Polling and Testing

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard has a lot of critical things to say about "polls and other forms of directive solicitation."  These passages, of course, resonate with the directive solicitation practices at the core of SB 6: voting ballots and, especially, standardized testing (eg, FCAT).

Certainly, the answer is induced by the question.  But the one who asks the question has no more autonomy: he can only ask questions which have a chance of getting a circular reply--he is caught in exactly the same vicious circle. (67)

However you perfect them, polls will never represent anything, because the rule of their game is representation. (116)

The obscenity proper to polls comes not from their betrayal of the secret of an opinion...but from statistical exhibitionism, from this continual voyeurism of the group spying on itself. At every moment it must know what it wants, what it thinks, it must see itself in numbers...Overinformed, it becomes obese with itself. (118)

...no one can live in the anticipated image of what he is, nor in the exorbitant mirror of his statistical truth. (120)

At all events the greatness of statistics is not in their objectivity but in their involuntary humor. (121)

Statistical Exhibitionism

It is tempting and humorous/ironic to think of a test as a poll.  It even seems accurate in the case of standardized, multiple-choice questions dealing with contingencies of practical reason, as is generally the case with reading comprehension/interpretation sections.  For Baudrillard, the kind of knowledge yield by the poll is only ever a degraded form of opinion.  Can the same be said of standardized tests like the FCAT--that they test (and teach) not knowledge but a degraded form of opinion?  As such, an FCAT-based education could be framed (via obsenario) as an series of exercises in learning how to think with degraded opinions.