We hung the most dimwitted essays on the wall

We did not have benefits and rarely got 40 hours a week. We were hired for only one school district's test at a time, meaning possible unemployment was never more than three weeks away. And we could get dropped, at any time during a test, for any reason. Every day, someone was. But if we came back for more the next summer, we'd get a 25-cent raise.

The state of Pennsylvania paid the Minnesota-based test-scoring company I worked for $12 million to score a two-question essay test. Here's what that money bought: Two hundred or so $6-an-hour test scorers for a couple of weeks; photocopying fees to give us all copies of the tests on pink-and-blue paper; overhead costs on a water-damaged building with no air-conditioning that had recently been abandoned by the telephone company. Oh yes, and lawyers' fees, when the test turned out to be mis-scored.

Machines scored the fill-in-the-blanks tests; we scored the essay questions. We scored third graders from Iowa in the morning and 12th graders from South Carolina after lunch. Each day, I read hundreds of tests. Each question got no more than 30 seconds of my attention, although some took less -- kids routinely left whole tests or questions blank. I tried not to think about the panic or sense of futility that must have overwhelmed these kids. Fortunately for us, there were always five hilarious morons for every sad kid stricken with mute panic. If a child was particularly funny, or especially dim, his or her test was posted in the hallway for entertainment. There were hundreds of them, and we'd file along the hall and hoot over them during lunch.

Each test was a little different. Kids would either answer questions based on a short, boring reading, to test for comprehension, or they'd get a free-write question that would test writing skills and ability to answer simple questions like "Describe the best gift you ever got."

Brains wear out after reading hundreds of identical descriptions of Nintendo games: They really rocked, they were really cool, they were exactly what I'd always dreamed about in my most wildest dream I'd ever had about the best Christmas of my whole life, so far. That was about all anyone had to say about Nintendo, and very few kids seemed to get anything better or anything different than that. Maybe once a week I'd get a puppy or a bike. We scorers would start out each fresh test eager to give each kid the best score they could reasonably expect. But after a few hours or days or weeks, we'd sleepwalk and skim and assign scores sort of randomly. It was hard not to.

We'd look forward to lunch, when we could go outside and breathe fresh air and lie spread-eagle on the lawn in good weather. After lunch, we'd look forward to suicide threats. We each had a yellow stack of Post-it notes, which we were to apply to essays that hinted at abuse or suicide. It was thought that the anonymity of the test would allow troubled kids to admit to us what they could not tell their friends, teachers or parents. When we found such a kid, it was like finding a prize under a Coke bottle top. The other scorers at our tables would light up, and we'd pass the essay around until a manager caught us.

In late July, I was assigned to score the Alabama test. I sailed into my half-hour training and prep session without concern. But something was a little different about this test. I can't remember what it was now, but I raised my hand to ask the trainer a question. She looked at me, and then she snapped. She ripped the Pucci scarf off of her neck and began to wave it at me, berating me for "challenging" her, and causing me and the other trainees to inch our chairs away from her in confused shock. Her curly hair worked itself into Medusa-like formations as her head waggled. This was a bona fide nervous breakdown, and it ended only when she fired me.

Her managers were sympathetic to me, and my co-trainees backed me up -- I'd done nothing wrong. But all the other tests were filled, and the work was dwindling for the summer. They didn't really need me -- in fact, they were looking for ways to weed out a few more scorers, so I was sent home. And that was OK. I have never been so happy to leave a job, and I'd worked at McDonald's in high school and washed dishes in the cafeteria in college.

A month after I was fired, I took the Graduate Record Exam. I'd decided to go to graduate school, mostly to stave off my student loans. When I went to the restroom to pee before the test started, I could hear a woman crying in the stall next to me. On the side, another was vomiting. I suddenly understood how scary and nerve-wracking testing can be.

We all understood that the kids behind the tests were real, and we never intentionally tried to screw them. But discomfort, resentment and tedium no doubt caused our minds to wander and our scores to get sloppy. Subtle pressure from our co-workers, or open pressure from our managers, caused us to rush through the tests. We were underpaid and poorly trained and none of us was qualified to be scoring those kids.

I want to say I never let the clock or the weather or the monotony of reading the same uninspired responses hundreds of times get in the way of being able to give each child the best score possible. I want to say I thought about the kids, cared about each child behind each pink-and-blue test packet and gave them the most fair and generous score possible. And most of the time, I did.

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