Hi, Tony.
What is a performance test in that context?
A performance test (or P-Run, as they were commonly called) is where air
traffic control students perform the job in a simulated environment and are
evaluated on their performance. As few as two to six tiny mistakes on a
P-Run or written exam means failure. One big mistake means immediate
failure. Any failure on an exam that isn't successfully remediated within
an hour means the student rocks out. With a 75% attrition rate, the U.S.
taxpayers paid about $1 million for every air traffic controller back then
who eventually got qualified, so interrupting an entire class or making even
one student nervous enough to fail an exam and prevent him from getting
qualified was rather expensive.
We had an exceptional class of students. We set records (besides the only
interruption ever during a P-Run). In the previous 12 years, they'd
followed the same curriculum with 20 to 25 classes per year with 16 to 48
students in each one, and only one student had ever aced nine of the 14
performance and written exams. One student in our class aced ten and
another aced eleven exams, blowing away the previous record.
When those two students aced eight exams, one lady (and I'm not saying who,
because I'm not supposed to know about it) did some research and found out
who one of those students was: a student with eidetic memory. She bet
several other people (again, I'm not saying who because they shouldn't have
been gambling) that this one student would ace all three of the last three
exams.
Since no other student had ever aced more than nine exams -- let alone aced
eleven -- and this particular student missed two days of class after being
hospitalized and put on bed rest due to walking pneumonia and was doing
horribly during daily practice quizzes after returning to class, these other
people couldn't line up fast enough to place their bets. When they found
out soon afterward that many of the other students were quarantined during
an outbreak of the mumps and that this one student -- being immune to the
mumps and (relatively) healthy -- was given extra duties in their place for
four to seven hours every night after class for the next two weeks (so there
was virtually no time for this student to study before the exams and
graduation in less than two weeks), they upped their bets and gave her very
favorable odds should she win their bet. (And no, they didn't bother
telling her what they'd found out about this student's heavy schedule. And
no, she didn't tell them what she'd discovered about the student's eidetic
memory, either. So they were even.) The instructors even rewrote the last
two exams within one to five hours of the time the students sat down to take
the exams and then patrolled the testing room during the exams with twice as
many instructors as usual to ensure that no one could possibly cheat.
She took them to the cleaners. With her winnings she paid off her car loan,
all of her college expenses, and even set some money aside for her
two-year-old daughter's college education. She said she wished she'd had
more money in the bank than just 4 1/2 months salary, because she would have
bet that, too. She knew she couldn't lose.
I'm sure that's what the other betters said, too. :-D
Gunny
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