On Tuesday of this week, I went back to college.
Well, technically I did, but literally I'm not enrolled per se, I just paid them enough money for the registrar to say I'm a student and I get to go to one class. It's what they call a "graduate prep course" or for the layman, a crash course in figuring out whether you're cut out for grad school and if you remember your times tables.
I barely know my times tables past the 4's, and I stutter trying to spell out loud, though I'm not afraid to say I'm a pretty smart little girl. Nevertheless, I often get an itch to have someone explain fractions to me in a classroom setting, or sit in on a lecture about the history of brick building. I have sudden intense cravings to go back to school which last only so long for the university to cash my check, then I just stop showing up for class. This, however, is different, because I've fooled my psyche with my own clever game: the class is only 6 weeks long.
To start, aptitude tests were given, simple assessments of each student's current ability to fill in tiny squares with tiny pencils. Then an essay was required on an entirely random subject, and then a very unscientific IQ test was handed out that we were free to take home and bring back to the next class. I did well on the aptitude test, I'm certain I did well on the essay portion, but the IQ test? I'm thinking not so much.
One of the reasons I decided to take this class was because in late August, I discovered a setting on my phone called "games". This menu item stored within its pixelated bowels a plethora of distractions, everything from Monopoly to Tetris, to a "pro" version of Bejeweled I had never dreamed existed. At the moment I was discovering this electronic wonderland, I had just finished Malcom Gladwell's Blink, and had moved on to a similar book, Crimes Against Logic. This was after I read The Tipping Point, Status Anxiety, and five other very heady, philosophy-laden books in the course of a month. Crimes Against Logic creaked open before me, my phone rang, my fingers slipped and I hit a strange series of numbers.
Since that night, there is a good chance I haven't touched a book, let alone opened up to a page and set my eyes across the letters and lines. I've been playing Bejeweled Pro and Monopoly for hours a day. I spend nights curled up in bed, heart racing while my fingers dance across the keypad, my blood pressure soaring while I attempt to stack colored blocks atop each other like a hyperactive toddler doped up on sugar cereal at 6am. I decide to stop playing only when I cannot physically keep my eyes open any longer, only after I've relegated myself to one-hand playing while I rest my head on the other, covers pulled to my chin.
It's partially this obsession that made me want to rebuild my intelligence quotient with a class or two, and partially why I'm probably going to fail the ungraded, not-for-credit course. I brought home the IQ test and prepared myself for test taking. I cleared my desk of distraction, turned on some soothing music, sharpened my No. 2 pencil and opened the test with a deep breath.
First Question: Something about how something has this many things and something else has that many...I don't know, SKIP!
Next Question: SSASSASSSA is to 9919919991 as ASSASSASS is to...Ass is to what? Wait, ass is to sass? Ugh, I don't know, SKIP!
Some questions I new immediately, anything having to do with simple pattern recognition or "which comes next in this series of shapes" I was certain of the answer. The long paragraphs of logical discourse I could barely comprehend, so I picked something, anything, I just filled in the box.
At the next class we submitted our ScanTron sheets for scores, and when my answer sheet ran through the machine the tech stopped and looked at me. "HHmmm," she said. "Hold on a sec."
She looked over my scores and ran the answer sheet through again, and again said, "Hhmmm?" I asked her if it wasn't registering, perhaps my pencil was a No. 1 and not a No. 2?
She said, "No, it's working all right, but it's saying you only got a 60. Like, a score of 60."
An IQ of 60.
This was not correct. I know I'm dense at times but I am not that dense. I've been to college before, it's not like I don't know things. The instructor came over and looked at the score and back at me and asked, "Did you do this test yourself? It was a take home test, did you research any answers?"
"Of course not!" I said. "I was just trying to get it done!" Then I realized that was my problem, I'd just turned an IQ exam for graduate courses into a game of Bejeweled Pro, for no reason other than my addiction to video games had sequestered my subsconscious into a live version of Beat the Clock! Instead of taking my time and reading the questions and actually answering them, I just answered as quickly as possible. On a take home test.
I asked the instructor if I could take the test again, and coldly, as if it didn't matter, he said, "Well it really doesn't matter. It's just a test."
All I could think, standing there before my IQ of 60 in red print across my answer sheet, was that IT DOES MATTER, because I'm not retarded! I just like stacking colored blocks!!
