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Again, I’ve had the same problem with teacher-written tests. To give two examples:
1. In my 9th grade Italian class, we had an exam where we had to choose which word doesn’t fit with the other two. For one question, the choices were high school, high school student, and college. A valid case can be made for either high school student, or college. The one I chose was not the one she wanted, and it was marked wrong. When I made the argument in favor of my answer, I was just told “life isn’t fair”. Why aren’t kids who underperform on standardized tests just told that “life isn’t fair”?
2. In 3rd grade, we learned about how each calendar date advances one day of the week each year. We had a bonus question to figure out what day of the week 4th of July will fall on the upcoming summer. This was the 1987-88s school year. 1988 was a leap year, so every day advanced 2 days, rather than 1, and I knew that, even though it had not been taught yet. We had to remember that 4th of July was a Saturday in 1987, which I did remember. So, I answered Monday for 4th of July in 1988, which was the correct answer. However, it was marked wrong, since the answer the teacher wanted was Sunday, since we were supposed to think it only advanced one day. I made my argument that I knew about leap year, but it was not accepted, saying I could not have possibly known about leap year.
The effect of one teacher who writes bad tests is relatively small. Universities do not look at individual foreign language tests from their freshman year nor do they care much about 3rd grade timekeeping. What they look at is GPA which has the effect of EVERY test as well as non-assessment work.
Except that I’m an engineer making less than what teachers make, plus they get a pension and retiree health insurance, neither of which I get.
I’ll respond later to other points.
Teacher salary and engineer salary can fluctuate a lot depending on area (and field within engineering). But I doubt you make less as an engineer than teachers on average.
People do not like Standardized Tests because they or close family members do not, or never have, performed well on these types of exams. All licensed professions, and many non-licensed ones, rely on such exams to validate a person's ability to perform the required services for clients.
Are these exams perfect? No. But they are the best and most unbiased tool we currently have.
Plenty of people who have performed well on "standardized" tests and still don't like them.
They are not best nor unbiased, they are unproudly one of many tools that we currently have.
All these many tools together are the best we currently have, but they are still biased and it can't be otherwise; unless one is trying to sell something, then they are perfect.
But the answer that the teacher wanted was "college". When I chose "high school student", and she marked it wrong, I made the exact same argument that you did. Her answer was "life isn't fair". And she said that in one of her Italian classes in college, the entire final exam was to write an essay about why the Dodgers will lose the World Series, and said that if a professor can write such an exam, she can write whatever exams she chooses to and grade them however she chooses.
As a side note, I think my teacher missed the point of that essay question on her final exam in college. I obviously wasn't there, but I strongly suspect that the intent was to see if you could write an essay, perhaps on a topic you weren't comfortable with. I seriously doubt that she was being graded based on her baseball knowledge.
I guess you are saying that my teacher was a shallow thinker, since she wanted "college" as the answer.
Some teachers should be in a job where their main line of questioning is to ask someone "Do you want fries with that?"
If someone thinks that standardized testing is unfair, then they should have experienced the huge variety of unfairness (and incompetence) in SOME of the teachers I had in public schools and in college. The majority of my teachers were good to great, but some were a disgrace to the name "teacher".
BTW, writing essays comes under the heading of "creative" type subjects which I said in my post is not conducive to standardized testing. Likewise, students majoring in music, art, theater, etc would not be good prospects for standardized tests.
Standardized tests are best for determining skills involving logic, science, math, and reading comprehension.
a. They can be gamed. There is a method to how standardized tests are designed and students who are coached on "how to take standardized tests" can raise their score significantly. Not that they actually know more or are smarter, but that they've been coached on tricks. Even our local elementary schools spend a significant amount of time on "how to take the test" rather than on learning the material.
b. They are tailor made for "teaching to the test." This leads a lot of schools to focus on what is tested rather than what the kids need to know. Let's say a subject requires you to know topics A, B, C, D, E, and F. The test however primarily focuses on topics A, C, and D. The school will spend most of their time on A, C, and D, while minimizing time on B, E, and F. During part of my career I worked as a SME to a course development effort. It started with designing the assessment, the "test" if you will, then designed the course to teach what was on the test. All of us who acted as SMEs were frustrated about how much material was left out because it wasn't going to be tested.
c. Many of the "pick the most correct" type questions depend on the student interpreting the question the same way the test writer did. Different interpretation can lead to a different answer. A good example of this was after i left the service I took the Praxis test. A lot of the questions were of the "pick the most correct" variety. On quite a few questions I had specific expertise from my time in the service where I knew what the actual correct answer was. And also knew there was a generally accepted, but technically wrong answer. So my dilemma was which to pick: the technically correct, but not popularly understood answers or the technically wrong, but popular answer. I solved that dilemma by asking myself "what would a teacher teach in school?" then selected all the technically wrong answers. Aced the test. A good example of that kind of question is "how does an airplane generate lift?" The most common answers in school textbooks are wrong.
d. A standardized test is one data point when it comes to individual students. While it may be somewhat statistically valid across a population, we tend to use standardized tests to predict individual capabilities. As an engineer, would you use one data point to determine the strength of a material?
e. In terms of "fairness" most tests don't tend to be major life events. But tests like the SAT, GRE, and others can determine your whole life by expanding or limiting your options based on that one test. It's those high stakes that make the fairness issue more crucial.
regarding bold above
there was a course i took in university, one of those huge 400-person lecture courses. With a very long mid-term exam. When graded exams were handed back mine had an awful score. I scheduled an appointment with the professor who taught the course, and brought with me the exam with "wrong answers" and also the notes which I had taken during the course. I spent about an hour with him showing how and why i answered the questions he had marked wrong. He changed my grade to an A. And he asked if he could have a copy of my notes so he could use them as a teaching aid for the course.
