Leaked Standardized Test Questions from Middle-Earth’s Push to Adopt the Common Core

With annotations and grading notes from Ms. Belinda Greenleaf, a teacher at Minas Tirith Middle.

Westron / Language Arts Section

1. The relationship between tree and Ent is the same as the relationship between:

A) oliphaunt and coney.
B) barrow-wight and acorn.
C) eagle and Eagle.
D) Vala and Maia.

Grading notes: This question satisfies the Common Core standard L.9-10.4 (“Determine the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies such as palantír-gazing, uttering the Black Speech, or smiting a Balrog down upon a mountain-side and retrieving the answer from the wreck of its still-smoldering corpse”). Students should recognize that trees and Ents, much like eagles and Eagles, differ only in their level of sentience. If students have access to a palantír (or if you’ve got one in your classroom!), they may gaze into its dark, fiery depths and seek the answer there.

2. Read this sentence:

Minas Tirith is a very cosmopolitan city.

The word cosmopolitan comes from:

A) the Quenya word for “wet.”
B) the Sindarin word for “great region, province.”
C) the Khuzdul word for “intercourse” (lit. “hammering”).
D) the Easterling name for the god Oromë, Huntsman of the Valar.

Grading notes: This question meets the Common Core standard W-LA.2a (“Recognize no-win situations, much as our glorious Elessar did when making his last stand at the Black Gate”). To receive full credit, students should realize that none of the answers are correct, skip the question entirely, then covertly send a pair of frightened hobbits to the central testing center in Bree to manually change their score in the nick of time (they may NOT use Eagles).

Use the following passage to answer question 3:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

3. How is this couplet a representative example of Third Age literature?

A) It cleverly uses true rhyme to accentuate the metrical inconsistencies in the passage, thereby undermining the ostensible jollity of Old Tom’s demeanor.
B) It reinforces the prevailing Third Age view that Bombadil was an actual historical figure, rather than a mushroom-induced hallucination that King Elessar’s hobbit companions insisted they met and spoke with on their bizarre (and likely apocryphal) journey to Rivendell.
C) It adopts a strained positivity at odds with the wars and constant bloodshed of the period.
D) It utilizes the yellowness of Old Tom’s boots to represent the filthy golden lucre of the Gondorian aristocratic class.

Grading notes: Regardless of their answer choice, students should recognize that Western literature from the Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor is inherently superior to whatever they’re teaching in Mirkwood or Dale or Rhûn these days. The monarchy brooks no disagreement from its teachers, ha ha, so the author of this test for sure agrees with this Gondor-centric, colonialist stance, ha ha ha. Honestly, the Southrons in Harad probably can’t even read, is a thing this author DEFINITELY agrees with. We all remember what happened to Mr. Finwë when he tried teaching his students Khandian poetry.

Use the following poem to answer question 4:

slowly it writhes
like a fly in Ungoliant’s web
my heart the Balrog
my heart the Nazgûl
this crownless heart

4. One feature of this poem that classifies it as postmodern Fourth Age poetry, rather than literature of the Third Age period, is that:

A) it is not strongly moralistic or religious.
B) the narrator is critical of the Gondorian monarchy.
C) no halflings grow mutated through their obsessive compulsion with a piece of jewelry, become increasingly ostracized from their riverside community, spend several centuries in a cave, and eventually die by biting off their only friend’s finger and falling into a volcano.
D) all of these answers are correct.

Grading notes: As with all other questions in this section, students should be able to regurgitate information from a vast storehouse of mental facts in a feat of memory impossible for most adult humans, let alone their children.

Math Section

5. If there are three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, nine for mortal Man doomed to die, and one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, what is half the total number of rings minus six times the square root of the number of man’s rings?

A) -8
B) 10 – 6√7
C) 2
D) 14

Grading notes: This question satisfies Common Core standard N-Q.1 (“Use enchanted jewelry as a way to understand word problems and guide the solution of multi-step problems”) and A-APR.1 (“Understand that Rings of Power and Silmarils form a system analogous to the integers: namely, they are closed under addition, subtraction, and multiplication”).

6. The Valar originally sent five Istari to Middle-earth in the guise of old wizards. If two of them rode off into the East never to be heard from again, one became a radical environmentalist, one started a failed industrial revolution, and one was immortalized as a messianic figure in Westron literature, how many of the Istari were fabricated by the Gondorian right-wing government in an attempt to deter their citizens from ever considering acts of civil disobedience, such as picketing the capital for higher teacher wages?

A) 5
B) 0
C) 1
D) 4

Grading notes: Have you or your students ever seen a wizard in real life or examined any hard evidence that they existed? This could be the basis for a lively in-class discussion. Satisfies the Common Core standard A-REI.1 (“Explain each step in solving a simple equation as following from the equality of numbers asserted at the previous step, starting from the assumption that wizards are totally real and definitely not made up at all”).

Short Answer / Essay Section

7. In your own words, explain whether it is philosophically defensible that the Kingdom of Gondor insists on teaching the Ainulindalë and Quenta Silmarillion as historical texts rather than creation-myths. Should teachers be forced to present religious texts as factually accurate?

8. In 1,200 words or less, describe the dangers of patrilineal monarchy and/or theocracy, using examples from current and/or historical events (e.g., the Scouring of the Shire in T.A. 3019, the resurgence of the magic cults of Alatar and Pallando). What are some good alternatives to having a non-constitutional government ruled by a single charismatic individual that nobody votes for, as with Mordor and Gondor?

Quenya / Translation Section

9. During his coronation, Aragorn Elessar sang Elendil’s Oath:

Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien. Sinomë maruvan ar Hildinyar tenn’ Ambar-metta!

Which of the following is a reasonable translation of the Oath?

A) “Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come. In this place I will abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world.”
B) “And the Great Sea is coming to Middle-earth. Teachers’ unions should be abolished, and I’m going to bankrupt the nation in my racist obsession with subjugating the Wild Men and Easterlings.”
C) “From Death and Destruction have I returned. I don’t care about the school system and I am going to eat your children and cut teachers’ pay by 15% to fund my kingdom’s imperialistic expansion to the Sea of Rhûn.”
D) None of these answers are correct.

Grading notes: Fuck Aragorn Elessar.