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LESSON TWO America’s Exam Anxiety Daniel Mcginn Inside Chicago’s top-ranked Whitney Young High School, the posters started appearing last December. “Let’s Be # 1!”“Give it 110%!”Usually this sort of rah-rah propaganda supports the basketball team, but this campaign by the principal had a different aim: urging kids to score high on the Illinois Goal Assessment Program , a standardized tests that students would take in February . Tests are nothing new to the kids at Whitney Young---they already take three other batteries of standardized exams each year. But for a group of high-achieving 11th graders, the pressure was just too much. These kids say real learning is being shoved aside as teachers focus on boosting test scores. Creative writing? Forget it. Instead, they say, teachers emphasize a boilerplate essay format that exam scorers prefer. So on Feb. 2, eight juniors purposely failed the -social-studies portion of the test. The next day, 10 failed the science test. Then they sent a letter to the principal: “We refuse to feed into this test-taking frenzy.” It’s a small sign of the growing anxiety among parents, teachers and kids over the proliferation of standardized tests. Fill-in-the-bubble exams have been part of classroom life for decades, but for most of their history they were no big deal. Scores were tucked in students’ folders; at most, they were used to segregate kids into higher-and lower-level classes. That’s changed dramatically in the last decade as reformers try to improve school quality by holding educators accountable for learning. Every state has a different testing scheme, but many state legislatures are writing new standards for what kids should learn in each grade and mandating tough new “high stakes” tests to gauge progress. Unlike such old-style standardized tests as the Iowas or Metropolitans, many of the new exams are linked to the curriculum and feature essays and short answers, no