"You have two hours to complete the test. No talking. Keep your eyes on your own tablet. This test is an accurate test that will determine your aptitude, as you know; all grades are final."
— Mr. Glass, The Thinning
They call this a test, but it's not just a test; it's THE test. It's the one thing that will judge every aspect of your character. It will tell your limits, your future, your fate, all spelled out in little black dots of number two pencil on a Scantron sheet. It's the Achievement Test That Will Decide Your Destiny.
In fiction (and in real life) Standardized Exams are Serious Business. Students will do anything to succeed. They might go to Cram School at the urging of their well-intentioned Education Mama. They might plot an elaborate scheme to cheat, but those who do likely Can't Get Away with Nuthin'. They might take (either with or without permission) their friend's ADHD medication to aid those all-night cram sessions. They might literally go insane. They might undergo stress to the point of doing things they'd never realize they'd do. And if you get saddled with a less-than-perfect score? Your only options are a job at the local Burger Fool or suicide.
Even the smartest kids in school might shudder at the thought of taking this test. There may be protests everywhere condemning how unfair it is and how a mere test score doesn't indicate everything about a person's character. The bane of many a scholar's existence. Most cases of this may use the Real Life SAT test, which many colleges have a minimum cutoff score to determine which students they will accept, though fictional and non-college-based exams can also apply.
Compare the Final Exam Finale, and the Final-Exam Boss. Contrast the Inept Aptitude Test, which will tell you that working at the Burger Fool would be your favorite career option, not your only one. Note that the Achievement Test of Destiny need not be a standardized exam, however in American school systems such is normally the case. See also The B Grade.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Fushigi Yuugi opens with Miaka attending Cram School and studying for the entrance exams to the prestigious Jonan High School. She envies her best friend and later mortal enemy Yui, because she knows that Yui would be able to pass that test in her sleep. Miaka doesn't even really want to go to Jonan; she's only trying to get in to please her mother, although the chance to attend High School with Yui does help sweeten the deal. In a twist, it's revealed that Miaka passed the test with flying colors, but decided to go to another school, and Yui failed the test for Jonan but got into the school Miaka decided to go to instead.
- Great Teacher Onizuka: Onizuka is required to get the highest score in the country on the National Scholastic Aptitude Test to keep his job. Fuyutsuki becomes a temporary Education Mama and his students try to come up with a way to help him cheat, but he ends up passing fair and square (after saving a girl from the yakuza and getting shot multiple times, which made him only have an hour left to take it).
- Love Hina has early chapters about the main characters trying to get into Tokyo University (and failing, for the most part). Once they make it, the plotlines become much more diverse.
Comic Books
- Given the main cast of Safe Havens were at one point in high school, the SATs are eventually taken. It's this trope for Dave more than most of the others because if his SAT score isn't high enough, he'd be ineligible for NCAA basketball, and a basketball scholarship is basically the only way he'll be able to attend the same university as his best friend Samantha, especially since he's dyslexic. He gets a high enough score to be eligible.
- It should be noted that technically Remora cheated. When she was still living as a mermaid someone dumped a SAT master sheet in the ocean and she memorized it, giving her a perfect score.
Films — Live-Action
- The film Accepted has this with one of its own characters. In addition to characters who aren't going to college because they goofed around and didn't get accepted anywhere (main character Bartleby), only picked one school and didn't get in (Rory, who only applied to Yale and nowhere else), the best example of this is Glen, who got a 0 on the SAT.
- The Perfect Score is about several teenagers who attempt to steal the answers to their upcoming SAT test, believing they'll be doomed if they fail.
- The YouTube Red original film The Thinning shows a dystopia, where the US has adopted a form of Population Control that executes children, who don't pass the annual test. Naturally, the rich and powerful use their influence to keep their own kids from ending up in the gas chamber, while throwing the poorer kids under the bus. The Governor of Texas even has his son's girlfriend, who he doesn't approve of, deliberately fail the test. It's not made better when the ending reveals that the kids who fail are used as slave labor instead of killed.
Literature
- Discworld: several examples...
- The Assassins' Guild final exam, presented in Pyramids as a parody of the British driving test.
- The Unseen University final exam plays a part in Moving Pictures. The pass mark is 88%; student wizard Victor Tugelbend has a generous allowance from his uncle for as long as he remains a student, provided he does not score less than 80%. So he takes great care to score exactly 84% and keeps this up year after year until the plot gets going...
- The exams set by the Agatean Empire in Interesting Times as an entry requirement for pretty well everything (a parody of the real-world Chinese exams noted in the "Real Life" section below), which stunt the country's technological development by ensuring that, for instance, engineers are selected on the basis of their ability to write irrelevant poems about lotus blossoms while requiring no actual engineering knowledge whatsoever.
