Friday, September 30, 2011

Getting Artistic with Standardized-Test Answer Sheets - Design - GOOD

Getting Artistic with Standardized-Test Answer Sheets - Design - GOOD:

The Testing Bubble

1 / 5

“It wasn't filling in the bubbles that bothered me about taking standardized tests. The first part where you fill in the area for your name and birthdate I really enjoyed actually. One of the first tests like that I took was in sixth grade on a hot, muggy afternoon in Philadelphia. I remember thinking about how at some point it would be over and I could go outside and play a sadistic game with a tennis ball we had invented. By the end I couldn't stay in that room a moment longer; it was like the place was about to implode. I probably got nailed in the back with the ball by Christian Garfield like 10 minutes later.”

Tucker Nichols is an artist based in San Francisco. His work has been shown in galleries and museums around the world.


The seventh-century Chinese emperor Yangdi is usually remembered as a megalomaniac who led his newly united nation into a series of debilitating wars. But Yangdi’s real legacy is his development of the world’s first standardized testing system. The idea was to locate China’s most talented rural scholars and bring them into the nascent empire’s civil service.

The history of education is filled with such earnest, progressive hopes for stan- dardized testing; Napoleon built the French bureaucracy in much the same way, and the SAT, for all its flaws, played an important role in opening up the Ivy League to Jews, Catholics, and public-school students.

The University of California and other elite colleges now acknowledge