Keep Hoping Machine Running (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thefourthvine) wrote2021-02-27 08:39 pm
thefourthvine) wrote2021-02-27 08:39 pm
Entry tags:
Testing: A History
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher stood in front of the class one day and introduced a Special Teacher. “She’s going to show you her big book of words,” our teacher said. “And you’re going to read them. It’s important to do your best.”
One by one, kids were called to the back of the classroom. They spent ten or fifteen minutes back there and returned to their desks. It seemed like no big deal, but I was still eager for my turn. A big book of words! To me that seemed like by far the most exciting thing that had happened since the day of the Worst Substitute Teacher, the one who showed us that, indeed, a teacher can just walk out in the middle of a day and never return, and there will be drama when he does.
Eventually, it was my turn. I inspected the setup with interest as the special teacher explained the process. The book of words was designed to stand up on its own, with the ring binding facing up, and the teacher said she would flip pages over so I could read the word on the page facing me. I prepared to Do My Best. She flipped the first page over.
The page was entirely blank except for one giant word: CAT. I looked at the word and tried to figure out what I could possibly be expected to do with it. I could not imagine any combination of “doing my best” and “just the word ‘cat’ by itself on the page” that made sense. I hesitated. Anagram? Hidden word? What was going on with this test?
“Can you tell me what word that is?” the teacher said, in a very gentle, sweet, encouraging tone. “Can you sound it out, maybe?”
“It just says cat,” I said helplessly.
“Good!” the teacher said, and flipped the page. I decided maybe there wasn’t a trick here.
We progressed to multiple words on the page. Then many words on the page. The teacher stopped saying “good!” after each word. She started having me skip words. A short time after that, she began making little huffy noises after I read the words to her. These seemed like potentially unhappy sounds, but she was still giving me new pages, and I knew I was reading them correctly, so I just kept on. I was Doing My Best!
The teacher began having me read just one randomly-chosen word per page. I continued to Do My Best.
Finally, the teacher looked at me over the top of the ring binder. “Have you taken this test before?” she said.
In the classroom, every other kid was packing up to go home.
“No,” I said. I was not very into this conversation thing; I just wanted to get back to the book of words.
She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Did someone give you words to memorize for this test?”
“No,” I said again.
She studied me for a minute as my classmates filed out the door. Then she said, “Try THIS,” and flipped to the very last page in the book.
Now, I need to explain here that my parents had a “read whatever you want and on your own head be it” policy with me, largely because it was extremely challenging to keep me in books (or, for that matter, away from books). Also, they had a collection of Erma Bombeck books that I was very into at that point. And one of my favorite sections of one of those books was about Bombeck’s attempts to provide sex education for her children via fish tanks. I had read it many times, and I had asked about the word in it that I didn’t know, and my father had helped me look it up in our giant unabridged dictionary.
So when the teacher told me to read a specific word on that last page, yes, I am sure there were ones that I didn’t know there, but the one she picked out, I read confidently. “Enceinte,” I said carefully, closing my eyes because the word was said nothing like it was spelled.
The teacher looked at me flatly. “There is no way you know that word,” she said.
“It means the wall of a fort or the inside part of a fort,” I told her, exactly as my father had told me, “but it used to be a euphemism for being pregnant.” (I knew all about euphemisms by that age, which is what happens when you have a father with a rich, varied vocabulary and zero interest in self-censorship. I also knew about, for example, bowdlerizing, which my father had explained to me several years before, along with the editorial comment that it was “fucking bullshit.”)
The special teacher said, in a very different tone than she previously had, “Good.” Then she slammed her book of words shut, picked it up, and stalked over to our teacher. “I am going to have to come back tomorrow,” she snarled. “Because SOMEONE took FOREVER because she had to be a SMARTY PANTS.” I was not great at people or feelings, but I sensed that, just possibly, the special teacher was mad at me.
My teacher looked over at me, now packing up my things, and sighed ruefully. “She’s one of our problems,” she said.
And so I learned two very important lessons:
I did tasks. I answered questions. And as I did the many things the psychologist wanted, I asked questions. Why this pattern of blocks? Could I build anything else with the blocks? Why a triangle out of circles? Why not a circle out of triangles? Why does it matter if I know where the sun sets? Okay, but before I repeat the numbers back to you, why those numbers?
