# PSAT 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. ## Origin The 2014 PSAT was administered across the United States on October 15, 2014[1]. 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 answers[4]. 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 exam[1]. 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 hours[4]. - **Platform:** Reddit / Twitter (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2014 ## 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 problems[4]. 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 production[4]. 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 2013[1]. ## How It Spread Within 24 hours of the 2014 exam, the #PSAT hashtag was tweeted more than 330,000 times[4]. 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 hours[3]. 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 voided[4]. The October PSAT posting ritual has run every year since 2014. ## How to Use 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 ### What is PSAT? Officially the Preliminary SAT / National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, a standardized test taken by millions of US high school sophomores and juniors[1]. Online, PSAT also refers to the annual October ritual of students posting jokes about the exam they aren't supposed to discuss[4]. ### Where did PSAT come from? The meme started on October 15, 2014, when Redditor NO_USERNAMES_FREE created an r/teenagers thread titled 'Hey guys let's illegally discuss the PSAT' and #PSAT was tweeted over 330,000 times inside 24 hours[4]. ### What does PSAT mean? The College Board's abbreviation for Preliminary SAT[1]. Urban Dictionary users jokingly redefine it as 'the one thing that everybody talks about when they aren't allowed to'[5]. ### How do you use PSAT? Post a reaction image, video, or joke tagged #PSAT that references a specific question from that year's exam, like the 2015 Herminia poetry passage or the 2018 Wisconsin mozzarella cheese question[3][4]. ### Is PSAT still popular? The October PSAT posting ritual has recurred every year since 2014, with the College Board itself joining in by 2019 with warning memes[4]. ## References 1. [https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2014/1015/PSAT-test-time-Time-for-teens-to-tweet-and-parents-to-tune-in]() 2. [https://college.usatoday.com/2014/10/15/the-quad-report-1200-pizza-sex-and-the-city-and-3-psat-tweets/]() 3. [https://x.com/i/status/1050050842764738561]() 4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/psat]() 5. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Psat]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/psat Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library