- In Futuretrack Five, the E-Levels, which determine whether you get to be part of the Establishment, or get sent through the Wire live a nasty, brutish and short life among the underclass.
- The Hardy Boys: Zigzagged in the Digest book The Test Case. Stolen test answers are found in the Hardys' friend Tony's backpack while a shady tutoring agency starts advertising their services by hinting they have the answers to the test. About a dozen approached students refuse outright and tell the Hardys about the offer due to not seeing the test as anything to worry about. However, a Dumb Jock with bad grades and a girl desperate to get into a prestigious college are suspected of taking the offer to buy the exam answers. No one is cheating. The whole purpose of the theft is to frame the jock for cheating and get him banned from the hockey championship game. The culprit mistook Tony's bag for the jock's.
- Harry Potter has two such exams in the Hogwarts curriculum: the Ordinary Wizarding Levels (OWL) and the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test (NEWT). OWL determines whether or not one is qualified to continue an education in a given subject at the NEWT level, and NEWT is there to prove full competency in that subject. Different forms of cheating (including potentially lethal fraudulent intelligence potions such as doxy droppings) and self-correcting quills are passed around and banned for these tests. Mrs. Weasley gets very upset that her sons Fred and George got dismal OWL scores and dropped out before completing the NEWT, and Harry's also concerned because his chosen career path requires a NEWT in potions and he learns Professor Snape won't accept any NEWT students who didn't get anything less than top marks on the OWL in Order of the Phoenix (luckily, Snape's successor Professor Slughorn is happy to accept students who get Exceeds Expectations).
- Hive Mind (2016)'s futuristic society has the Lottery. You take it at 18, it lasts four days, and when you're done it tells you what job you'll have for the rest of your life. It is, however, designed to take personality and desires into account; only a few jobs are so essential that the Lottery will assign you to them against your wishes, and those come with great perks to keep the people in them happy. Most people seem reasonably happy with their results.
- Jack Blank features a PMAP: the Potential Mapping Test, which Ross Calhoun declares beyond reproach as it shows everything worthwhile about a child and decides their futures. Jack is less than excited when his test score amounts to "Toilet Brush Cleaner". Later on, Jonas Smart forces Jack and his other classmates in his superhero training program to take a 4-hour comprehensive, custom-made Total Personality Test that could single-handedly psychoanalyze anyone and had questions on every possible subject, complete with multiple rude questions implying Jack to be allied with the Rüstov. Smart is shocked when Jack's test comes back with the result "NEEDS MORE INPUT" and blames Jack for messing with the form.
- The Kingkiller Chronicle the University sets each student's tuition each term based on their performance in an oral exam. Since Kvothe is constantly broke and borrowing money just to stay in school, it becomes essential for him to do well. Indeed, he even cheats the first time by eavesdropping on over a dozen prior tests. Later, after he secures a wealthy patron and arranges a profit-splitting scheme with the bursar, these tension-filled tests become a joke.
- The last book in the Regarding The... series, Regarding the Bees, has the BEEs. They're tough, your teacher can't help you on them (either before or during the test), they'll follow you to college, and — starting the current school year — if a seventh grader fails them, they'll get sent back to fifth grade. They also apparently change each year — while it's implied that previous tests were more similar to standardized tests, this year's tests consist of a single essay question to frustrate cheaters.
- Way of Choices doubles down on this in the Grand Examination Arc. First, Chen must pass an entry exam into one of the six Ivy Schools of Cultivation, because only as a student can he participate in the Grand Examination. The forty-three highest tiered students will gain access to the Mausoleum of Books and priceless books, but only the absolute winner is allowed into the Lingxu Pavillion, where the rarest books are held that describe how to escape fate. Since changing his fate of young death is the entire point, the test really is life-or-death for Chen, but only because of circumstances beyond the test or its design.
- In Wind on Fire, hierarchy in the city of Aramanth is decided solely on exam results from the age of two. Your caste, marked by colour, influences everything from what job you can hold to where you're allowed to live.
Live-Action TV
- Eric on Boy Meets World was so worried about failing his SATs that he willingly made himself an indentured servant to his neighbor and teacher Mr. Feeny so Feeny would tell him the secrets to acing it. Feeny just strings him along, and reveals at the end that Eric should just get a good night's sleep and a good breakfast before taking it. Eric then says he no longer has to be Feeny's slave anymore, but Feeny adds that he only told two of the three secrets.
- An episode of Full House was about DJ freaking out about her SATs. The tester is her crabby neighbor, she gets every question wrong, she doesn't even get points for her name because "initials don't count", the only college she can get into Clown College, and even her Dumb Is Good boyfriend leaves her over the results. Subverted in the end. It was All Just a Dream and the actual test wasn't that big a deal.
