Powder Witch & Company

So this college has all new students take a placement test before allowing them to schedule classes. Theres a claim on their website that graduates (like me) might not be required to, but when I asked about that they effectively told me that since I'd already signed up, I had to take the test.

And fair enough, I guess. My college journey has been a little chaotic. I went straight after highschool, dropped out, then went back and finished my bachelors. But that was a few years ago.

[Edit: I almost certainly didn't need to take this placement, because all of it was stuff covered by my college transcripts. Which they still, as of January, haven't finished processing.]

The test was broken into three categories: Reading Comprehension, General Math (think basic algebra and geometry), and Algebra (the complicated stuff). A pretty simple "how effective was your high school?" test.

Reading was as easy as expected, I am at least a semi-professional writer after all. General Math took a bit more focus, as a lot of it was stuff I hadn't used since high school, but I came out the other end just fine. Algebra turned out to be the problem.

Now, when I was going through school originally, I remember struggling with the kinds of questions this test put forth. Dispite that, I managed to get through those classes with pretty decent grades, overall. But it's been over a decade since then, and just looking over the practice test was a slap in the face of how much I had forgotten in that time.

Going over the practice test was enough to remind me most of how those problems worked, but not enough to get the right answer consistantly. Short answer, even when I had the right idea for an answer, I forgot how to implement negatives correctly. Or I'd forget how graphing formulas worked. Or I'd confuse it with how differentials in calculus worked, because I'd thought for sure that that was part of the test and had been brushing up in the few weeks before.

The algebra section was also the only one without an explanation for how its scoring system worked, so I'm not even sure how I did. On top of that, because of some delays on both ends, I only got to take the test the day before Thanksgiving. Staff are out till the folowing Monday, and at time of writing I still don't know if I can proceed and maybe sign up for my classes.

Beyond all of that, the only other issue I hit was the test administrator, Examify. It only works on Win10 or later (so lucky me I upgraded my set up shortly before this), and it refuses to work on anything other than Chrome. Say what you will about Chrome, but it's riddled with spyware and Google is attempting to prevent and deny user alterations to that as fast as they can manage for "security purposes."

And just for good measure, Examify requires an active camera, and microphone, and screen sharing, so that they can spy on everything you do throughout the test. This is intended as an anticheating measure, sure, but it's still an invasion of my and the other test taker's privacy.