finishing the exam. The College Board forbids sharing test content, which is the whole point: the ritual gets framed as 'illegally' leaking inside jokes about specific passages and word problems4.

Loading tweet...

The format shifts each year around whichever questions stick in students' heads. Recurring examples include the 2015 reading passage about a girl named Herminia whose parents disagreed over publishing her poetry, a 2017 tomato-selling word problem, a 2017 passage on the symbiotic relationship between seagrass and clams, and a 2018 statistics question about Wisconsin's mozzarella cheese production4. Officially the test is the Preliminary SAT / National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), taken by more than 3 million US sophomores and juniors in 20131.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit / Twitter (viral spread)
Date
2014

The 2014 PSAT was administered across the United States on October 15, 20141. That same day, Redditor NO_USERNAMES_FREE created a thread on r/teenagers titled 'Hey guys let's illegally discuss the PSAT' where students swapped impressions of specific questions and compared answers4. Christian Science Monitor, tracking the reaction that morning, reported hundreds of tweets pouring in every few seconds before 7 a.m. EDT complaining about the exam1.

Early viral jokes centered on a question that compared children to dolphins and on the stress of sitting still through the three-hour test. A parody Twitter account called PSAT2014, describing itself as 'Recapping the 2014 PSAT. Original Parody Account,' sent more than 3,000 tweets and picked up over 60,000 followers in under 48 hours4.

How It Spread

Within 24 hours of the 2014 exam, the #PSAT hashtag was tweeted more than 330,000 times4. USA Today's Quad Report ran a roundup embedding three of the viral tweets the same afternoon, framing it as a chance to revisit 'the bizarre/culturally irrelevant questions you can find on the test'2. Urban Dictionary entries submitted around the same time defined PSAT as 'the one thing that everybody talks about when they aren't allowed to'5.

The cycle repeated each October. In 2015, the Herminia poetry passage spawned Tumblr crossovers with Pepe the Frog and 'Why the Fuck You Lyin.' In 2017, jokes clustered around the tomato and seagrass-and-clams questions, with BuzzFeed writing up the round. On October 9, 2018, Twitter user @VersaceMedina posted a video of men dancing captioned 'my last 3 brain cells trying to calculate the percent of mozzarella cheese made in wisconsin vs the total amount made #PSAT,' which pulled over 5,500 retweets and 12,000 likes in 24 hours3.

By October 2019, the College Board began posting its own memes asking test takers to stop sharing content, and students responded with jokes about being sued or having scores voided4. The October PSAT posting ritual has run every year since 2014.

Timeline

2014-10-15

2014 PSAT administered; NO_USERNAMES_FREE posts the 'illegally discuss the PSAT' thread on r/teenagers; #PSAT hits 330,000+ tweets in 24 hours.

2014-10-15

USA Today's Quad Report and Christian Science Monitor publish articles on the tweet wave the same day.

2015-10-14

Herminia poetry reading passage sparks Tumblr and Twitter jokes referencing Pepe the Frog and 'Why the Fuck You Lyin.'

2017-10-11

Tomato-selling word problem and seagrass/clams passage go viral; BuzzFeed publishes a meme roundup.

2018-10-09

@VersaceMedina posts the Wisconsin mozzarella cheese dancing-men video, one of the year's most-shared #PSAT tweets.

2019-10-16

@CollegeBoard posts its own memes warning test takers not to share content online, which students meme in return.

How to Use This Meme

The format is simple: after taking the PSAT, post a reaction image, GIF, or short video captioned with a reference to a specific question from that year's test, tagged #PSAT. Common conventions include treating the College Board like a sinister authority figure, framing the joke as 'illegal,' or using absurd word problems as a metaphor for exhaustion or panic.

Frequently Asked Questions