Josh would pass them with flying colors. She’d listened in rapt fascination as Engersol, a man of about forty-five, with iron-gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses that, though they had gone out of style at least twenty years ago, still looked perfect on his craggy face, explained to her more of the details about how the Academy had been structured and what they were trying to accomplish. And not only for their students, but for gifted children everywhere. The more she heard, the more Engersol had impressed Brenda—with his ideas and the simplicity with which he was able to explain them. It was clear to her that Engersol regarded his students not merely as gifted children to be taught, but almost as if they were his own children. His paternalism toward them permeated every phrase he uttered, and it was only reluctantly that she had finally shifted her attention to Josh’s image on the closed circuit television screen mounted on the wall of the director’s office.
“Does he know we’re watching him?” she asked now.
“Not unless the camera isn’t hidden as well as it should be,” Engersol replied. “Knowing he was being watched would be too distracting, and would skew the results of the test.”
“But it seems—I don’t know, it seems sort of wrong to be watching him without him knowing it.”
Engersol shook his head. “Not really. Part of what I need to know is how he goes about the testing procedure. If he knows he’s being watched, he’ll unconsciously do whatever he thinks I might expect of him. For instance, look what he’s doing now. And keep in mind I told him he was free to go about the tests any way he wants.”
As Brenda watched, Josh flipped quickly through the thick booklet that contained the test, then frowned and started over again. But on the second run-through he paused here and there, then quickly marked a spot on the answer sheet.
“What’s he doing?” Brenda asked.
“What I’ve done is structured the test differently from most such things. There are no separate sections to it—everything’s mixed up together. There might be a problem in algebra, immediately followed by an analogy, or one of the aptitude identifiers.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Brenda sighed, wondering, not for the first time, where Josh’s brilliance had come from. Certainly not from herself, she reflected ruefully. Despite Engersol’s efforts to make everything he’d said clearly understandable, she’d still had to struggle to keep from getting lost every now and then.
“I’m not only interested in how well he does on the test, but how he goes about working on it,” Engersol went on. “The whole concept of the function of intelligence fascinates me. Some of the children, for instance, seem to concentrate only on certain areas of the test, mathematics, of course, being the most popular. In fact, I suspect what Josh is doing right now is going through the math problems, solving them as fast as he can, getting the easy part out of the way first. Often, however, the brightest of the children start with the hardest problems, getting the worst of the work out of the way while they’re still fresh. You never know until you score it, but I can tell a lot simply by watching them work.” He nodded toward the monitor, where Josh had abruptly stopped, frowned uncertainly, then flipped back to the third page. A moment later he went all the way to the back of the book and began paging quickly toward the front, his eyes scanning the problems so fast, Brenda could hardly believe he was actually reading them.
“He’s not,” Engersol replied when she voiced her question. “He’s discovered one of the tricks, and I think he’s checking himself out.”
“Tricks?” Brenda asked.
“There are a lot of duplicate problems. Let’s see what he does next.”
In the room where he was working, Josh’s mind was racing. So far, the test had been pretty easy. He’d glanced through the whole thing, and immediately realized that if he were going to get through it in the required time, he’d have to work fast.
He’d started with the math, where he didn’t really have to think. All he had to do was look at the numbers, and the answers were pretty clear, especially since all he really needed was a pretty good guess. After all, who would really think the cube root of 27 could be 9? On a lot of the problems he’d simply been able to eliminate the wrong answers and mark the