Student Forgets Name; Fails PSAT

New upper Zark Muckerberg was ready. He’d bought number 2 pencils and only had to give half of them away to his unprepared friends. His calculator was charged and he was pretty sure he knew which button turned it on. He had studied, revised, taken practice tests and slept a solid hour the night before. He had never felt so well rested!

The test proctor handed Zark an answer sheet. He took it and stared at the bubbles dotting the page. The proctor began to read.

“Please read the directions in field 1 of your answer sheet. Then fill in your full legal name, starting with your last name. If your last name is longer than the space available, fill in as many letters as will fit. Include spaces, hyphens, or apostrophes if these are part of your name.” (This is real; I looked up the script.)

Zark was shocked. He hadn’t expected the first question to be so hard! His name? He was pretty sure that topic had not been covered in his study guide. He would have to skip this problem and come back to it.

At the end of the test, Zark remained unable to answer field 1. His name. What was his name? He racked his brain, bit his pencil and gave his eraser a chew for good measure. Still no answer. At least there was no penalty for guessing. He filled in the bubbles to spell JOHN SNOW just as the proctor announced that the test was over. He hoped the other sections had gone better than this one.

Sadly, Muckerberg was not alone in his struggle to answer field 1. Many other test takers found this question to be one of the hardest.

“That question was tough,” said Upper Joe Mama. “Luckily, I remembered the definition of a name: A proper noun used to address me, usually with the phrase ‘You didn’t do the reading, did you?’ following it. That is when it came to me. The answer was Joe! The actual question I had to answer was, “Who’s Joe?”

The smartest of Zark’s classmates discovered that their name could be found in a very unlikely place: on their Lion Card. “I considered that section a strong suit for me, so I’m very glad I managed to answer it well,” They said. “However, I found the math section very challenging.”

Upon hearing of their classmate’s approach to the problem, Zark and his peers were skeptical.

“But how,” questioned Zark, “was I supposed to know that was MY name?”