In-Test (Term)

In-Test is the period of time it takes to drive a channel to attempting a Kill. 
During this time, the channels are taken to an isolated facility and subjected to stresses designed to maximize Need and deny its satisfaction until they reach a limit, a breaking point where they attack the Donor offered with real intent to Kill.
Every channel undergoes this procedure before being licensed to work in the Tecton, and then is re-tested at intervals.
With the passing centuries, instrumentation is devised which can take exact objective measurements during the provocations, and especially during the final provocation which breaks the channel's control.
These measurements are detailed in the Proficiency Rating Chart and determine each of the parameters from which the Proficiency Rating is calculated.  Controllers use the Proficiency Rating to calculate (without zlinning the individuals involved) who can provide an adequat transfer to whom and when.  (Donors acquire the PR of the channels whom they serve and who rate the transfer satisfying.) 
Testing usually only takes a few days or a few weeks for most channels. 
Farrises generally take more than three months to be provoked to the breaking point.  At that breaking point, they usually rate on-scale though at the top, and are assigned a PR of 4.0 -- the PR scale was designed to place the typical Farris channel at 4.0 by definition. 
After some generations, though, testing began to turn up a Farris channel here and there who took more than 4 months to break, and who -- when they did go for a Kill -- blew the instruments off their tracks.
Those few Farrises were assigned the vague rating of 4+ because who cared "plus what?" -- just up there off the scale somewhere is close enough. 
Digen's problem, in Sime Surgeon, is that he can't afford 4 months to sit around being testing and doing nothing else -- all to no avail because who cares PLUS WHAT?  There's no information to be acquired from his Test that a Controller could actually use to calculate which Donor could serve him and get a different answer than the one he knows already.  But though there are a lot of exceptions built into Tecton law for Farris situations -- it would be some centuries before all the necessary exceptions are in place.  Meanwhile, the Tecton gets more bureaucratic, and middle-management people less independent, less able to make judgement calls.
From: Sime Surgeon, Ch 9. 'He couldn't take four months off from the hospital to go in-test himself, and he doubted if he'd be allowed to if he had the time. The testing was standardized, and his injury made him a very nonstandard subject.'
From: Sime Surgeon, Ch 16. 'Digen couldn't answer that. The prospect, real and imminent now, of losing Ilyana forever because of Tecton politics, had struck at the very deepest Sime instincts for survival, and he felt himself on the verge of a kind of panic he'd not known except in-Test on the brink of death by attrition....'
(Source:  Index card file.  Unto Zeor, Forever --- Third Draft)  Where official Proficiency Rating figures for channels and Donors are determined.  "It's been three years since I was in-Test."
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/cz/cz16/UNTO_OUT.HTM  --- Proficiency Rating formula diagram
Category:Terms