Tick Tock

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about high school. Unlike pretty much every aspect of life since, the experience of high school -- at least my experience of high school -- contained an element that now strikes me as extremely relevant to my life, though the bulk of the experience does not.

I refer, of course, to the timed test.

I don't know about you, but my high school involved a lot of timed tests. Freshman social studies, for example, began with an exercise that go the entire class to the point where, given a pencil, an A3 sheet of paper, and two minutes, we could all freehand and label a map of the world. Now granted, it didn't have to be perfect -- India was just a point-down equilateral triangle -- and I went to high school before the wall fell, so the upper right hand corner was just the big blob of the Soviet Union rather than all of the individual 'stans and whatnot, but it was still a timed test. And then, of course, there were all the state mandated "does your school suck?" tests, and eventually the pre-college alphabet soup -- PSAT, SAT, ACT, AP, etc. 

So, yeah, a lot of timed tests.

One of the more interesting parts of a timed test was always the question of what to do when you got the two minute warning. Do you a) continue plodding along, b) panic, and start randomly filling out bubbles, or c) take the zen approach and call it all good. 

In high school testing, there was an easy way to figure out the right choice. First, you ask the question, does this test matter? If the test is, say, a "does your school suck?", the answer is a definite no. And if the test doesn't matter, the answers don't matter, and stressing about the answers doesn't matter, so you go with the zen option and put your pencil down. But if the tests matters -- and will, say, determine if you get into college or whether you'll qualify for scholarships -- you've got to 

ask a follow-up question. Is there a penalty for wrong answers?

If there's no penalty go B and start filling out bubbles. What the hell? Any question you randomly get right is a point in your favor, so you may as well take a shot.

And if there is a penalty? Well now you've got to do some calculations. How much is a right answer worth? How much does a wrong answer harm you? How confident are you in the material and your chances at randomly guessing the right answer? Most of the time, even with a penalty for wrong answers, guessing still has a large enough payoff to make it worthwhile.

Of course, this only applies to the fill in the dots exams, where four or five minutes is plenty of time to complete an answer sheet. Essay tests, well, there you're back to zen. Nothing you can write in a panic in the last four minutes is going to have any impact on your score.

So the question is, what kind of test is life? 

Is it a test that matters? Should you run around in your last few months trying to make amends, or find god, or finish your projects, or whatever, or can you just walk away from it knowing that it was what it was, and nothing you can do in the time remaining will have much impact at all?

And if you decide it matters, what part of it matters? Where do you spend your limited number of remaining days? 

The evidence would suggest that I got pretty good at figuring out what to do with the last five minutes of a standardized test. I'm not sure I can say the same about figuring what to do with the last six months of a life. I don't miss much about high school, but I miss taking tests where I knew what was expected and how to perform.