The Iowa Test
In the 1950's, the Los Angeles Unified School District arranged for the Iowa Test to be given every four years to every student in kindergarten through the twelfth grade. The first time I remember taking it, I was enrolled in the eighth grade at Eagle Rock High School.
The Iowa test covered basic skills and took all day for either four or five consecutive days, as best as I can recall. Each day, students were given a booklet containing questions and multiple choice answers (a) through (e); and a separate page with empty circles for marking your answers with a number two pencil. By the time Wednesday rolled around, I and the budding juvenile delinquents I ate lunch with every day were looking for a way out.
Jim Handy and I began tossing around some ideas and came up with the following theory. The answer sheets were obviously scored by machine. Marking your answer was to be done by completely blackening in a single empty circle for each question. In addition, you could change an answer but you had to ensure that you made a complete erasure of your initial answer. These instructions led us to conclude that (1) the method used to score the answer sheet involved directing a beam of light through the circle for each of the correct answers on the sheet. If the light did not pass through the circle on the sheet representing the correct answer, it was because the circle had been blackened in, and the answer was scored as correct; (2), this technique would require the light beams to be sent through a template that directed light through only the circles for the correct answers; and (3), the test instructions warning us to thoroughly erase any changed circles was complete bullshit since the machine scoring mechanism checks on but a single circle for each answer.
Therefore, if you were to blacken in every circle (a, b, c, d and e) on the answer sheet, for each answer, you would receive a perfect score. The beauty of this was that we could fill out the answer sheet in a few minutes and then kick back for the rest of the day. The next test section was math skills and Handy and I proceeded to blacken in everything.
The results of the Iowa test didn't arrive until the beginning of our ninth grade year. It was during the first week of the new semester and I was sitting in my Algebra I class. Class had just started and the teacher, Dwayne Cressy, called for everyone's attention. He told the class that the Iowa test results would be distributed the next day in our homerooms. He then went on to say that someone in our Algebra class had done something quite noteworthy. He then said that I had scored higher in math skills than anyone in the Los Angeles School District. No one really gave a shit about this but Mr Cressy was really pumped and droned on for 5 minutes due to the significance of this accomplishment. My sheepishness must have come across as great humility. The next morning after we received our test results, I caught up with Handy in the snack line where we exchanged test scores. In the math section, I had a score of 119 and Handy had a zero. Perhaps there was some random spot checking that nailed Handy's answer sheet – we never found out what went wrong. Handy's parents, who were both high school principals, were really pissed. Of course, Handy had to claim that it was all my doing and I instantly became persona non grata.
Then things got very weird. I didn't like Algebra. I stopped doing the homework in the fourth or fifth week and I stopped paying attention during class mostly because I no longer understood what they were talking about. When it came time for the ten week mid-term test I looked over the test for a few minutes and then walked up to the front of the room and handed it to Mr. Cressy and told him I couldn't answer any of the questions – which was the God's honest truth. He took the test from me and placed it in his top desk drawer, then closed the drawer and said, "Don't worry about it. Go back to your seat." This little exchange was repeated for every test Mr Cressy gave during my 9th grade year. My final grade was a C. I didn't figure out what was going on at first, I just went with the flow. Eventually, it dawned on me that Mr. Cressy had no other choice. If he were to give me the grade of F (which I fully deserved), what would this say about his teaching skills? You mean to say that Mr, Cressy couldn't transfer basic Algebra to the student with the greatest math skills in the entire school district?