Poet can't answer questions about her own work that appears on a standardized test.

Modern standardized testing exists.

That's about the only positive that can be said about it these days, and even that's not a positive thing.

Many parents want it to justify their child's educational success or failure, yet they don't want the standardized tests that are given because of personal, moral, or educational beliefs.

And:

Educators despise wasting weeks teaching toward these tests, and then spending more time to administer those very same tests.

And:

Administrators justify the testing as a means to show they're serious about improving education, yet have no other ideas or suggestions how to improve education except to enforce a standardized test upon educators and students in a one-size-fits-all model.

And:

Local, state, and federal government officials largely have no reasonable idea how actual education works, yet they pass legislation demanding standardized tests be given at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, per state, often to for-profit companies with little oversight.

And now this:

Which brings us to Sara Holbrook, a poet of merit, who recently found some of her work included on a Texas standardized test. The problem for Holbrook? As she wrote originally on the Huffington Post, the questions asked about her poetry were so open-ended and vague, even she didn't know the answer. That would seem to be a wee bit of a problem.

Many of the questions demand to know the motivations of the writer--except the test-creators never actually asked Holbrook her motivation or thought process in the poems used, so how would they know the answer? As Holbrook notes, often these tests examine dead writers' work. Dead writers are often quiet on the matter of standardized tests.

Or, as she concludes in her Huffington Post article:

"My final reflection is this: any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich. Mostly test makers do this to dead people who can’t protest. But I’m not dead.

I protest."