Testing, one, two, three

If you’re looking for a marker for middle age, or at least a cynical quip, let me offer this one: It’s when you realize that most conversations are merely reincarnations of previous ones. So here’s one topic that’s always resurfacing around the homestead: tests. Every year, another order of kith and kin is facing a gauntlet of tests such as PSATs, SATs, college midterms and finals, military aptitude tests, graduate school admission tests, licensing exams, and so on.

The world isn’t getting any less competitive. From what I’ve seen, unless you were born with a juicy trust fund, being a good test-taker can very well make the difference between getting somewhere or staying stuck.

But not everybody embraces test-taking as a tool for opportunity. Some people loathe taking written exams. Other people, by contrast, relish the competitive nature of matching wits. I think these are polarized camps and I haven’t seen much, if any, middle ground.

At the big and obvious end of things, many parents, fingers a-waggin’, have pointed out that if you want to write the magic letters after your name (such as M.D., C.P.A., etc.) you’ll be taking dozens (if not hundreds, all things considered) of tests along those paths. In fact, once you boil off the fur and fat, most high-level professional credentials are basically evidence of test-passing, usually up to and including a licensing exam.

There’s a lot of discussion these days about the costs vs. benefits of going to college, but I’m not opening that can of worms here. It’s not my fight one way or the other.

But college isn’t where all the test action is. We can look at other things. I’ll note a few industries that can also involve written exams, and these have nothing to do with college, or at least nothing directly.

Here’s one: financial services. This isn’t just for Wall Street hotshots. There are a lot of normal everyday people working on Main Street who had to pass certification exams in fields such as stock sales, bond sales, futures and options sales, certain types of insurance sales, investment advising, and so on.

This realm can be a step up the ladder for people who start with pretty humble jobs. I’ve known people who started off as bank tellers, for example, who became investment advisors or “securities representatives” (think stock broker).

Maintaining our focus on Main Street, one very common job is real estate sales. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, “Real estate brokers and sales agents held about 422,000 jobs in 2012. About 52 percent were self-employed.”

I don’t know how this shakes out in the CNMI since I never shopped for real estate here, but in every case I know of stateside, real estate agents and brokers had to pass licensing exams.

This is one broad field. There’s seemingly something for everybody in real estate. I’ve seen people in hot markets become millionaires selling houses, I’ve seen people working merely part-time who were happy to sell just a few houses a year, I’ve seen wheeler-dealer types doing deals in commercial “1031” tax-deferral exchanges, and most people I’ve known who owned their own jets were involved, somehow, in real estate.

Well, speaking of jets, we’ll take a look at the airport. And here we’ll notice that many workers have to take licensing exams. A few that come to mind are pilots, flight engineers, aircraft dispatchers, and various types of technicians. Come to think of it, I took my flight engineer exam at a test center on Saipan, so maybe this makes up for my lack of participation in the real estate scene.

Meanwhile, as many Saipan residents know, there’s a test known as the ASVAB, which stands for Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. This is the test to screen candidates for military enlistment.

There is a healthy industry in test-preparation courses for all the realms I’m mentioned, and the home-study method is alive and well.

As you can see, taking tests isn’t the exclusive domain of ivory towers, but is a big part of normal life, too. Some topics never die. This is one of them.