Tests of English proficiency for international graduate students at US universities are neoliberal institutions which make (mis)communication the responsibility of individual workers. While cloaking themselves in a discourse of linguistic expertise, they require test‐takers to assimilate to white, upper class, American mannerisms. In this ethnographic study of two testing centers, we address their material and ideological consequences: increases in precarity and xenophobia, losses in pay and students' communicative competence. We trace tests' distribution of interpretive labor (Graeber 2015) and propose a new interactionally informed approach to intelligibility which accounts for the co‐operation (Goodwin 2018) of multiple subjects.