I was arriving at a place to take a standardized test like the SAT.  I knew the test had two main sections: verbal/logical reasoning, and math.  It was a bit dim in the room; other students were there already and seated. I walked through for a bit, then tried to grab a pencil from a student who appeared to have several extras.  It was a black dude; the pencil seemed kind of thick and had a good eraser, and maybe the shaft was black; the dude wasn’t happy that I just took it without asking first.  It wasn’t surreptitiously taken– it felt like it was reasonable conduct in the situation — if someone had several extras, and another guy was short, I’d help him out without question, but that’s not how it went with this guy in this case.  Then I found a small adjacent, private room in the back, and the door seemed about to swing shut; I worried that I might get suspected of cheating, so I didn’t allow it to close. I went out, then found a different little room to then get started on the test. 

The new place I sat down had two other people in there as well, a guy and a girl.  I got started, but it became something pretty non-standard; it was basically an exercise in determining the relative quickness of three individual, somewhat random tasks: 1) had something to do with a pole like a fishing pole, with a three-foot line and some heavy object attached at the end, which was to be picked up and quickly placed down somewhere else, in a very particular spot. 2) Was physically jumping from one spot to another, maybe the distance of a kitchen appliance, such as a stove or dishwasher. And 3) was something like a bucket to be filled up and moved — but I can’t recall the exact details.  There was some element of a race with these tasks; each of us had to choose one, as a type of strategy. All of them could be accomplished quickly, obviously, but with how much precision to constitute a success on the first attempt? I seemed pretty confident of my chances with whichever one I went for; it was like the ‘test’ in this case was sorting all that out; but then could we actually execute it swiftly? Then it was like OK back to the paper portion of the exam — whereas in this ‘team’ exercise all of us were all together on the same problem, now it was back to independent work, but the other two people somehow became united and decided to pause for a break, or maybe quit.  I thought, Wait, isn’t this stuff timed? I wanted to get it done and be done, so I didn’t slip into lagging-out with them. Even if this was more like a practice test, like the PSAT, rather than one with a more long-term-critical score, I just got to it and even looked forward to the next section coming up, which I guessed would be math.

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