Now, I've spent a fair amount of time in lecture halls; I know them pretty well. I also know my way around a test, having taken one or two over the years.
But man is it a little trippy to be on the other side, watching 300 soon-to-be freshmen scribbling away, clawing at their heads like they might be able to somehow drag the answers out, the sweat beads rolling off while they chew on their pencils and their nails and then they put their grubby freshmen paws all over everything and spread their saliva everywhere.
It's actually kind of intensely gross.
The nerves ratchet up towards the end...they glance up to see the remaining time at more frequent and frantic intervals, and sometimes you see one just sitting there staring off into space, maybe wanting to cry, maybe contemplating the previous first real night at college and ruing the amount of alcohol consumption that has made their liver weep a little bit. Or at least, that was what my roommate at orientation seemed to experience after she stumbled in at 4am and then somehow managed to roll her ass out of bed again at 8 to take her math placement test. I wonder what happened to that girl...
Or maybe they are just wondering what the hell they are doing up that early. In any case, the glaze in the eyes is just a little bit hilarious.
See, I feel like now that I've passed the halfway mark of college, there's enough distance between myself and this new gaggle of younglings that I can more openly ridicule them. It's a good feeling. Except that the omnipresent what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-my-life question seems a lot closer on this side than it did the first two years. And the fact that most days I still feel like a freshman myself. But they don't really need to know that as I laugh at their standardized testing woes.
I personally like the non-testing side a little better. Less pressure. Less oral fixation. It's kind of fun, because you can simultaneously empathize with their suffering and be grateful that you are not in their position. And I gotta hand it to professors who deal with the lecture halls. It would be insanely intimidating to stand in front of 500 people and yak on about your subject. Even if you know it incredibly well, there just seems to be 500 times the potential for screwing up. And that's scary.
That's the trade-off, I guess, for moving on in life.
Fear for fear.
Standardized testing has pretty much become the norm in modern American education. It's efficient, it's uniform, and hey, who doesn't just love filling in an endless sea of scantron bubbles with that trusty #2 pencil?
Even little kids get thrown out into the scantron circle sea and are made to swim for themselves. I remember taking those ridiculous tests all the way back to elementary school. The only part I liked was the essay, and only because once I got to write about a purple elephant that ran away from the circus. But anyway, you can call it what you want...aptitude measurements, "success" predictors, readiness assessments, blah blah blah, but it all really just comes down to being a highly systematic way of categorizing and evaluating people.
And though the scores produced might be hailed as an effective device for determining "readiness" (readiness for what, by the way? There's no amount of "readiness" for life, that's for sure), there is no accounting for any kind of creativity or individual thought.
Hell, the "What We Do" of the ETS says it pretty clearly:
All of our products and services — including individual test questions, assessments, instructional materials and publications — are evaluated during development to ensure that they
- are not offensive or controversial
- do not reinforce stereotypical views of any group
- are free of racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic and other forms of bias
- are free of content believed to be inappropriate or derogatory toward any group
I'm not encouraging racism or sexism or classism or any other "ism" out there, but I do encourage deviation from "proper" thinking, and I just mean in more general terms that according to those standards, there could never possibly be an actually good literary passage on any of those tests because, hell, good literature is almost always controversial, and if it's really great, then it's usually offensive, too, to some group of people or another. Normally, if you don't like it, you're more than welcome to challenge it. But see, these tests don't want to be challenged, they just want to establish a top percentile that knows exactly how to answer their questions in a way that pleases their sensibilities. And if you care about the number you recieve, then you might as well just check any of your own thoughts at the door and start thinking like an unbiased, appropriate test-writer would!
That has to be the only explanation for how the hell Billy Collins showed up on my AP English test senior year. Because that guy is just about as unoffensive as a poet could possibly be.
They might as well rephrase their entire mission statement to read: ETS: making boring our standard (and so should you)!
Because who doesn't love being evaluated on how well they can conform to the AP-style essay, right? (Never, ever forget to state a complementary tone!) Our heads were crammed full of this crap over the years, and only so that we might have a chance at getting the testing formula right and obtaining good enough scores to somehow eke ourselves into college. And just when you enter a university and think you're finally home free, you realize that if you plan on giving up your soul to a grad school or a law school or a med school or a whole host of other professions, you'll have to do it all again in just a few short years.
No reprieve no reprieve no reprieve!
Not to mention that test prep is probably something like a multimillion-dollar industry. Because hey, if you can make an absurd amount of money exploiting the desperation of students in the midst of all their life crises, why not, right?
But you know what? Have some faith, disheartened bubblers! Even if those tests haven't been kind to you over the years, somehow, someway, you might still be able to make it in the world. Hell, I've always really kind of sucked at standardized testing and somehow, I'm doing okay. I haven't completely failed at life. Though there's still plenty of time for that, I guess.
Anyway, if you are currently on hiatus from testing, take a moment and be grateful for that fact. And, if you are among the unlucky throngs that are currently engaged, or preparing to engage, in battle with that dreaded scantron sheet, you have my immense sympathies.
And do also know that I am silently and gleefully mocking you.



