Test Takers

One of my concerns with the world we live in is kids are growing up being trained as test takers and not thinkers. They are being groomed to come up with the right answers, but don’t learn to answer – or even ask – the right questions. What happens to kids when they graduate college and find out the most important questions in life don’t have a “right” answer.

How will they deal with failure when the are faced with only “bad” choices and try to come up with a solution when all the paths ahead seem to be “wrong”? What’s the right answer when they are laden with student loans and faced with taking a job that will pay the bills or one that fits their passion and desired direction in life? There are no “right answers” when life hits you hard and you lose a spouse, lose a child, go through a major health crisis or even lose a job.

Life isn’t a multiple-choice test in which the answer justifies the means. Sometimes how you address a problem is more important than the answer you come up with. I had a calculus professor in college who would sometimes give us problems that didn’t have a solution. He would let us take them home on a Friday and allow the quiz to ruin the whole weekend before letting us know the equation wasn’t solvable. At first, I thought he did this just because he hated students and enjoyed watching us suffer (the latter was partially true). But I realized he was exposing the way in which we addressed the problem. He wanted to see – and wanted us to see – how we processed a difficult assignment. He was more interested in how we solved a problem than the answer we came up with.

I also had a chemistry professor who would purposely give an exam with too many questions. He would prepare the tests so that no student would have time to solve all the problems. We would have to triage the questions to determine which ones warranted the best use of our remaining time. Some of these problems would have an equation that might take an entire page to solve, and he wanted to know if we could quickly work through the questions and pick out which problems would give us the best return on our time and focus all our energy and attention on those. As a very driven and motivated student, it was very strange turning in a test with only seven of ten questions answered. That really messed with my mind.

These two professors had an incredible impact on my life. Not just on my time in college, but on my life. They didn’t push me to become a better test taker. They challenged me to be a better thinker, to be a better problem solver. They taught me to seek the right question before trying to find the right answer. They taught me how to learn more efficiently. They even taught me how to fail honorably.

The tests of life don’t require the right answer. They require the right processes, the right thinking, the right attitude, the right questions, and they require you to learn when things go wrong. And sometimes, they require you to fail honorably.