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Once upon a time, I was the king of tests. I was a
marginal student, at best, and would generally spend more time and effort
trying to get out of studying or doing work than it would have taken to
actually do the work--but anytime anyone put any sort of standardized test in
front of me, the vast seething library of arcana and noise that’s rattled
around in my head since childhood would suddenly click to order, files and
data organizing themselves for the dump, and the test would be mine.
Lest you have any doubts about how test-driven our society is, let me assure
you that a marginal work ethic and high test scores carried me further than
most of my hard-working, low-testing peers. Elementary school standardized
tests placed me in a variety of gifted and talented classes, where we spent
all sorts of quality creative thinking and processing and analyzing time that
masked the fact that we really were working far less hard and having far more
goof-off time than the kids in the regular classes. Junior high aptitude
tests indicated to guidance counselors that I was college track material, and
advanced placement tests later ensured that when I got to college, that I
would be able to skip all sorts of typical first and second year courses.
And the SAT’s? Oh, the SAT’s! My SAT scores, with no advance effort to
prepare whatsoever, overcame tepid grades and a marginal extracurricular
record to get me admitted to one of the most prestigious colleges in America,
where I spent four years as the King of Cram, leading a posse of like-minded
slugs in the "Late Night Study Club," packing just enough
information into our heads to barf it onto the test forms the following
mornings. And then we slept. After college, I spent a year in a postgraduate
program, drinking and sleeping and drinking and sleeping, only occasionally
coming up for air to take the tests that would get me selected for a
prestigious position in a high profile government organization in Washington,
DC.
When that gig was winding down, my girlfriend and I decided that we would
take the Federal Foreign Service Examination together and, once we passed it
with flying colors, we would jet off for an exciting, cosmopolitan life
abroad, doing our best royalty waves at the natives, eating in the world’s
finest restaurants on expense accounts, hobnobbing with royalty, and sleeping
really, really often and well. My girlfriend, being a serious academic sort,
did all sorts of research into the Foreign Service Exam, took sample tests,
boned up on political science and economics and history, talked to people who
had taken and passed the test. I, on the other hand, slept really, really
well the night before the exam--figuring that if all night cram sessions had
work well for me all those years, then a "well rested, well tested"
approach should really reap spectacular dividends.
The test itself seemed no harder or easier than any other standardized test
that I’d ever taken, and I was one of the first in the room to finish, not
bothering to go back and check my work since, hey, I never went back and
checked my work. My girlfriend, on the other hand, worked diligently through
the entire testing period, while I sat thinking patronizing thoughts about
how cute it was when she worked so hard on things.
Six weeks or so passed, and my girlfriend called me at my office to tell me
that, yay, she had gotten the results of the examination, and she had passed!
I congratulated her, and congratulated myself, since (to my mind) the only
thing that could have caused us to not spend our lives jetting around the
world together was for her to have failed the test. I was so glad that her
hard work and preparation had paid off, and that our lives would now unfold
the way we’d planned them--and I told her that.
But I’d spoken too soon, since when I got home that night and opened my own
test results, I discovered to my shock, horror and dismay that I had not
passed the Foreign Service Examination. In fact, I had not even gotten close
to passing the Foreign Service Examination. I had failed in a fairly
spectacular fashion, and now I had to call my girlfriend and eat crow of a
variety that I’d never tasted, with a healthy slab of humble pie for desert.
And I had to reassess two basic personal premises in my life. Firstly, I
could no longer waltz in to a standardized exam setting without preparation
and have it carry me forward to whatever next step I had in mind. And second,
and perhaps more profoundly, I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t the
smartest person that I knew anymore--because a lifetime of tests telling me
that I was in the 99th percentile of this or the top decile of that had
imbued me with an arrogance about my own intellectual capabilities that made
me certain that I was always right.
So there I was, hoisted on my own hubris, planning a life that wasn’t
possible because the King of Tests had struck out. The logical reaction,
then, perhaps would have been to take the test again and redeem myself as
Lord of All That I Multiple Guessed, but my reaction was, instead, to turn my
back on tests entirely, to let my failure be the victor, to let that moment
be a benchmark for a different approach to life. So I haven’t taken a
standardized test or a college exam since that day, and have instead focused
my energies on actually doing and learning things in practical, hands-on
fashion, trying to earn tangible kudos rather than bluffing my way into paper
victories.
And the girlfriend in the story? I figured that the only way to deal with
people who were smarter than me was to stay very, very close to them, just to
see what might rub off. We’ve been married for some 15 years now, and I’m
still learning.
Copyright 2003: J. Eric Smith.
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