All throughout my days at school, “State Boards” was the relative euphemism for The Bogeyman. We were trained to fear this test. Everything we did and all the skills we learned and all the methods we were trained to apply were done so in order to appease the dark gods of the State Boards.

“At State Boards they’re going to expect you to roll your perm THIS way”

“Don’t hold your dryer like THAT, or they will flunk you at State Boards”

“Everyone does it -this- way but State Boards prefer you to learn it -this- way”

“Don’t do THAT at State Boards, whatever you DO! They will kill you!”

“If you turn out the lights and look into a mirror, and repeat ‘State Boards’ three times, when the lights turn on you will be denied your cosmetology license and your student loan rates will go up”

I dreaded these exams for the past 12 months to the day. Everyone dreads them, every student fears this day. It keeps us up at night and puts knots in our stomachs. However, as of this moment I will not need to lose sleep over this fateful day any longer. Or at least that SHOULD be the case, however the fact remains that no matter how much I study, how much I prepare or how well I paid attention in school, there is no way to be sure I passed this test. What’s worse – if I failed this test, I will never be told why.

Personally, I feel like I did an amazing job, yet the fact of the matter is that I have a 50-50 chance of failing this test. I get my results in 6-10 days, at which point I’ll know if I can start looking for work, or if I have to spend more money and wait another under-employed month (maybe two) to take the test again.

Here is the low-down. The State of Vermont outsources its licensing and examination of barbers, cosmetologists, nail technicians and aestheticians to a company in Minnesota. Love it or hate it, this external entity is the beast to appease. I spend a large sum of money on an 11-month education (which is around 2,000 dollars more than 11 months at the tuition-inflated University of Vermont), after which I pay $240.00 to this Minnesota company for admittance to the next available exam, a test to be held at a neighboring school. The practical portion of the exam takes about four hours (four long, stressful, silent hours), followed by a 130-question written exam. Once finished you get to go home and pretend you’ve passed. Still, it’s best leave all your testing material in that enormous 20-gallon storage bin you keep it in because you aren’t necessarily out of the woods yet! After 6 to 10 days, you will receive a notice telling you how you did on the test, whether you passed or failed, and which parts you will need to re-take before you can obtain your license.

I arrived at the testing location – I knew it was the testing location because of the laminated sign on the door: “Do Not Distrub(sic): Testing In Progress.” I have to be honest, cosmetologists have the absolute worst skills in English. Spelling, grammar – minor inconveniences. The comical irony in this is that cosmetology is one of those careers where precision and exactness are important. Everything is measured carefully, timed carefully, and checked for inequalities and mistakes to the minute detail. The same care, however, is almost never applied to their usage of the English language (written or spoken form). There was almost not a single sign at my school that didn’t have some form of negligence in spelling and/or grammar, but every head of hair would leave in a state of relative perfection. Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

Let me start by describing (in no illegal amount of detail, mind you) the written portion of the exam. 130 questions, multiple-choice questions, anything below 75% is a failing grade. Not too bad really, considering that I passed the mock-up of this exam that served as our final exam with a 97% I am just really not that worried about it.

Here’s the enormous flaw in my logic: I passed a similar exam where the questions originated from the curriculum I was taught, and the textbook from which I learned it. THIS test, however, is not entirely from my curriculum. The test was written with TWO separate textbooks as sources, both of which seem to have different wording for everything, and describe the tools and skills of the industry in different ways. It’s terribly disenchanting. I drilled myself sick with a 500-question mock examination, and read many, many highlighted passages from my textbook this past week – yet a great deal of the question on this test I had to make semi-educated guesses on because I was never tested on them before, and a lot of them I’m fairly certain I was never even taught.

I can’t be positive I was never taught many of these questions, but I may remind you that I missed very, VERY few days, I took a very active role with my education, and graduated at the very top of my class. SO, if I say I was not taught many of these questions – then I was not taught them.

This feeling was shared with one of the OTHER top students from my class that I took the test with. All we could do was to make our most educated guesses, and to hope for the best. The worst part is that, if we had to re-take the test, we really couldn’t know what to study in order to prepare. It was as if we went to someone ELSE’s school and took THEIR final exam. How do you prepare for that?