- Malcolm in the Middle warned his little brother Dewey about acing a particular achievement test. Dewey had the same potential to be classified as a genius as Malcolm, but Malcolm didn't want Dewey to be cursed with the same fate of being a socially-outcast Krelboyne if he aced. Instead, he offered that their much dumber brother Reese take the test for Dewey, which landed Dewey in a class for children they treated as mentally slow.
- Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung: Like all government bureaucrat positions in Joseon, prospective historians must take an examination.
- On Suits Rachel's dream of going to Harvard Law School are derailed by the fact that she has a Heroic BSoD every time she tries to take the LSATs. In contrast, Mike's Photographic Memory allows him to get perfect scores on the test and his future as a lawyer was derailed by a comparatively insignificant exam that he aced. He sold the answers to that exam to another student and was expelled from college as a result. As the series begins Mike is making money taking the LSATs on behalf of students who cannot get into law school without cheating and Rachel is getting desperate enough to consider hiring him.
Roleplay
- Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues starts a week before final exams. Many students stay after school to cram in some studying — particularly those who attend Mr. Claremont's class, as he has a nasty subject of not actually teaching the subjects that appear in the test proper. After some of the kids receive superpowers, there's then a Time Skip to the exam proper, where multiple students try to use said powers to cheat their way through the exam. A fire alarm and bomb threat causes everyone to evacuate before the test can begin, though.
Video Games
- In Growing Up, your grade in the final exam in high school combined with how many skills in a certain subject you've mastered determines the job you'll get in the end. There are 42 possible careers to take.
Western Animation
- All Grown Up! featured a 5th grade standardized exam that was considered so horrible that even the teacher declared it scarred him for life. When the kids grill their older friend Chuckie, he confirms it was one of the worst experiences of his life. Phil believes that if he cracks under pressure, he'll become a mime. The stress from the test causes Tommy to steal items from all around the neighborhood in his sleep, and when police officers catch him, they sigh and sympathetically release him knowing he's another victim of the test.
- To put into context how horrific this test was supposed to be, nearly everyone who took it would say "Before that test, I didn't used to have a-" with it being some underlying condition. Their teacher was apparently a muscular athlete before he took that test, and the two cops who questioned Tommy mentioned one of them gained a stigmatism and the other needed a new hip after that test.
- Batman Beyond featured an episode where the cast had taken the GAT. When a student learns he "only" got 2391 out of 2400 and that someone else had attained a perfect score, he gets so upset that he is willing to delete all the test records to even the score. Having a disappointed Education Mama chastising him for not having the highest score didn't help.
- Big Mouth has the Academic Skills Survey (or as the show calls it "The ASSes"), a three day long standardized test that is repeatedly told to determine the kids' future. After the first day and seeing how hard it is, everyone gets so desperate, they start buying Adderall off of Jay to boost their chances.
- Parodied on Clone High with the PXJTs. Gandhi blows them off but is subtly prepared for them by a friendly, if creepy, trucker who may be a ghost. Abe helps Cleo study for them, ironically causing him to miss out on sleep and do poorly on the test himself.
- Danny Phantom:
- The Career Aptitude Test is used as the catalyst for the special The Ultimate Enemy. Mr Lancer says the CAT is the most important test anyone will ever take and that it will determine a student's entire future. Danny is especially stressed because his older sister got the highest grade ever, and his Bumbling Dad claimed he failed "and didn't turn out to be a cat". Sam and Tucker aren't worried, but Danny is, so when ghostly intervention puts the answers to the test in his hands, he is very tempted to cheat, only to find that cheating is a Butterfly of Doom that would indeed destroy his future in a way he didn't expect.
- An earlier episode, "Fanning The Flames", played this for laughs. Casper High invests in new Cramtastic equipment to prepare everyone for an upcoming standardized test. Because Ember's concert is that day, everyone has Ember on the mind and doesn't focus on studying. However, Sam and Danny forced their friend Tucker into the Cramtastic to get Ember off his mind earlier in the episode, and the yolk was on their face when they all failed and had to stay after school while Tucker got the perfect score and was excused.
- Fillmore! featured the SATTY 9 test. The resident genius Ingrid Third was greatly expected to succeed, and she was confident, but she didn't like taking the test because she knew there were kids who weren't great test takers but had plenty of other great qualities that couldn't be judged by a test. There were protesters trying to boycott the test. The plot of this episode started when all the answer sheets to the test were stolen, and either Ingrid and Fillmore had to find them or everyone would have to take the test over again because they had to be sent to the government to be graded.
- In the Mission Hill episode "Kevin Vs. the SAT", Kevin becomes obsessed with cracking the "code" of standardized tests to guarantee a perfect score and thus ensure admission to a top-ranked college (the alternative suggestion of extracurricular activities doesn't go over so well with him and his friends). He succeeds, but then destroys the only public copy of the key because allowing everyone to pass would mean jocks would get to follow their favorite nerd punching bags forever.
