"I'm really good at it! I promise."

"Fine, okay, I can take a hint."

His ears are BRIGHT RED.

Wei Wuxian has never passed a Psychology check before and has no intention of starting now.

He is quiet for nearly a minute, reflecting on his rejection, before he pipes up with "hey, have you heard of my mom?"

She shaved John's uncle's beard but if John says that that sounds like talking. 

"Probably not. Probably everyone has totally erased my mom from the history books because she embarrassed the emperor. --Are you sure you don't know where I can get some booze?"

"Shameless."

"I'll take that as a 'no.' --I really do think you're more of a Little John than a Long John Silver but the resemblance to either of them isn't exactly, like, obvious--"

The next morning Asher collects them all at 8am, takes them to breakfast, and then drops them off at a room with dozens of computers in it. 

"We're going to get you guys to take placement tests so we know how much you know already."

(Bern is honestly kind of surprised that Asher didn't beat him up last night, like, at all, or even make him have sex with him. Probably he thinks Bern isn't that hot? Either way, good to stay out of his way... insofar as they can stay out of his way...)

First thing Bern doesn't know: How to use a computer! (Other than what Asher showed him last night, which he does, in fact, remember surprisingly well.)

"Sure," she says. "How's that work?"

(She's a little worried that Bern took care of telling Asher himself; she wants to be the interface with Authority, it's a source of power, and if Bern is taking that job over it weakens her. But she isn't actually afraid of Bern.)

(Also, that's a lot of computers. How rich are these people? Other than 'the kind of rich you get when you can extort the entire world for riches?')

He gives them each a pair of headphones, then turns on four computers that are maximally distant from each other, then says, "the program is going to ask you questions, and you want to click on the button that goes with the right answer. They'll read the questions to you-- the headphones mean that you'll only hear your own questions being read to you. The tests adjust in difficulty depending on how well you do, so don't worry if the questions are hard. --Also, cheating is totally pointless, it just means you'll be in a harder class than you can actually do the work for, you're only hurting yourself." 

She nods.

His claim is, of course, nonsense, because she's from the Isle of the Lost; she's always had the duty of surviving, of outperforming, of triumphing with less resources and more grit; they may know more, but she has real experience and so she can learn faster. These fools in Auradon won't know what hit them. She means to get the highest score she can, and the only reason not to cheat is because she doesn't know just how Asher's watching her.

... She attempts to poke a button on the screen and then remembers the mouse exists, and manages not to flush.

Okay, no cheating, got it. He's got no intention of crossing Asher, Asher eats more than he does.

It does not in fact occur to Wei Wuxian that he's not going to get the highest score.

... ...at least she'll be out of here quickly.

The computers want to know if you can recognize letters and read words and read sentences and read paragraphs and read entire articles and read articles with a lot of long words and unfamiliar jargon in them! The computers want to know if you can recognize numbers and count and add and subtract and multiply and divide and solve increasingly complicated algebra problems and take a derivative! The computers want to know if you can locate these countries and these rivers and these mountains and if you know what these kings and military leaders did and if you know which countries have the following cultural traits! The computers want to know if you know what plants need to grow, and whether vibrating things make sounds, and how the speed of an object affects the energy of that object, and the atomic composition of various molecules, and the parts of a cell, and how the composition of a nucleus changes during radioactive decay, and the role of mitosis in producing complex organisms, and what the stars are made of!

Wei Wuxian can read the hardest things you have to throw at him. He is hopeless at biology but excellent at chemistry and physics. He is easily bored by the rivers and starts deliberately getting the answers wrong so that section will be over with. He only knows math up through algebra, but he ends up getting a fair amount of the way through calculus via using this as an opportunity to reinvent calculus. 

Tetley... can read an article if it's not too hard, and is pretty solid on counting but shaky on addition over about sixteen. 

Sure, Bern can read. The long words mostly make sense from context. That's not too hard.

... He can add and subtract, that's easy. Multiplying is simple and dividing's just the opposite of multiplying, right, he thinks he heard that once. The first algebra problem stumps him for a while and then he figures out what it's trying to ask and he just... keeps going, until he hits calculus, which he decides is clearly impossible to solve with what he knows and so gives up on without really trying.

His biology, chemistry, and physics are all at the same level, which is "no education at all, great intuition," which is really not enough. He can't find any of the countries, rivers, or mountains, except by chance. He can do slightly better than chance on cultural traits and knows no kings or military leaders people he has not met have not met.

Alida has been decrypting badly-written books on every topic she can name in the hopes they'll be about chemistry. She's got the reading. She's actually behind Wei Wuxian on the math, since she can not in fact reinvent calculus in her head. She has plotted invasions of most of the countries along most of the rivers and avoiding the mountain ranges, following the examples of the kings and military leaders, but will slightly downplay her knowledge of warfare so people don't start getting any ideas. She knows the cultural traits if they are mentioned in histories she has tracked down in the Island or if they apply to people she's met on the Island. Her biology isn't great but her chemical knowledge was good before she got a theoretical background and has only gotten better, and her physics is eccentric (highly focused on what she can learn or reinvent on the island) but not too bad, all in all.

"...how are multiple of you in honors classes."

Because people in Auradon are really dumb. "I figured you tried to pick smart Islanders."