I know now that the testing psychologist was limited in terms of responses he could give, but at the time, I was frustrated. I was being asked to do all these things, and most of them were fun, yes, but I still wanted to know WHY I was doing them, and he wouldn’t tell me.
Finally, the psychologist said wearily, “Please. Just do the test and stop asking questions.”
I did, since it was clear there was, at that moment, no way for me to get real answers, but I thought about that all through the meeting he had with my mother while I sat in the waiting room (must have been a fun one for her!) and during the drive home. I gave all the answers I could and did not get a single one in return. Not even after the tests were over. No one would even tell me how I did on the tests.
This was not fair.
After some time of considering my, in my opinion, fully justified resentment, I made two decisions.
Over the next couple of years, I experienced every level of special education my school district had to offer. Simultaneously. Classes for gifted kids? I was in them. Classes for kids with moderate to severe disabilities? I was in them. Classes for kids with mild to moderate disabilities? Yup. I even spent an exciting six week period in a class for kids with severe behavioral issues. I did pull-out programs and after-school programs at the district office until I refused to go anymore and my parents decided not to die on that hill. No one had any clue what to do with me or where to put me, so they just kind of put me everywhere and hoped I would become someone else’s Problem, but it just had the effect of making me everyone’s. (Except the behavioral class teacher, who drew a boundary – “She doesn’t belong in here” – and defended it against all comers.)
(If you’re wondering how all this played out in terms of the education I actually got, the answer is: not terribly well. I spent years repeatedly learning to make change, then got shifted to a new level of math and discovered I had completely missed fractions and long division and had to teach them to myself. I learned how to write a five-paragraph essay on the same day that I was taught, for at least the fourth time, what a noun was. I did no history for three years – there was, somehow, no room for it in my schedule of shuttling between various levels of special education – but ended up doing science at two different levels for a year. I was banned from some electives “for safety reasons,” but I was still allowed to use the knives and needles and hot ovens in Home Economics. And most of the classes I was sent to did full-day instruction, but I was only supposed to learn one subject there. You know what teachers love? A kid who arrives in the middle of a carefully-planned day of learning and screws it all up. Especially when they think that kid doesn’t belong in their classroom anyway – and almost every teacher thought that, because the whole problem was that I didn’t belong anywhere. I spent a lot of time reading in isolation rooms and hallways, basically.)
To justify this special education bonanza, I had to take many, many assessments – all the ones required for every level of special ed, plus extra ones suggested by various school and testing psychologists. But since I did not want the special education, that seemed, again, unfair: somehow I had to take the tests to make it okay for them to do what they wanted?
So I spent a lot of time studying both psychological assessments and educational testing. My initial idea was to memorize the tests – thanks for the inspiration, fourth grade reading test teacher! – but I couldn’t get access to all the ones I’d taken, and they kept switching them up on me, so instead, I learned how assessments were designed and scored, and then I used what I learned to experiment on the tests. It was, I felt, only fair: the tests tested me, and I tested them right back.
I understood in theory why I was taking the IQ tests, but I still resented them. My parents absolutely would not tell me what I scored on them, and I couldn’t figure out a way to test them with no feedback on how I did. The best I could do was remember the questions I wasn’t sure about, look them up, and get them right the next time. (And that is exactly why you’re not supposed to give an IQ test repeatedly, school district!)
But it was a different story with projective tests. I hated those and believed they were a complete waste of my time. This led to, shall we say, some conflict between me and my examiners, like the one who said to me, halfway through a Rorschach test and on approximately her thirtieth page of notes, “You do realize that I have to write down everything you say, right?” in tones of pure loathing.
I did – I had, after all, fully done the reading – and I did not care. My attitude was, “You want me to take this bullshit test? Well, I want you to suffer for it.” You can sure find a lot in every inkblot if you’re making an effort, and that was one area where I was still willing to do my best.
I used a similar approach on the Thematic Apperception Test, which I for some reason was given four times in three years, resenting it more each time. (One year, I began one of my stories, “This kid has been given so many psychological tests, and he’s just completely sick of it, so he’s decided ...” The examiner interrupted me to say, in that I’m-pretending-to-be-amused-but-actually-I-hate-you voice, “Okay, I get it, you don’t like this, but how about you tell me the real story?” He completely missed the fact that he had actually almost gotten the actual real story.)
We will draw a veil over my approach to the Draw-a-Person and House-Tree-Person tests, except to say that probably someone, at some point, should have asked me about my mother’s field – experimental psychology – and made some guesses about the kinds of books I had ready access to, instead of just scoring those tests with ever-increasing alarm.
