This is Only a Test

There are those who believe that “Life is a test” and that, at the end, we all get a grade of H. Everything then depends on whether it’s an H-Plus, for Heaven, or an H-Minus, for Hellswhere.

But there are enough hard tests along the way to make life often seem to be a little foretaste of H-Minus.

Tests and examinations formed a big and burdensome part of my own life – first, taking them as a student, then giving and grading them as a teacher. On the receiving end, I was good at writing, and if the questions required essay-type answers, I nearly always did well. Not till I started taking courses in “Education,” to qualify as a California teacher, did I learn of recent studies that showed essay-type answers were inevitably graded subjectively, and the same paper might receive widely different grades, depending on who did the grading.

Multiple-choice tests were supposedly more fair, since, at least in theory, each question could have only one “right” answer. But the bias now shifted from the grader to the constructor of the test. It actually became a national scandal that tests could be constructed in such a way as to give the advantage to certain ethnic or cultural groups. For example, children from urban and rural backgrounds might give different answers to the same question, but arguably be equally “right.”

Intelligence tests have become particularly controversial. In order to become a member of MENSA, you need to score in the top 2 percent of a “standardized” intelligence test. But there are now so many such tests that which ones are acceptable is a matter of dispute. My wife Dorothy and I were both MENSANs, because of tests we took in the 1960s. And by paying an additional fee, we became Life Members, which means we never had to be tested again, regardless of any changed mental condition.

As a teacher, I far preferred multiple-choice tests, because they could be marked and graded much more quickly and easily – that is, unless I had to construct them myself, which could be as tediously time-consuming as grading essays. But here I have to tell you about something I am not altogether proud of.

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, one means of supporting myself was by securing a “Readership,” which meant that I had to read and grade examination papers for a professor in my field. I might be given a pile of as many as 150 papers to go through. At the same time, as a Ph.D. candidate myself, I had my own studies and examinations to worry about. 

Consequently, when confronted with a huge pile of undergraduate papers to mark, I simply could not read them all as carefully as I should have. It was slightly more tricky with the mid-term exams, because these were returned to the students, who might then come and take issue with the grade they’d received. So, I had to give at least some evidence that I’d actually read the paper.

But, when it came to the all-important “finals,” the reader had nothing but conscience constraining him – because those papers, for some reason, were never given back to the students. All I had to do was give each paper a grade, which, in effect, would be that student’s final grade for the course. And my guiding principle was, often just by estimating how many pages had been written, to give each student the grade I thought he or she probably felt they deserved. This method saved a great deal of time. I still feel somewhat guilty about it – but it worked for me, and nobody ever complained.

Of course, there are many other kinds of tests, including the “acid test,” which originally was an actual test with acids, to determine whether a substance was or wasn’t real gold. It has now acquired the metaphorical meaning of the ultimate proof of almost anything.

Then there are the numerous medical tests, with which we’re so unhappily familiar.

And where would the pharmaceutical Industry be – or the whole realm of engineering – without their own incessant testing – to say nothing of the military and its passion for testing weaponry?

But if life itself is somehow a test, all we can say with certainty of its purpose, (as of many lesser trials) is that “The purpose of this test is to test your ability to pass this test.”