Introduction by Eva Díaz

Dude…I’m so wasted
Eva Díaz

In Sean Penn’s portrayal of mellow, witless, very near atavistic
San Diego stoner Jeff Spicoli in the 1982 film Fast Times at
Ridgemont High, a throwaway shot of Spicoli in a U.S. history
class exam shows him penciling the bubbles of a standardized
test with the outline of a surfboard.
Hold up, was that actually in the movie? Did that really happen?
. . .
Frittered away at least the last half-hour posing increasingly
esoteric Google searches, trying badly, unsuccessfully, to
source a supporting image or any sort of passing reference
substantiating my clear and cogent memory of this scene.
Rabid fandom surrounds the movie, I (very) recently learned—
even cursory research indicates that a full-blown FTARH cult
can be identified, particularly among men of a certain age
with regard to a notorious red bikini scene. Virulence of
the FTARH following suggests that if not one aficionado has
so much as mentioned this shot in the fertile nooks of the
internet containing, for example 1) several competing,
completely transcribed scripts of the film, 2) detailed frameby-
frame, post facto storyboards, and 3) exhaustive plot,
dialogue, and character analyses; that perhaps this ostensibly
indelible incident in FTARH did not actually happen, or
at least not in FTARH. I must rent the movie and immediately
subject it to agitated, remote-controlled fast forward scrutiny.
. . .
The Spicoli scene was to be the hook for this essay on
Carla Herrera-Prats’s work on standardized testing because,
if it existed (even if only as a whimsy of my imagination), it
represents the superlative fuck you to the litany of monotonous
high school (and college) exams whereby we all crammed
(or not), then crouched over Scantron sheets clutching sweaty
number 2 pencils and performed our one/two/three hour
monkey work of plugging in numbered ovals. STOP working
and put down your pencils. You know the drill.
I was too young for FTARH to be a contemporaneous
reference (and hell, it still hasn’t been established whether
the scene cum mirage was even in the movie), but I never
was as intrepid as Spicoli in making pattern of my Scantron.
He is the doofy id of public education I was too busy repressing
in order to academically succeed, my only ticket out of that
rotten euphemism, the Inland Empire—San Bernardino,
California—“the junkyard of dreams,” in urbanist Mike Davis’s
wonderfully snarky estimation. My Scantron technique was
far more instrumental: if, for example, I had squandered test
time at the proctor’s one minute warning, I would hastily
fill the blank bed of remaining bubbles by consistently marking
a single letter in one vertical column. That way, I reasoned,
it was statistically possible to get a right answer or two out
of the mess.
Marxists may call that petty bourgeois striving. Spicoli,
in contrast, represents working class/slacker disinvestment
in what Louis Althusser once termed the repressive control
apparatus of education; Spicoli spurns the aspirational swill
that explains successes and failures as the result of individual
merit, when in reality the structural effects of standardized
testing have historically and consistently reproduced and legitimated
the existing class constitution of society. Paul Willis’s
classic 1977 sociological study Learning to Labor details how
working class mobility is discouraged externally and policed
internally by associating educational success with conformity
to dominant cultural values. Though working class or low-paying
service jobs are, in effect, as repetitive and automated as
the labor required to complete a standardized test, society’s
capitalist imperative privileges these jobs’ financial remuneration
above the intellectual labor of school. Public education
allows for a brief and fiery burst of youthful rebellion before the
hammer comes down and the real soul sucking tedium of wage
earning kicks in. The “fuck you” of the surfboard silhouette
encapsulates working class leveled ambition in all its pitiless
irony. The scoring machine can’t read the figure or comprehend
the intended middle finger, but at least one audience will,
the teacher/agent of the educational system. But low-grade
pestering of in the field representatives of the system hardly
gets you far, and perhaps that’s the point of valorizing it
as a louche insurrectionary gesture. The result for students
is of course wasted potential, not merely of their individual
acting out, but for a whole form of wasted class revolt.
In Herrera-Prats’s multi-part installation at Art in
General, she explores the development of mass testing and
optical grading technologies beginning in the 1920s through
their adoption as voter ballot counters in the 1970s to desktop
scanners today. Traveling through archives in Iowa, New Jersey,
and New York, she photographically documented, using a
4 by 5 inch camera and the scanners available at each of these
archives, the various prototype machines that effectuated the
robot work of scoring standardized tests that is the counterpart
to students’ ape-like task of completing them. Additionally,
Herrera-Prats probed deeper into these archives, recovering
correspondence between the machine’s main inventors—
Reynold B. Johnson, Henry Chauncey, and Everett Franklin
Lindquist—who viewed testing primarily as a zone of
entrepreneurial expansion while simultaneously promoting
the adoption of standardized testing as a meritocratic tool
guaranteeing equal opportunity. Though these men are
not household names, the alphabet soup of institutions
and assessment tests they founded or represented—IBM,
Educational Testing Service (ETS), Scholastic Aptitude
Test (SAT), and American College Testing (ACT)—are behemoths
in the field of higher education testing.
Automating intellectual labor came part and parcel
with the quantification of previously qualitative precincts of
thought. What emerges from Herrera-Prats’s research is the
fatuous manner in which these men believed that “efficient”
technologies would realize principles such as equality of
opportunity. However, in the case of fill-in-the-bubble tests
adept test takers master the process by internalizing codes
of translation—converting complicated possibilities into
one of a repetitious set of five discrete, lettered solutions.
In a slide projection accompanying the photos and scans
in the gallery, Herrera-Prats collages images of ovals of test
sheets marked with random arrangements; some are shown
with nearly all ovals filled in, others emerge with a hint
of pattern. She removes frames depicting the acting hand,
and the spectral labor results in a surfeit of information
as the legibility of the form to its intended recipient-reader,
the scoring machine, is effaced while the “drawing” becomes
more complete. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, “A drawing
that completely covered its background would cease to
be a drawing.” Here the binary and robotic qualities of the
test are exposed; each answer line has an on/off quality, with
only one possible field representing success. If more than
one oval per line is covered, that is, anything in excess
of the “on” oval in a single line, “background” takes over and
the drawn portion ceases to have semiotic meaning in the
machine’s registration process. As each successive oval
is completed beyond the test’s designated logic of the single
mark, the compulsive element of the exam is laid bare.
The slide show intermingles these seemingly haphazard
registrations with images of Scantrons inscribed to form
words such as “SAT,” “surf,” “flunk,” “smile,” and “TOEFL,”
(the latter is the acronym for the Test of English as a Foreign
Language, an exam all immigrants are required to pass before
entering higher education programs in the United States).
Again Jeff Spicoli bobs to the surface; Herrera-Prats’s work
demonstrates the process in which a test-taker’s pique leads
to a decision to “fuck up” the test and thereby tacitly accept
a future of failure. Her work charts the psychological effects
of Johnson, Chauncey, and Lindquist’s overemphasis on
standardized testing for educational placement and advancement;
the slide show conveys the sinking feeling we have when
we realize that the test matters more than any subjective or
qualitative assessment. As such, Herrera-Prats’s is a timely
intervention: one of historical recovery of a time in the early 20th
century when the wedge of standardized testing was insinuated
into the prospect of democratic access to mass education.
Thank you Jeremy Sigler for substantiating
this scene.

Benjamin, “Painting, or Signs and Marks,”
in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings,
eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1996), 83.

From Carla Herrera-Prats: Prep Materials