I preferred the personality inventories, because they were interesting and had statistics you could study. But I was given them at a truly phenomenal rate, and, after all, I didn’t actually want to spend days on end in a random small room full of spare desks filling in bubble sheets for no clear reason. So I turned it into a game. I decided ahead of time what results I wanted to get, and then I did my best to get them. It was a kind of doing my best! That was somehow not at all like actually doing my best.
It was a lot more fun than just bubbling in endless questions. I got good at scanning ahead to see where the test was going, sorting questions together into scales, remembering the answers I’d given to other questions to avoid contradicting them, and identifying the lie questions. After a year or two of sustained effort, I began to win my game, and my personality test results left the realm of “possibly vaguely related to reality” and entered the realm of pure fantasy. I felt all my goals had been achieved, and I was pleased with myself.
Then came eighth grade.
One thing about this testing: the teachers hated it, too. Especially the gifted track teachers, who each year had to surrender a LOT of class time to tests. (For some reason, my school district felt that students in gifted needed to be tested until they begged for mercy.) And my eighth grade language arts teacher, Mrs. D, put that into clear, explicit words.
“You need to do well enough on yearly testing to stay in gifted,” she told us. And then she listed the tests that were going to help us do that. “The rest of them,” she said, “don’t really matter. They’re for the school’s benefit, not yours.” Telling a middle school class that is not, let me say, a recipe for enthusiastic and honest participation, and Mrs. D definitely knew that.
“Now,” she continued. “Of those important tests, one is useless. The district keeps using it even though its own creators say they shouldn’t. So here’s what you to do to well on that one: draw something in every single box on the page, and then write as many words as you can until your time runs out. Write fast. Try to make related sentences, because it’s good practice. But they’re only going to count boxes and words, so it’s fine if you don’t always.”
I decided I loved Mrs. D even more than I had previously. She was the only teacher I had ever encountered who seemed as willing to be a Problem as I was, at least when it came to testing.
“This one,” she concluded as she passed out a test, “is a personality test. And they let me administer it. That’s how you know it’s not important! Be done when I get back.”
Then she left the classroom. (At the time, I thought this was an amazing piece of luck, but I have since concluded that this was entirely deliberate on her part – the teacher equivalent of screaming “FUCK YOU AND FUCK THESE TESTS” at the school administration.)
We gathered in a group and considered the test we had been given. “So we can get whatever we want on this, right?” Danny said.
“Only if you do it right,” I responded.
Everyone looked at me. And the thing was, I rarely talked in that class, or indeed in school as a whole – many days I spoke no words at all between 7:30 and 3:00 – but I had information they absolutely needed to know if we were going to wreak the havoc that test fully deserved, and it turned out I hated the test more than I hated speaking up. I explained as quickly as I could what results were possible and how to take it to get whatever ones you wanted. (By that time, I had taken that specific test so much I basically owned it. The school district loved it. They shouldn’t have.)
We divided the class into groups and set about attempting to get the worst results any class has ever gotten on a personality test. No randomly filling in bubbles for us! Sure, most of my classmates had done that at least once in a previous year, because of the testing-until-we-cried-for-mercy thing, but in eighth grade we were better than that. My table was assigned to score as antisocial as possible. Other tables picked other results. Everyone bubbled like the wind to make up for the time we spent planning.
When Mrs. D came back, we had a finished pile of tests on her desk and smugness in our malicious eighth grade hearts.
(Apparently not one person at the school district asked themselves a single question about why all the members of one class had serious psychological disorders, and if that was maybe a sign of something going wrong in the administration of the test rather than a problem with the kids. Parents were notified. My parents, I should note, never even mentioned it, even though I knew I’d fixed my results perfectly. Either they’d stopped getting the results – entirely possible, as the school district took a strict information diet approach to communicating with my parents, who were, with their dogged insistence that I get an appropriate education, their own kind of Problem – or they had stopped believing them. And Mrs. D made only one reference to it: “I hear you all enjoyed taking the tests this year. My other class is jealous.”)
That set the stage for my final phase of testing resistance: spreading the word. In the first semester of ninth grade, I had to do a report that would be presented to my class, and it had to include posters that would be displayed in the hallway of the building for the whole semester. I chose projective tests as my topic, and my posters covered scoring for all the major ones the school district used. In detail. Break-the-test detail.
