The Relationship Assessment Rest (RAT)
2025
8.5” x 11” booklet, participatory performance
Concept + Development April Wen
Graphic Designer Cindy Hwang
Performance Space The City Reliquary
Test Proctors Starr Jiang, Em Adamo
Contributors Anonymous
Supported by The Social Practice Actionist Fellowship, City University of New York
The Relationship Assessment Test is an original text and participatory performance that reauthors the U.S. college admissions exam, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), as an archive of people’s real-life quandaries and life experiences.
For 100 years, the SAT has long served as a structuring mechanism for access to university education and its attendant catalysis of socioeconomic opportunities. The SAT operates as both a tenuous framework and mass ritual to assess a young person’s readiness for the next stage of their educational development. As a test, it is divisive by design, compounded by unequal access to test preparation itself.
During in-person, proctored test-taking sessions, participants take the RAT individually, then in groups, when they can discuss their answers and “compete” for prizes.The RAT shows a version of life as it is: full of questions with one, some, or perhaps no right answers.
2025
8.5” x 11” booklet, participatory performance
Concept + Development April Wen
Graphic Designer Cindy Hwang
Performance Space The City Reliquary
Test Proctors Starr Jiang, Em Adamo
Contributors Anonymous
Supported by The Social Practice Actionist Fellowship, City University of New York
The Relationship Assessment Test is an original text and participatory performance that reauthors the U.S. college admissions exam, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), as an archive of people’s real-life quandaries and life experiences.
For 100 years, the SAT has long served as a structuring mechanism for access to university education and its attendant catalysis of socioeconomic opportunities. The SAT operates as both a tenuous framework and mass ritual to assess a young person’s readiness for the next stage of their educational development. As a test, it is divisive by design, compounded by unequal access to test preparation itself.
During in-person, proctored test-taking sessions, participants take the RAT individually, then in groups, when they can discuss their answers and “compete” for prizes.The RAT shows a version of life as it is: full of questions with one, some, or perhaps no right answers.
top right, bottom, and bottom left photos by Avery Savage