Certifiable

I've been stressing about becoming certified in another scoring program. Even this morning at 7:30, my internet connection was spotty. I gave up and took a shower, thinking if I couldn't log on at my scheduled time of 8:15 I'd call and let the testing company know I wasn't able to retake the test. Today was my last chance. When I got out of the shower, I saw that my oldest son had called, so I called him back and walked around a while. (In my family, we're all big "phonewalkers".) When I sat down at the computer again, the connection popped right up and it was 8:15 on the dot.

Now, I can't say much about the test, as I'm sworn to secrecy, but I will say that the essays are much more complicated to score than the ones I do for the other program. Maybe it just seems that way because I've been scoring the latter since 2002. Anyway, it was stressing me out -- even with the internet connection holding up. I went through all the training sets -- again -- and by the time I was ready for certification, I was really short on time. I had two choices: read quickly and risk missing the threshhold for certification, or read slowly and risk running out of time. I tried to do something in between. At that point, I had kind of determined I wouldn't pass anyway, so the pressure was falling off a bit.

I finished scoring the last essay with three minutes to spare, and a message popped up congratulating me on passing certification. I was surprised and delighted. I don't like to fail. I have no idea how I'll do on the actual scoring; for the test I score now, I have to calibrate before each session. I do like that it gives me options, though. I'm hoping that when volume is low for one test, it will be high for the other, and vice versa. So today I'm feeling a nice sense of accomplishment, a good way to feel on the first Monday of the new year.