As I was making these posters at home, my father said, “So you’re basically invalidating these tests for everyone in your class.”
“And everyone who reads the posters. Yes,” I said.
“What if people need real results from those tests?”
“Daddy,” I said sincerely, “these are bad tests. The school system shouldn’t use them. I’m helping.”
He considered this. “Okay,” he said, apparently having sighted yet another hill not worth dying on, and that was that.
My posters actually did attract some attention from my fellow students. (Mostly the ones I’d been in language arts with in eighth grade; they were very into this idea, especially the ones who’d ended up in therapy after our tiny testing rebellion. Gaming tests, they’d realized, was power. I gave the ones who asked a short speech on the worst possible stories to tell and things to draw and so on.) But the people who really paid attention were the teachers.
“You seem to know a lot about psychological tests,” my health teacher observed.
“I take a lot of them,” I said. “So I’ve read up.”
She thought about that. “How does that work? Do the tests still work on you after you read about them?”
I laughed. “No. But don’t worry. They never worked.”
Later, as a result of that conversation, I had the first of what would prove to be kind of a lot of sessions with the school nurse and guidance counselor. (That same semester, I got reported to them by my Communications teacher, leading to even more meetings.) We discussed my beliefs about psychological testing in some detail, along with many other topics, and the school nurse offered to put a note in my file that I should be given fewer tests. (She was really surprised by the list of tests I’d taken.)
But it didn’t matter, because the school district had given up. By the third quarter of that year their new policy was: her parents have mostly stopped complaining (because I was going to school more willingly, although they didn’t know it was just to sit in the tardy room), so maybe we can just pretend she doesn’t exist until she ceases to be our Problem. Which I quickly did, moving on to college, where I wasn’t a problem at all.
I had taken my last public-school-administered psychological test. A pity, in a way; if I’d had just a few more years of resentment in me, I probably would have found a way to set tests on fire with my mind, and a superpower would have actually been the first and only useful educational outcome of all that psychological testing.
One by one, kids were called to the back of the classroom. They spent ten or fifteen minutes back there and returned to their desks. It seemed like no big deal, but I was still eager for my turn. A big book of words! To me that seemed like by far the most exciting thing that had happened since the day of the Worst Substitute Teacher, the one who showed us that, indeed, a teacher can just walk out in the middle of a day and never return, and there will be drama when he does.
Eventually, it was my turn. I inspected the setup with interest as the special teacher explained the process. The book of words was designed to stand up on its own, with the ring binding facing up, and the teacher said she would flip pages over so I could read the word on the page facing me. I prepared to Do My Best. She flipped the first page over.
The page was entirely blank except for one giant word: CAT. I looked at the word and tried to figure out what I could possibly be expected to do with it. I could not imagine any combination of “doing my best” and “just the word ‘cat’ by itself on the page” that made sense. I hesitated. Anagram? Hidden word? What was going on with this test?
“Can you tell me what word that is?” the teacher said, in a very gentle, sweet, encouraging tone. “Can you sound it out, maybe?”
“It just says cat,” I said helplessly.
“Good!” the teacher said, and flipped the page. I decided maybe there wasn’t a trick here.
We progressed to multiple words on the page. Then many words on the page. The teacher stopped saying “good!” after each word. She started having me skip words. A short time after that, she began making little huffy noises after I read the words to her. These seemed like potentially unhappy sounds, but she was still giving me new pages, and I knew I was reading them correctly, so I just kept on. I was Doing My Best!
The teacher began having me read just one randomly-chosen word per page. I continued to Do My Best.
Finally, the teacher looked at me over the top of the ring binder. “Have you taken this test before?” she said.
In the classroom, every other kid was packing up to go home.
“No,” I said. I was not very into this conversation thing; I just wanted to get back to the book of words.
She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Did someone give you words to memorize for this test?”
“No,” I said again.
She studied me for a minute as my classmates filed out the door. Then she said, “Try THIS,” and flipped to the very last page in the book.
Now, I need to explain here that my parents had a “read whatever you want and on your own head be it” policy with me, largely because it was extremely challenging to keep me in books (or, for that matter, away from books). Also, they had a collection of Erma Bombeck books that I was very into at that point. And one of my favorite sections of one of those books was about Bombeck’s attempts to provide sex education for her children via fish tanks. I had read it many times, and I had asked about the word in it that I didn’t know, and my father had helped me look it up in our giant unabridged dictionary.