I don’t know that I got more than 25 questions wrong so I realistically SHOULD have passed this test quite handily. Still, I can’t say I’m entirely positive of that.

Now where the practical skills exam goes, that’s an even bigger reason to be unsettled. The four-hour exam is composed of thirteen separate skill tests, seven of which are considered “critical.” If you pass the overall skills exam but fail one of more of the critical sub-tests you need to re-take that particular critical area. To make matters even more difficult, it’s apparently quite easy to fail many of these tests. If you touch something in the wrong way (even glancingly), or don’t perform some of the simplest of tasks in a particular order, or don’t make the correct kind of eye contact with the grader, or don’t write the word “Implements” on a Ziploc bag marked “Blow-Dry Test: Sanitized and Disinfected Implements,” you stand the chance of completely failing the test with no warning whatsoever, and no indication you are about to do something that the State of Minnesota feels renders you a danger to public health and safety.

Yes, it really is that unrealistic. Welcome to the world of outsourced bureaucracy.

Wait, it gets worse. If you DO fail a particular section of the test, you are notified that you failed, but you are not told WHY you failed. Did I un-glove the wrong hand? Did I not sanitize my hands enough? Did I use my comb in the wrong fashion? Is there ANYTHING you can tell me that will keep me from repeating the same mistake over and over and over? Nope! All they can tell me is that it’s going to cost me an additional $90 to re-take a portion of the test, and that I have to re-apply to take that test. That’s not only money, but that is time I’ve lost as well. Possibly a lot of time. I will get notified within 10 days (Business days? Real days? I Don’t Know!!) if I have to re-take the test in August, however, the deadline for registration is in eight days. I have almost no chance of getting into the August exam and would have to wait until September to re-do whatever it is I need to re-do. There were five students there from the class that graduated five months ago, they had to re-take one or more of the tests. They can’t get work in this field until they get their license, can’t even really go and apply for jobs yet, how do they live in the meantime? How do they pay their student loans? How many MORE times do they need to take their tests before they can start applying for a job – a job that takes much longer to get in our current economy.

This is one of the worse ironies about the state boards in action. Look at me: I’ve just finished my tests, this bogeyman that loomed over me all year long. I can’t tell you any one thing I did wrong, I studied hard and I did as I was trained. The lady who acted as my grader was very nice, pleasant and personable, and I have no reason to feel she’s going to be malicious or overly-critical with regard to my immediate future. Right now I should be happy! I should be elated that this burden is off my shoulders, and that I can finally embark on my new life. Yet I am already in the mindset that I failed and failed miserably, and I am not happy. I’m not! I am stressed about it in fact, and I’m already trying to figure out how I can get into the August boards.

The bogeyman that is the Vermont/Minnesota State Boards is so great that I can’t even accept the very real possibility that I might have actually PASSED!

This is a really dysfunctional system, in my opinion. Not only are we the students kept in the dark about the testing specifics, our school is kept in the very same darkness. They don’t actually know all the information about the state boards, and as much transparency and accountability as they ask for, they are denied just about every request. This isn’t a matter of international espionage, this is about cutting hair! There is the mission to “Ensure the public safety is maintained” and I respect that mission, however, “Let them all swim in red tape” seems to be the more predominate mission.

I’ve paid a lot of money and spent a lot of hours in (purportedly) the best hair school in the area. I should be able to take these exams and walk out of school with a diploma AND a license in my hand, rather than going to the same exams shared by formally-schooled and independently-apprenticed cosmetologists alike.

Getting a cosmetology license in Vermont is the relative equivalent of spending four years at Rutgers but then having to take your final exams and get your diploma at Seton Hall. If our school is accredited to perform my first 1,500 hours, it should be able to provide the final five hours of testing. Public safety can be preserved without having to put so many roadblocks in our way. I’m bright. I’m methodical. I’m careful. There’s no reason I should be denied my license.

Only time will tell, but one thing remains the same: State Boards is a bogeyman that will continue to haunt me, even four weeks after school has finished.