Early in the week, I finished up TPA#3… or so I thought.  When I was turning it in, my teacher warned me that the official grader for all TPAs has had a string of 10 unacceptable TPAs in a row this week and does not want to see any more.  The teacher recommended that I take my TPA home and spend the week with it to make sure it is thoroughly complete and of high quality.  These things are graded on a 1-4 scale and anything under a 3 is a fail.  Anyone who fails has to redo their TPA, and the grader has to grade it again.  The grader has just seen 10 that she will have to grade again, so she was pretty mad.  I asked what I got on my first two TPAs that I passed.  I got 3s.  Wow, any drop in performance and mine wouldn’t pass.  And here I thought I had turned in two 4 papers.  Now I’m concerned about TPA#4, which I turned in last week.  Both TPA#3 and TPA#4 were not as good as TPA#1 and TPA#2 in my opinion.  My enthusiasm waned after spending 80 hours to complete the first two.  I had “only” spent 30 hours each completing the latter two.  I took TPA#3 home.  I’ll look at it over the weekend.

So, after Tuesday, the rest of the week was spent studying for my CSET (Bachelor equivalency test) in Art.  I had purchased a practice test booklet from a company two weeks ago, and it had not yet arrived.  I was a little concerned because these practice tests really do help and I felt I needed it.  Fortunately, in the case of Art, I have a massive collection of books so I grabbed a dozen that I thought might help me.  I studied some of those on Wednesday.  Wednesday evening, I got the practice test book in the mail.  I took the test Thursday morning and got a 22%.  Ouch.  It turns out that if one relies on the retained knowledge from a now 15-year-old Art History degree, one will fail this CSET.  I had a lot to study.  I read an entire art book on Thursday and took notes, and then read another book on Friday.  I also looked up every term and process I didn’t understand on the pre-test, which was a lot.  I know next to nothing about photography, printing, textiles, ceramics, Modern Art, African Art and Asian Art, which represents about 80% of the test.  I know European Art, architecture, graphic arts and drawing/painting, and even then, I was getting fooled by some of those questions.  On Friday night, I took the pre-test again and got an 88%.  Yeah!  Saturday morning, I took the two Art CSET tests.  They were tough!  It took me four hours to complete both.  I was really happy to find that maybe 10% of the questions on the test had also been in the pre-test book, as was one of the two drawing demonstrations that I had to perform (drawing a pyramid and a sphere in two point perspective with a light source).  Had I not practiced that at home, I might not have been able to do that – I’m a one point perspective kind of guy.  I was a little miffed that I only had to write essays on four of my six art project photographs.  I had studied how to write an effective essay for all six.  Several hours were spent looking up art terms and processes for two pieces of art that I now didn’t have to explain at all, but simply submit.  For the record, I turned in three graphic arts items (CD covers I had made) to show my depth in one area of art, and three other pictures to show breadth: architecture, photography and ceramics.  I explained the photography submission because it seemed to be the easiest to explain of the three and I only had one page with which to explain it.

When I got home from the test, I was too tired to do anything but take a nap.  Maybe I’ll look at TPA#3 on Monday.  Sunday, I have a chip to look at.