So when the teacher told me to read a specific word on that last page, yes, I am sure there were ones that I didn’t know there, but the one she picked out, I read confidently. “Enceinte,” I said carefully, closing my eyes because the word was said nothing like it was spelled.
The teacher looked at me flatly. “There is no way you know that word,” she said.
“It means the wall of a fort or the inside part of a fort,” I told her, exactly as my father had told me, “but it used to be a euphemism for being pregnant.” (I knew all about euphemisms by that age, which is what happens when you have a father with a rich, varied vocabulary and zero interest in self-censorship. I also knew about, for example, bowdlerizing, which my father had explained to me several years before, along with the editorial comment that it was “fucking bullshit.”)
The special teacher said, in a very different tone than she previously had, “Good.” Then she slammed her book of words shut, picked it up, and stalked over to our teacher. “I am going to have to come back tomorrow,” she snarled. “Because SOMEONE took FOREVER because she had to be a SMARTY PANTS.” I was not great at people or feelings, but I sensed that, just possibly, the special teacher was mad at me.
My teacher looked over at me, now packing up my things, and sighed ruefully. “She’s one of our problems,” she said.
And so I learned two very important lessons:
- They tell you to do your best on tests, but they don’t mean it.
- I was a Problem. (I already kind of knew this – there was a lot of evidence piling up – but this was the first time I had ever heard the word for it.)
- My mother and I had an argument over what year I was born.
- My mother stared at the question “What discipline methods work best with your child?” for a long moment, and then wrote, as I peered over her shoulder, “None. She is impossible to discipline.” And she underlined “impossible.” That didn’t seem entirely true to me – I was absolutely willing to entertain requests and adhere to rules, as long as they didn’t conflict with things I wanted – but I let it go, because after all I had already been victorious in the argument about the year I was born, and you have to let parents have their own way sometimes.
I did tasks. I answered questions. And as I did the many things the psychologist wanted, I asked questions. Why this pattern of blocks? Could I build anything else with the blocks? Why a triangle out of circles? Why not a circle out of triangles? Why does it matter if I know where the sun sets? Okay, but before I repeat the numbers back to you, why those numbers?
I know now that the testing psychologist was limited in terms of responses he could give, but at the time, I was frustrated. I was being asked to do all these things, and most of them were fun, yes, but I still wanted to know WHY I was doing them, and he wouldn’t tell me.
Finally, the psychologist said wearily, “Please. Just do the test and stop asking questions.”
I did, since it was clear there was, at that moment, no way for me to get real answers, but I thought about that all through the meeting he had with my mother while I sat in the waiting room (must have been a fun one for her!) and during the drive home. I gave all the answers I could and did not get a single one in return. Not even after the tests were over. No one would even tell me how I did on the tests.
This was not fair.
After some time of considering my, in my opinion, fully justified resentment, I made two decisions.
- I would find my own answers.
- I would, if I took any tests in the future, make sure things were more fair.
Over the next couple of years, I experienced every level of special education my school district had to offer. Simultaneously. Classes for gifted kids? I was in them. Classes for kids with moderate to severe disabilities? I was in them. Classes for kids with mild to moderate disabilities? Yup. I even spent an exciting six week period in a class for kids with severe behavioral issues. I did pull-out programs and after-school programs at the district office until I refused to go anymore and my parents decided not to die on that hill. No one had any clue what to do with me or where to put me, so they just kind of put me everywhere and hoped I would become someone else’s Problem, but it just had the effect of making me everyone’s. (Except the behavioral class teacher, who drew a boundary – “She doesn’t belong in here” – and defended it against all comers.)
(If you’re wondering how all this played out in terms of the education I actually got, the answer is: not terribly well. I spent years repeatedly learning to make change, then got shifted to a new level of math and discovered I had completely missed fractions and long division and had to teach them to myself. I learned how to write a five-paragraph essay on the same day that I was taught, for at least the fourth time, what a noun was. I did no history for three years – there was, somehow, no room for it in my schedule of shuttling between various levels of special education – but ended up doing science at two different levels for a year. I was banned from some electives “for safety reasons,” but I was still allowed to use the knives and needles and hot ovens in Home Economics. And most of the classes I was sent to did full-day instruction, but I was only supposed to learn one subject there. You know what teachers love? A kid who arrives in the middle of a carefully-planned day of learning and screws it all up. Especially when they think that kid doesn’t belong in their classroom anyway – and almost every teacher thought that, because the whole problem was that I didn’t belong anywhere. I spent a lot of time reading in isolation rooms and hallways, basically.)
