In Jordan, students describe the Tawjihi as “the most important stage” in their lives, circumscribing their academic and professional futures. An exam which takes place at the end of high school, scores on the Tawjihi determine not only whether a student can attend college but what they can study. Parents have gone so far as to bring their children answers during the test, stopped only by the Jordanian gendarmerie. When results of the Tawjihi are posted, the country erupts with fireworks, gunshots, celebrations and parliamentary debates over cheating and the exam’s difficulty. This year the King tweeted that his “sons and daughters, who passed the Tawjihi exam, fill me with happiness…your help will make our way towards the future, and with your ambition our country will prosper.” This paper recovers the origins and politics of Jordan’s Tawjihi, and how standardized examinations more broadly shape the relationship between state and citizen. It argues that the promise of objectivity allowed the exam to take hold, despite many of its proponents goals of social engineering and even repression. This paper also analyzes why the Tawjihi exists in its current peculiar form and why it has taken on such overwhelming significance for the thousands of teenagers who take the exam every year. It draws on educational reports, oral histories, newspapers and other publications, from Jordan as well as Palestine and Israel. The Tawjihi began in Mandate Palestine, as the elite Palestine Matriculation Exam, a site in which British, Palestinian Arab and Jewish as well as missionary figures fought over form, subject matter and purpose. The Transjordanian Matriculation, and in the mid 1940s the General Examination both nationalized testing, as it became firmly under the Transjordanian government’s control, but also internationalized standards as holders of the Transjordanian matriculation examination could attend the American University of Beirut at a sophomore level. The exam itself was a political site: it could be used as an unwieldy tool of regulating not only schooling but access to white-collar employment. It also functioned as a claims making device on the Jordanian government, due to its purported objectivity.