During winter break in December 2012, about twenty-five students crammed into one student’s dimly lit living room for a general Portland Student Union meeting. We shared couches, chairs, and sat on the floor in order to squeeze everyone in. We called our friends to make sure all schools with unions had representation. We were to discuss our goals as a union, which would become our Five-Point Program. Everyone wanted one of our points to be about deemphasizing standardized testing—but to what extent was the question. A lively debate broke out. We discussed how testing is becoming higher-stakes and how it’s used as a means of evaluation, students shared stories about how testing takes time away from actual learning and is irrelevant to many of our classes, and we discussed alternatives to both testing and evaluation. The solution became the area of disagreement. The discussion escalated, voices rose, and students even left the room in frustration. There was one suggestion that did receive a lot of support: “Why don’t we refuse to take our tests?”