To justify this special education bonanza, I had to take many, many assessments – all the ones required for every level of special ed, plus extra ones suggested by various school and testing psychologists. But since I did not want the special education, that seemed, again, unfair: somehow I had to take the tests to make it okay for them to do what they wanted?
So I spent a lot of time studying both psychological assessments and educational testing. My initial idea was to memorize the tests – thanks for the inspiration, fourth grade reading test teacher! – but I couldn’t get access to all the ones I’d taken, and they kept switching them up on me, so instead, I learned how assessments were designed and scored, and then I used what I learned to experiment on the tests. It was, I felt, only fair: the tests tested me, and I tested them right back.
I understood in theory why I was taking the IQ tests, but I still resented them. My parents absolutely would not tell me what I scored on them, and I couldn’t figure out a way to test them with no feedback on how I did. The best I could do was remember the questions I wasn’t sure about, look them up, and get them right the next time. (And that is exactly why you’re not supposed to give an IQ test repeatedly, school district!)
But it was a different story with projective tests. I hated those and believed they were a complete waste of my time. This led to, shall we say, some conflict between me and my examiners, like the one who said to me, halfway through a Rorschach test and on approximately her thirtieth page of notes, “You do realize that I have to write down everything you say, right?” in tones of pure loathing.
I did – I had, after all, fully done the reading – and I did not care. My attitude was, “You want me to take this bullshit test? Well, I want you to suffer for it.” You can sure find a lot in every inkblot if you’re making an effort, and that was one area where I was still willing to do my best.
I used a similar approach on the Thematic Apperception Test, which I for some reason was given four times in three years, resenting it more each time. (One year, I began one of my stories, “This kid has been given so many psychological tests, and he’s just completely sick of it, so he’s decided ...” The examiner interrupted me to say, in that I’m-pretending-to-be-amused-but-actually-I-hate-you voice, “Okay, I get it, you don’t like this, but how about you tell me the real story?” He completely missed the fact that he had actually almost gotten the actual real story.)
We will draw a veil over my approach to the Draw-a-Person and House-Tree-Person tests, except to say that probably someone, at some point, should have asked me about my mother’s field – experimental psychology – and made some guesses about the kinds of books I had ready access to, instead of just scoring those tests with ever-increasing alarm.
I preferred the personality inventories, because they were interesting and had statistics you could study. But I was given them at a truly phenomenal rate, and, after all, I didn’t actually want to spend days on end in a random small room full of spare desks filling in bubble sheets for no clear reason. So I turned it into a game. I decided ahead of time what results I wanted to get, and then I did my best to get them. It was a kind of doing my best! That was somehow not at all like actually doing my best.
It was a lot more fun than just bubbling in endless questions. I got good at scanning ahead to see where the test was going, sorting questions together into scales, remembering the answers I’d given to other questions to avoid contradicting them, and identifying the lie questions. After a year or two of sustained effort, I began to win my game, and my personality test results left the realm of “possibly vaguely related to reality” and entered the realm of pure fantasy. I felt all my goals had been achieved, and I was pleased with myself.
Then came eighth grade.
One thing about this testing: the teachers hated it, too. Especially the gifted track teachers, who each year had to surrender a LOT of class time to tests. (For some reason, my school district felt that students in gifted needed to be tested until they begged for mercy.) And my eighth grade language arts teacher, Mrs. D, put that into clear, explicit words.
“You need to do well enough on yearly testing to stay in gifted,” she told us. And then she listed the tests that were going to help us do that. “The rest of them,” she said, “don’t really matter. They’re for the school’s benefit, not yours.” Telling a middle school class that is not, let me say, a recipe for enthusiastic and honest participation, and Mrs. D definitely knew that.
“Now,” she continued. “Of those important tests, one is useless. The district keeps using it even though its own creators say they shouldn’t. So here’s what you to do to well on that one: draw something in every single box on the page, and then write as many words as you can until your time runs out. Write fast. Try to make related sentences, because it’s good practice. But they’re only going to count boxes and words, so it’s fine if you don’t always.”
I decided I loved Mrs. D even more than I had previously. She was the only teacher I had ever encountered who seemed as willing to be a Problem as I was, at least when it came to testing.