If the standardized test were a minor part of the education picture people wouldn't care that much. But when weeks of schooling are given up for standardized testing and people are pocketing millions over it with little-to-no benefit for the students, and in many cases an argument for it being a detriment to their education due to loss of education time and loss of meaningful electives, etc., due to standards pressure, etc., people start to balk. Making the tests high-stakes for schools or students and making kids test for a week or two straight every year of their careers is where people rightly start to have issues.
As others have noted, most of these tests, if they are at all consistent in what they test, are coachable, so when they are high stakes for schools and/or kids, they ultimately become measures of teaching to the test and prosperity - i.e. ability to pay for and benefit from higher end coaching. There is little evidence that these tests have ever really raised the bar in a way that truly benefits students, with a few exceptions.
Then there is the question of the what do the data really tell you that is worth all those millions of dollars and millions of hours of lost education time, etc. For the schools, the truth is that the results come back so late - in summer typically - and in forms that tell so little, that the teachers cannot use the data to revise their instruction meaningfully for a particular student or student(s). And using them to track students into course levels raises huge equity concerns - i.e. deciding that a test score in 6th or 7th grade means that a student will not have the chance to learn Calculus before graduation due to math placement is an extreme decision, yet one done to millions of students - moving them away from STEM careers by lowering the bar for them and effectively limiting their career options. Yes, for a particularly motivated student it can be recovered-from but reality is that students placed in lower math are much less likely to think such types of careers are "for" them. While we do want to place students where they need to be, using a one-off test to determine futures is fraught with issues.
a. They can be gamed. There is a method to how standardized tests are designed and students who are coached on "how to take standardized tests" can raise their score significantly. Not that they actually know more or are smarter, but that they've been coached on tricks. Even our local elementary schools spend a significant amount of time on "how to take the test" rather than on learning the material.
.
All that coaching teaches, is test-taking strategy on how to maximize your time on the questions you're most likely to be able to answer correctly. That is not "gaming the system". Showing a student how to leave the toughest (per individual student) questions until the end, and do the questions they can easily answer first, is not a "trick". There are no "tricks"; you still have to be able to answer the majority of the questions correctly. You still need to have the basic skills the test is evaluating.
As to "teaching to the test", most standardized tests have a "follow the pattern" section, showing some kind of geometric sequence, and the student is supposed to analyze each set of patterns, and figure out what the next image in each pattern would be. There is no school course that teaches that. There are a number of sections on tests that are of that type, that assesses logical reasoning. There's no way to teach that.
The only standardized tests a school could teach to, are the ones limited to one or two subject areas, like reading comprehension (which also isn't really teachable; you either know how to read and get the gist of a story, or you don't), or math. Any basic math or algebra course, or whatever, will cover the types of questions on the test. The problem in the US is, that for some reason, algebra, including pre-algebra in middle school, and other advanced math isn't taught in a way that students can understand it. But no "teaching to the test" can possibly help students "get" math.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 03-08-2021 at 07:28 AM..
regarding bold above
there was a course i took in university, one of those huge 400-person lecture courses. With a very long mid-term exam. When graded exams were handed back mine had an awful score. I scheduled an appointment with the professor who taught the course, and brought with me the exam with "wrong answers" and also the notes which I had taken during the course. I spent about an hour with him showing how and why i answered the questions he had marked wrong. He changed my grade to an A. And he asked if he could have a copy of my notes so he could use them as a teaching aid for the course.
This is a strange story. It says scary things about some college professors, or at least, about that particular one you had. It also isn't relevant to the standardized-test topic, but certainly is relevant to the point about interpreting test questions.
What the heck were the "right" answers, in his original view?! What was he thinking??
People do not like Standardized Tests because they or close family members do not, or never have, performed well on these types of exams.
All licensed professions, and many non-licensed ones, rely on such exams to validate a person's ability to perform the required services for clients.
I wonder how many individuals opposed to such exams would be a patient of a Doctor who never sat for State Board exams?
Are these exams perfect? No. But they are the best and most unbiased tool we currently have.
This is a great point. How many people would hire a lawyer who went ahead and set up an independent practice, even though he couldn't pass the ABA exam? I don't think that's even legal to do. Maybe the objection is about too-frequent standardized testing of grade school kids...? Did "No Child Left Behind" require annual standardized testing? The problem is in the policy, not in the tests themselves.
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