Here’s a movie I’m glad I don’t have to watch twice. It’s hardly a movie about school at all. It’s not even a movie mostly about testing. No, the score in the title isn’t just the 1600 on the SAT but the hoped-for result of the heist that takes up most of the plot. The six New Jersey high schoolers are motivated to break into the headquarters of ETS so they can get a copy of the SAT before they need to retake it again. Each has their own reason for wanting to do well on the test. More accurately, each of them needs to do well to get into the college of their choice: Cornell, Maryland, St. John’s, and Brown. Yes, that means two of the characters have no post-secondary ambitions. Scarlett Johannson’s Francesca and Leonardo Nam’s Roy are just along for the ride. The latter because he accidentally overheard friends Kyle and Matty detailing their plan in what they thought was an empty school bathroom. The former is involved because her dad owns the building where ETS has its offices, so she can help the crew get into the facility itself.
The details of the plot are less germane to my discussion of what this film has to say about teaching and learning. From the start, Roy’s obnoxious voiceover tells us that SAT may stand for “suck ass test” because it’s a source of stress for so many students. It’s the task that stands between hundreds of thousands of high schoolers and their futures and it reduces them to numbers. OK, nothing revolutionary in this commentary. Nothing wrong either. We soon see Kyle and Matty together at work in a package-sorting facility where Kyle explains to Matty (and us) the history of the meaning of the letters in SAT. It was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, and now the three letters mean nothing. Again, correct, but not very insightful.
It’s at this point that the other movie I watched last week provided a helpful context for these teenage testing frustrations. In Valerie Veatch’s recent documentary Ghost in the Machine, the history of measuring intelligence and its close relationship to eugenics are explored in the context of programming generative artificial intelligence systems. When advocates for these systems refer to metrics such as “Ph.D. level intelligence” or even intelligence as a quantity, they are taking for faith the idea that tests such as the SAT are valid measurements. If your only idea of what makes someone intelligent is how well they can do on a multiple-choice test, you are going to have a skewed idea of what it means to learn, let alone to live. I know I’m asking too much for a 2004 movie by MTV Films to go into an exegesis of the eugenicist underpinnings of so much of schooling in the United States. What would be cool is an update of The Perfect Score that explores these ideas and the purpose of education itself.
But I digress.
Kyle proves to be fairly critical of the political economy of the SAT when he says “the College Board made millions last year” in fees from students taking the test. He seems to be angry that someone is making money from the process and that he didn’t think of that idea first. He appears less annoyed about what that means for access to post-secondary education for families that are facing financial hardship. He’s also frustrated that his mom, a first-grade teacher, tells him that the kids in her class have to learn to “bubble in” on worksheets rather than spend time reading. Again, there’s the beginning of what could be a fruitful critique of what counts as literacy learning in the early elementary years. I doubt anyone involved in this film is familiar with Bond and Dykstra’s First-Grade Studies.
Additional critiques of the test appear courtesy of Erika Christensen’s Emma and then-NBA player Darius Miles’ Desmond. When we first see these two interact, he asks her for help studying. She mentions to him the concept of stereotype vulnerability as a possible explanation for why he may be underperforming on the test. This comment makes her reconsider her initial doubts about helping him. Shortly after, there is a scene where each conspirer explains their motivation for taking part in the heist, Desmond says “I’m here because the SAT is racist.” He elaborates, “Who made the test? Rich white guys. Who scored the highest on the test?” Roy’s witty reply is about another stereotype about who is successful on the test. Deflating Desmond’s criticism with a joke prevents this line of inquiry from going further. Look, I know it wouldn’t be an interesting movie if they sat and had a discussion about why standardized tests exist, but I also don’t think making a heist movie about stealing test answers was super interesting to begin with!
At least they all seem to learn that cheating is not going to get them what they want. Not because of some kind of moral awakening but because they realize they can get a decent score instead of a perfect score on their SAT and still go on living. The “right school” is the one you get into, even if it’s not your top choice. Quite a wholesome message from a movie with crude sexual stereotypes and trite stoner jokes. I see no reason to watch this again, but I’m glad I saw it at least once. If nothing else, the real-life circumstances of Darius Miles (prep-to-pro basketball star who signed a letter of intent with St. John's) and Mike Jarvis (the actual St. John’s coach who makes a cameo and was fired from that job a month before the movie came out) give the events of the movie weightier implications. There is too much riding on the results of this test, especially for those whose futures or careers depend on teenagers being successful at bubbling in.
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