Captain's Log #23 - the Exam

12/14/17

The Exam

In graduate school I took an accounting class. Now, I’d taken 3 quarters of accounting as an undergraduate, what more is there? Quite a bit. Our instructor spoke ‘accounting’ to us in every class and wrote copious notes on the board that we dutifully copied into our binders. One day I turned to the woman next to me, who always wore the most stylish high heels, she and her husband worked for Anheuser-Busch, and said “I’ve read the chapter and done the homework but I didn’t see any of this, did you?” She shook her head. It was a tough class. At the end was the final exam. The strategy for taking any test is - first put your name on the paper! Then read it through and do the easy ones first. My entire 125-member graduating class was jammed into one large room, an arm’s length between each desk. The fear hormone was thick in the air. The tests were handed out, upside down; the instructions read to us, we were told to begin. I turned mine over and confidently wrote my name at the top. Then I read through the questions looking for the easy one while a classmate next to me, a young Japanese woman for whom English was a second language, began loudly tapping away on her calculator and furiously writing. I kept reading. (How am I going to approach this? Where can I begin to pick it apart?) None of this stuff was in the text book. Twenty minutes after beginning I flipped back to the first page. The only thing on my paper was my name.

I vamped for 2-1/2 hours trying my best, it was like groping around in the dark. At the end we staggered outside dumbfounded. One guy dramatically emptied his binder into a trash can and threw his book in, too. Apparently, and remarkably, I passed the exam, and course. Later, I overheard the instructor say that there weren’t any right answers, he wanted to see you justify your approach.

Last week I took another exam. I had been hounding this poor guy in the Hiring Department to let me take it, the Staff Services Analyst Transfer Exam. He kept telling me I didn’t qualify but couldn’t explain why. I was relentless. Finally, he told me that someone in Sacramento said I could, so I did. They had sent out a couple practice questions to give us a heads up of what to expect, easy stuff like how many yards of fencing would be needed to enclose a lot 50’ x 150’ (never mind that fencing is sold by the foot.) This test had none of that. The questions weren’t impossible but they required serious, sustained thought and analysis. You could tell that a lot of people worked long and hard to create each question. The state got their money’s worth from those consultants. I haven’t calculated standard deviation and variance for 24 years, I used to do it for fun, but I couldn’t quite remember – and didn’t have time to figure it out. Yep, it was a good test. I’m pretty sure I passed but there were a bunch of questions about calculating someone’s sick leave and vacation days under various scenarios, Greek to me but I’m willing to bet that the 7 other state employees with me aced those questions.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

A warm and Happy Holidays to you and your family.

Many blessings,

Karla, mom & k.j.

And as always, let me know if you’d like to be removed from this distribution list. This is my creative writing outlet, sometimes interesting, sometimes not so much.