AFTER three years in high school, Sandra Yanez should be starting her summer of endless possibilities. There are college brochures to sort through, trips to the beach with girlfriends, maybe a few thoughts on a dress for the senior prom.

``I'm thinking of dropping out, instead,'' the 17-year-old junior at Oakland Technical high school said the other day.

She's failed the math portion of California's new high school exit examination four times.

``I feel, what am I going to do? I don't want to spend my last year of high school afraid of this test, afraid of panicking,'' she said, ``I feel embarrassed. Maybe I'm dumb.''

Forty percent of California students taking the exit test are failing, and we know where to find the concentration of failure. In fact, we always knew -- at overwhelmed urban high schools fed by elementary and middle schools in the poorest parts of the state.

Lots of urban, working class Latino students are among them, but Sandra is one of the few who hasn't retreated into silent acquiescence.

``Sandra's very angry,'' said Carmen Iniquez, an organizer with the Californians for Justice Education Fund in Oakland. ``She's embarrassed, but she's angry enough to speak on the record because she knows the test is wrong.''

Sitting in the organization's office in a Levi jacket, with thin braids falling down her face, Sandra looks more a high school cheerleader than a campus radical.

She recalled this scene when she first took the exit exam during her freshman year:

``Everybody was in the gym, where it was really loud, sitting at crowded tables. People started laughing and yelling and throwing things. You couldn't concentrate.''

Sandra failed both the verbal and math portions that day. When the school got its act straight the following year and tested students in smaller groups, she passed the verbal section. But she's 30 points shy of passing the math part after her fourth try.

The question isn't whether she'll pass. She's improved her math score every time and has at least four more tries. Her grade point average of 2.67, which includes A's in English and a C-plus in intermediate algebra, indicates she'll eventually pass and earn her diploma.

The question is, what happens to her in the meantime and to the thousands of California students who fail on their first attempts and possibly never pass at all?

``To me, the exit exam is a measure of the intelligence of a student,'' she said. ``It's made us lose our confidence. I've lost my confidence.''

This is not what the state Board of Education and Gov. Gray Davis had in mind when they dreamed up the exit exam. It is not an IQ test. Its purpose, they keep telling us, is to jump-start quality teaching at failing schools, not to punish individual students.

But punishment is what this cruel and unnecessary test delivers best.

``I once wanted to go to a university, but you can't get into college without a diploma,'' she said. ``Even if I do pass the test, I'm still going to feel bad. It won't give me my confidence back. I'll probably have to go to a community college.''

There you have it. A promising young lady, the daughter of hard-working Mexican immigrants, who dreams of becoming a social worker, who would normally graduate on time and qualify for admission to a state university -- is already beaten down at age 17.

Why? Whatever happened to the idea of building character and confidence in high school? What happened to the high school as agent of social progress? When did we turn them into testing mills, where the losers are ground into dust and the winners get to take the SAT?

Faced with stigmatizing thousands of students forever, the state Board of Education is close to delaying the diploma penalty. But it continues to push the false promise that a state that ranks 37th in school spending can deliver a quality and equal education for every child three short years from now.

Sandra Yanez doesn't have that much time.

``I'm studying hard to pass, but if I fail it again after I've worked so hard, I'm really not going to try anymore.''