- Subverted in an episode of Recess, Miss Finster seems to treat the Arkansas Standardized Achievement Test like it's a big deal. However, Miss Grotke tells the kids that it's not for a grade, and the plot revolves around the threat of Gretchen being transferred to an upscale school for doing too well.
Real Life
- A lot of people feel this way when they have to gear up for any standardized test. The SAT, ACT, GMAT, MCAT, LSAT, you name it. The score one earns on this test is an indicator that determines whether or not a student can attend a college or career program of their choice. A growing body of evidence suggests that standardized tests are in fact a poor indicator of college performance and serve better to track parental income, effectively sorting out the wealthier from poorer students. If students who score higher on the test do better in life, it's because they in fact have better opportunities due to their better socioeconomic status.
- Since the Sui Dynasty, Imperial China had an extensive meritocratic bureaucracy.note In order to get a comfortable high-class position in the bureaucracy, one had to take an extremely long and time-consuming set of exams (also known as keju (科举)). These exams covered everything from philosophy to math to civil administration to military strategy to law to poetry (Confucians valued breadth over depth). Each candidate was strip searched and locked into a special isolation room for the duration of the three day long test in order to prevent them from cheating. These tests were serious business. People were known to die from stress while writing the test. And although the exams were in theory open to anyone in the nation, only the sons of the very rich could afford to be tutored (over many years) in the sheer breadth of knowledge that the exam demanded.
- Modern China isn't much better. The Gaokao is a nationwide standardized test for third-year high-school students (high school lasts for three years in China) that determines which university they're assigned to, or at all, which can pretty much determine their future position in life.
- Neither does Hong Kong have any better. The Diploma of Secondary Education (DSEs) is a city-wide standardized test for Secondary 6 (12th Grade) students that also determines the university and degree programmes the student may get into. While some students may opt to take other public exam paths such as the A-levels or the International Baccalaureate (IB), they tend to be in the minority, and the DSEs themselves are often likened to a "battlefield" and are considered "the most important exam in one's lifetime", while the intensive preparation leading up to them in senior secondary school (10th to 12th Grade) are colloquially referred to as "preparing for battle/war" (備戰, beihjin). As a result of the intensive education system, the Secondary 3 finals are also this to a lesser extent, as their results often determine which electives a student would take in senior secondary and thus which degree programmes they would be able to qualify for, which causes them to be sometimes called "the second most important exam in one's lifetime".
- The American education system has been making scannable multiple-choice standardized tests (Scantron being the best-known supplier) mandatory in many states for nearly two decades now, with many states now eliminating the essay and fill-in-the-blank portions since those can not be machine-graded but require paying test graders. However, not only is this method unpopular with students, it's also unpopular with many teachers and other researchers into learning and education. In part, teachers often feel that they can't teach properly when confined to a curriculum of what is on the test and nothing else. However, the greatest objection is that such standardized exams can test only memorization, which means that class time spent on actually understanding and competently utilizing the material has no impact whatsoever on test scores — and therefore such understanding is actively discouraged by many school administrators since school funding is determined by these test scores and not by whether the students actually learn anything.
- Then there are certain professions which require you to pass a single test to determine if you are even allowed to work in that field. For example, in most common law countries (the U.K., the US, Canada, etc.), prospective lawyers need to pass the bar exam, a single test covering a wide (and often partially secret) list of legal subjects. It does not matter how well/poorly one did in law school itself, if you cannot pass the bar exam, you cannot get a license to practice law.
- Other countries have a version of this for secondary education with standardized tests determining whether students will enter a school that will prepare them for university or be shunted into an apprenticeship or vocational school.
- Britain, for example, used to have the Eleven-Plus which determined whether children would attend grammar schools or less academically rigorous secondary moderns. It was largely phased out in the 1960s and 1970s when comprehensive schools were introduced, although traces remain (those grammar schools that still exist note have entrance exams, although they exist alongside comps).
- In Germany/Austria/Switzerland and the Central and Eastern European countries that based their educational systems on the old German/Prussian/Austrian ones, the Abitur (Germany) or Matura (everywhere else) is this: a comprehensive multi-part test that almost always encompasses a mother-tongue and literature exam, a maths exam and an elective (some countries specify that both an exam from a social science and a natural science course have to be taken besides the two compulsories). Additionally, a foreign language exam (mostly English) may be either compulsory or an elective. Vocational schools also have an all-encompassing exam that covers everything from the area of work the students specialised in. For desired universities, like medicine and various engineering courses, where the competition is stiff, the exam is indeed a make-it-or-break-it for future freshmen — a subpar performance may mean that the student gets enrolled in an completely unwanted field.
