It came out a long time ago, but I have always been interested in seeing The Perfect Score because of my own tortured history with the SAT. I grew up in a family where the SAT was considered an objective and accurate measure of a person’s intelligence and of their likely level of success in life, so as you might imagine there was much anguish and despair in my family when my score of 1050 confirmed me as an “ignoramus,” destined to achieve nothing – it was for them akin to finding out I had Down Syndrome, or something like that.  Luckily, I got to go to a special school (Syracuse University) where idiots like me can get what they “don’t deserve” (an education.) Twenty years later whether or not I qualify as “smart” or “successful” depends on how you measure those things, but I have always felt that the SAT failed to measure anything of importance in my intellectual makeup, and that it got my scholastic potential quite wrong. I’m just lucky I was born in America, because standardized testing is taken much more seriously in other countries – if I lived in England, an imaginative dreamer like me would have been irrevocably slotted to become a ditch-digger by the fourth grade.

The Perfect Score explores the function and validity of the SAT in a rather subversive way, and its attitude is spot on. The SAT has been allowed by colleges to become a filtering system for American youth. The company that manufactures it, the Education Testing Service (ETS,) is a private non-profit corporation that makes a shit load of money. “Non-profit” just means they don’t have to pay taxes – in other words, Americans pay double to have their kids filtered by these ridiculous tests. The film is quite correct when it points out that officially “SAT” no longer stands for “scholastic aptitude,” because ETS can’t substantiate that claim in any way. So the question immediately presents itself: what the fuck does this test actually measure, besides a person’s capacity for obedience in performing tedious little tasks?

The kids in the film see all this, perhaps a bit too clearly to be realistic, and are tormented by the unfairness of it all. They even see their attempt to steal the answers as a “victimless crime”  (like marijuana possession.) They all have different reasons for wanting to subvert this nonsense – the smart girl who freezes during the test because her parents are forcing her to be an Ivy League drone and she’s fucked up about it, the kid who is convinced he must go to Cornell to become an architect (in the end he goes to Syracuse, which itself has a pretty decent Architecture school, and definitely has far fewer suicides,) the basketball player who calls the SAT on racism, and so on. It would have been even better if they had included a kid who represented the issue of alternate kinds of intelligence, because let’s face it: some people’s brains are just not optimized to answer contrived little questions, one after the other, at break-neck speed, for hours and hours at a time. I’m one of these people, and I can report that nothing I met in college, graduate school, or my professional career needed this ridiculous “skill” in any way.

I didn’t overly care for the moralistic sub-plot that gradually crept into the film, which basically conveyed the sentiment that even if no one gets hurt and nobody knows that they stole the answers to the SAT, it’s still a “crime.” The kids agree that if they were stopped at a red light in the middle of the Kansas plains at 3:00 am with no one around for hundreds of miles, they would not run the red light for this reason. The problem with this kind of thinking is that while we average people are so proud of our moral rectitude, the very people we admire, look up to, and aspire to be – ultra-rich corporate CEO’s, financial “wizards”, and captains of industry – are breaking laws with alacrity and reaming us up the ass every chance they get, with the help of our elected officials, who they basically own and tell what to do. (If this idea surprises you, watch Inside Job.) I just think individual morality is over-stressed in this society, while collective morality and our responsibility to create a moral and good society is not emphasized enough. In fact, the latter tends to be obscured and de-valued by our obsession with the former, often culminating in absurdly disempowered, holier-than-thou posturing (“Wall Street CEO’s can do whatever they want; what’s important is that I know I would never run a red light in Kansas!”)

Anyway, I just wish The Perfect Score had been more serious – the film is very light and juvenile, and the acting pretty uneven, but it still works. I actually found the crazy Asian character to be rather funny. In general, I really like MTV movies. They seem to make a lot of good films, two of the best being Hustle & Flow and Freedom Writers, which were both utterly fabulous and among my favorites. The Perfect Score is not nearly at that level, but it’s not bad, and it’s not afraid to be a bit edgy and make a statement.

I do however feel that the film missed an opportunity to make this point: If the collection of assholes at ETS were to suddenly vanish off the face of the earth, nobody would give a flying fuck. It’s not like these people are building houses for the poor and homeless, fighting for the ecological health of our planet, or striving to get people heath care. They are not working to break American politics out of the two-identical-parties paradigm or challenge the power of multinational corporations over our lives. They are not championing sustainable, local agriculture or worker-owned cooperative business models that would begin to de-prioritize greed in human commerce. They are not fighting the state subsidization of the current pharmaceutical epidemic, or of companies that make bunker busters, unmanned bombing drones, and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. They’re not trying to develop alternative means of energy so humans don’t have to slaughter each other over dwindling resources. They don’t work to support music and the arts, or the cultivation of peace and love in this world. They are not working to put men on Mars, or increase our understanding of our universe. They don’t do jack fucking shit!

ETS’s only contribution to human society is to promote laziness on the part of college admissions officers. Well, that and to perpetuate their own existence, of course!