“This one,” she concluded as she passed out a test, “is a personality test. And they let me administer it. That’s how you know it’s not important! Be done when I get back.”
Then she left the classroom. (At the time, I thought this was an amazing piece of luck, but I have since concluded that this was entirely deliberate on her part – the teacher equivalent of screaming “FUCK YOU AND FUCK THESE TESTS” at the school administration.)
We gathered in a group and considered the test we had been given. “So we can get whatever we want on this, right?” Danny said.
“Only if you do it right,” I responded.
Everyone looked at me. And the thing was, I rarely talked in that class, or indeed in school as a whole – many days I spoke no words at all between 7:30 and 3:00 – but I had information they absolutely needed to know if we were going to wreak the havoc that test fully deserved, and it turned out I hated the test more than I hated speaking up. I explained as quickly as I could what results were possible and how to take it to get whatever ones you wanted. (By that time, I had taken that specific test so much I basically owned it. The school district loved it. They shouldn’t have.)
We divided the class into groups and set about attempting to get the worst results any class has ever gotten on a personality test. No randomly filling in bubbles for us! Sure, most of my classmates had done that at least once in a previous year, because of the testing-until-we-cried-for-mercy thing, but in eighth grade we were better than that. My table was assigned to score as antisocial as possible. Other tables picked other results. Everyone bubbled like the wind to make up for the time we spent planning.
When Mrs. D came back, we had a finished pile of tests on her desk and smugness in our malicious eighth grade hearts.
(Apparently not one person at the school district asked themselves a single question about why all the members of one class had serious psychological disorders, and if that was maybe a sign of something going wrong in the administration of the test rather than a problem with the kids. Parents were notified. My parents, I should note, never even mentioned it, even though I knew I’d fixed my results perfectly. Either they’d stopped getting the results – entirely possible, as the school district took a strict information diet approach to communicating with my parents, who were, with their dogged insistence that I get an appropriate education, their own kind of Problem – or they had stopped believing them. And Mrs. D made only one reference to it: “I hear you all enjoyed taking the tests this year. My other class is jealous.”)
That set the stage for my final phase of testing resistance: spreading the word. In the first semester of ninth grade, I had to do a report that would be presented to my class, and it had to include posters that would be displayed in the hallway of the building for the whole semester. I chose projective tests as my topic, and my posters covered scoring for all the major ones the school district used. In detail. Break-the-test detail.
As I was making these posters at home, my father said, “So you’re basically invalidating these tests for everyone in your class.”
“And everyone who reads the posters. Yes,” I said.
“What if people need real results from those tests?”
“Daddy,” I said sincerely, “these are bad tests. The school system shouldn’t use them. I’m helping.”
He considered this. “Okay,” he said, apparently having sighted yet another hill not worth dying on, and that was that.
My posters actually did attract some attention from my fellow students. (Mostly the ones I’d been in language arts with in eighth grade; they were very into this idea, especially the ones who’d ended up in therapy after our tiny testing rebellion. Gaming tests, they’d realized, was power. I gave the ones who asked a short speech on the worst possible stories to tell and things to draw and so on.) But the people who really paid attention were the teachers.
“You seem to know a lot about psychological tests,” my health teacher observed.
“I take a lot of them,” I said. “So I’ve read up.”
She thought about that. “How does that work? Do the tests still work on you after you read about them?”
I laughed. “No. But don’t worry. They never worked.”
Later, as a result of that conversation, I had the first of what would prove to be kind of a lot of sessions with the school nurse and guidance counselor. (That same semester, I got reported to them by my Communications teacher, leading to even more meetings.) We discussed my beliefs about psychological testing in some detail, along with many other topics, and the school nurse offered to put a note in my file that I should be given fewer tests. (She was really surprised by the list of tests I’d taken.)
But it didn’t matter, because the school district had given up. By the third quarter of that year their new policy was: her parents have mostly stopped complaining (because I was going to school more willingly, although they didn’t know it was just to sit in the tardy room), so maybe we can just pretend she doesn’t exist until she ceases to be our Problem. Which I quickly did, moving on to college, where I wasn’t a problem at all.
I had taken my last public-school-administered psychological test. A pity, in a way; if I’d had just a few more years of resentment in me, I probably would have found a way to set tests on fire with my mind, and a superpower would have actually been the first and only useful educational outcome of all that psychological testing.
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