Out of Our Hands

This past Saturday evening, scores of juniors breathed immense sighs of relief. After spending seven hours using up more No. 2 pencils than several forests and a graphite mine could supply on a geologic time scale, they had completed what for some will be the most significant academic trial of their college careers: the MCAT.

Within the next five or six years, many of us, if not most, will subject ourselves to an alphabet soup of similar ordeals of widely varying intensity, including the LSAT, the GMAT and the GRE. But as they return from their pilgrimages to test sites at U. Mass-Boston or MIT, most test-taking students refuse to evaluate their performance themselves. As we hail the conquering heroes, they merely say, "It's over."

These tests are very high-schoolish, but not for the reasons most people think. True, the material they examine is occasionally elementary and often irrelevant, and the skill of answering these questions under such tight time pressure is really only useful to a small fraction of those taking all the various tests. True, the tests are mostly multiple choice, can be mastered through expensive test-prep courses and probably don't reflect anything about one's potential performance in graduate school.

But the most high-schoolish part of the process is actually the part that's happening right now, after the test is over. After days, weeks or months of preparing, cramming and mastering the techniques for answering various questions, those who took the test are now no longer responsible for the evaluation of their performance. It is, as many a junior has shouted for joy, out of their hands.

By the time we reach our very last graduation, most of us will have spent more than 20 percent of our lives in school. The number of tests we will have taken will be in the hundreds. The pages of essays or problem set solutions we have produced will be measurable in reams. The number of resumes or transcripts we will have sent out will suffice to nauseate us. For nearly 20 years, or possibly even more if we continue on to graduate school (as test-takers hope to do), we will have been judged by our words and by our numbers. But more than anything else, we have been judged by other people, and that is the tremendous handicap school has given us. After spending a quarter of our lives waiting for other people to evaluate us, we risk losing the ability to evaluate ourselves.

Medical researchers who passed the MCAT 30 years ago have documented this disorder as the "This Paper Sucks" Syndrome. Whenever an undergraduate finds him- or herself faced with a paper assigned for a class, he or she will eventually sit down, do a little research or a bit of critical thinking, and hammer it out. (This syndrome does not apply to those who plagiarize their academic work; for them, self-worth is a far more serious problem.) Sometimes the student is inspired by the topic to do a good job; other times, whether because of a lack of interest or a lack of time, the paper turns out worse than the student could have made it. But those who suffer from This Paper Sucks will always tell anyone who asks about their progress on the assignment that their paper--you guessed it--sucks. And after a while, they start believing it themselves.

This, of course, is a defense mechanism. If you tell everyone you aren't pleased with your own work and still receive a good grade the following week, you not only get to enjoy the fact that someone else has validated your worth, but you also have the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised. If you say you did a poor job on your paper and then receive a corresponding grade, you still "win," because you can then tell yourself that you were right. As long as the final determination of your paper's worth is out of your hands, you are safe: your evaluation of your own abilities doesn't matter.

And after 20-plus years of school, those of us who suffer from the syndrome might find it genuinely impossible to distinguish whether we are really any good or not at what we do. Unless someone else hands over the good grade or the pay-raise or the thumbs up, we cannot honestly evaluate ourselves. After years of MCAT-like experiences, that ability is now, as the saying goes, out of our hands.

For a limited number of instances in adult life, the This Paper Sucks syndrome may still be useful to its sufferers. After grades become a thing of the past, many people start using money as a litmus test for whether they have succeeded, as companies and even universities lure the "best of the best" with higher and higher salaries. Twenty years from now, perhaps we will find ourselves being evaluated for promotions or being ranked by our students or by our professional peers. But no test will await us on our first, fifth or tenth wedding anniversaries to determine whether our marriages until that point have been excellent, good or merely satisfactory. The cost of our best friend's birthday gift to us is no gauge of how well we have played our part as a friend. Our children will not assign their love for us to a standard deviation curved around a "B." Will other people judge our performance as a parent, friend or spouse? Without a doubt. But unlike the admissions committees at various schools of medicine, their opinions of us need not affect our lives. No one will be handing out scores anymore.

We could argue for years about whether standardized tests, or any kind of tests, are a worth-while way to judge us. But regardless of how useful these evaluations might be for their purposes, they contribute to our reliance on other people for our own self-esteem.

The only way to alleviate this damage is to practice being accurate judges of our own abilities again, deciding how well we did on that paper without changing our minds after we get it back with a grade. We have to know when we've done a good job without relying on someone else to validate us. If we don't know how to do that, we're in trouble; ultimately, we are the only ones who will care.

In June, MCAT scores will be back in the hands of those who took the test last weekend. When they open the envelope from the test agency, these students will hopefully remember that they are just as good at what they do now as they were before they found out their scores. Not everyone who took the MCAT this past Saturday will be accepted to Harvard Medical School. Some might even decide that medicine is not for them. But if we are brave enough to claim that these tests don't matter, we must be brave enough to make that claim for the right reason. When school is finally over for good, the score we give ourselves is always in our own hands.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.