Standardized test taking is scary

It’s testing season.

ISTEP may be gone, but ILEARN is alive and kicking as any kid, teacher or parent could tell you.

ILEARN, incidentally, stands for Indiana Learning Evaluation Assessment Readiness Network. (I learned that — pun intended — by Googling the name of the test. Students are not allowed to Google when taking the ILEARN test.)

Tests, as we all know, are scary.

My first encounter with standardized testing came along somewhere in grade school. I remember an “achievement test” in fifth grade, but there might have been earlier assessments in third or fourth.

Why were they scary? In part, because they were so bossy.

“Do not turn this page until you are told,” they scolded. So we all immediately wondered what was on the next page. There’s nothing like “do not” to inspire a kid’s curiosity.

What could it be? And what would be the consequences if we actually turned the page? Would we be kicked out of school? Would we burst into flames?

Or would they take away our No. 2 pencil, the one we had been so careful to use when we “filled in the bubbles” with our answers?

I don’t think I had encountered the term “No. 2 pencil” until my first standardized test. Pencils were just pencils. And — for that matter — “No. 2” had a slightly off-color connotation. As in, “Did you go No. 1 or No. 2?”

But a No. 2 pencil was required. Without it, a kid might be kicked out of school or burst into flames or — even worse — be forced to turn the page before he or she was told.

There were, at some point, IQ tests, which were even more pointless than achievement tests. Measuring “achievement” made a certain amount of sense; measuring a kid’s potential to achieve simply seemed dumb.

One family I grew up with was obsessed with IQ tests and IQ scores. Every kid in the family knew his or her IQ. They knew where the cutoff for moron was, and they knew who qualified as a “genius.”

As you might expect, none of that turned out well.

Knowing one’s potential — and test status — didn’t translate to achievement, mental health or anything other than in-family bragging rights.

But the tests were pretty much impossible to avoid.

If you wanted to apply to college, you had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT. There was no other choice.

(Today, colleges and universities are trying to re-tool the admissions process so that standardized testing is not part of the equation. But in my era, it could be a game changer for one’s future.)

For the most part, I was OK with the testing.

My only real problem came with those conceptual math problems that asked you to figure out a seating arrangement based upon which members of the dinner party were left-handed, which ones spoke only Spanish, which ones walked with a limp, which ones hated Republicans, which ones liked to talk about fly fishing, which ones looked like Eleanor Roosevelt, which ones preferred salt, which ones were on salt-free diets, which ones loved left-handed snowboarders, which ones played Flamenco guitar, which ones were vegan and which ones shouldn’t have been invited to the dinner party in the first place.

I could never get the hang of those.