The nightmare of standardized testing began not with a scream, but with an unjustifiably early arrival time. I showed up at the very crack of dawn, the prescribed hour, just to join a line that snaked through the pavilion. The “check-in” felt like airport security, a bureaucratic process where my identity was verified, cross-referenced, and marked off on a list of names printed on this ancient parchment.
Just when everyone filed in and began to check in to the testing application, the true horror was revealed. By some act of poor luck, the Chromebooks were rendered inert. Unable to connect to the Wi-Fi, everything stopped. The proctors shifted around the room, murmuring about what to do. The whole issue was more than just a wrench thrown into our carefully timed schedules. I sat, twitching with nervous energy, as an entire hour of my life dissolved due to the debacle.
Once the Chromebooks were somehow fixed, another challenge arose. Having chugged coffee to survive the early arrival time, I was now held prisoner by my own need for hydration. The primal urge stuck with me throughout the entire English section. My constant thinking was disrupted by crowds of rowdy students outside in the hallway and locker rooms. The deafening noise and chaos made any kind of chance at deciphering the nonsensical word-salad reading passages unimaginably futile.
When the ten-minute break finally arrived, piles of students burst out of the doors and flooded back into the Pavilion. The bathrooms became congested blobs of students, all in line to use the restroom. The line was so long that it felt like waiting in line for an amusement park ride during peak hours, or even worse: waiting for lunch in the cafeteria line. I was pushing and shoving through a zombie crowd in an attempt to leave (as if I even could…) and get back to the testing room.
The second half of the test was, if anything, more difficult than the first. The math section seemed to be just random symbols and numbers scattered around my screen. At that point, my brain was so fried by the hour of testing before that I just began to pick numbers that seemed to speak to me the most.
By the time the last question was answered and the timer at the top of the screen ran dry, the final challenge began. With the test now finished, everyone began to crowd towards the back to try and pluck their bag out of a sea of belongings. It was as if all order and law in the world had vanished. Now, exiting the room became as futile of an effort as shoving peanut M&Ms through a small funnel with a pin-sized hole. The crush of students caused me to be sandwiched at the epicenter of tangled backpack straps, forgotten lunch bags, and somehow every jabbing elbow in the room. Eventually, the pressure formed by the crowd ejected me back into the hallway, just in time to make it to my fourth-period class.
Now, all that remains is the agonizing, weeks-long wait that will confirm if the several-hour-long ordeal and descent into the purgatory that was high school standardized testing was worth the sacrifice. Either way, at least I lived to tell the tale…
