I'll confess: Testing was very low on the list of things I was trying to escape by going to Hampshire. I was always pretty good at tests, so proud of how I did on them that I still remember the one answer I got wrong on the phonics test which got me into Poly at age five. (And that one wasn't a misunderstanding; it was a mis-generalization which I might not have made if I wasn't so confident with my alphabet skills.)

I started practicing for the GREs today. Not the best day to do it; I just found out a job I was certain I'd get was offered to someone else who was "perfect" for it; and then I went and took a look at some journalism jobs and realized how unqualified I am for them. So my self-esteem is hanging out in some low circle of hell today, one with lots of demons wielding hot pokers. But I started working on the analogy section anyway, and for the first time in my life I'm finding tests to be sheer unadulterated agony.

Performance anxiety is part of it. I haven't taken a test in years, and my SAT verbal scores are a hard act to follow. There were one or two words on the test whose definitions I didn't know. I panicked. My SAT verbal scores were in the 99th percentile; I write for magazines; I won a scholarship to Bread Loaf; I still don't know what the hell "stygian" means, and I feel like a pretender.

These are the times when my Hampshire goggles kick in and, thank god, I get a clearer reading. I'm a writer, and I love words, and I don't know these ones -- how on earth is the other 99.99% of the world who didn't go to a school like mine EVER going to gain access to higher education when they have to claw their way through a wall of analogies which begin "prediction: augury?" How will they even bring themselves to sit down for yet another test which tells them what a an unworthy piece of sh!t they are?

I'm infuriated by these tests as a writer, too. Kids who get frog-marched through the vocabulary regimen that prepares you for the SAT come out believing that if they want to look smart they should actually use those words. The resulting prose is like sticking your head in a cage full of agitated pigeons. It's fscking unreadable. They never recover, either; look what I've written here. Most people in this country couldn't follow the complexity of my sentences. May my mouth be forcibly sealed and my hands chopped off if I ever use the word "stygian" when I am actually trying to get an idea across to another person!

The University of California can't stop relying on standardized tests soon enough. If I had realized what a crock the GREs were before I laid out a hundred dollars to take them, I would have refused and told the departments where I'm applying my rationale. I'm lucky any anthropology department where I'd feel comfortable working would agree with me.

coda: Conversely, taking the math and analytical sections of the GREs makes me feel super-confident, because I never was good at it and not getting every question wrong makes me feel productive. I stop thinking about the social ramifications of the test. so much for my sense of social justice. Or is math simply less socially mediated? I suppose it's not when it comes to gender. My boys in aftaschoo tended to feel great about themselves when it came to math, regardless of how nonstandard their English was, while the girls presumed they were getting the answers wrong even if they were performing flawlessly.