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I think that standardized tests are best for determining a student's ability to understand relationships and reasoning type problems and for students having good reading comprehension. This tends to favor students with an aptitude for math and the physical sciences and also those with good reading comprehension skills.
Standardized tests aren't much good for predicting who is going to be a success at creative type courses or careers.
The earlier test question posted by someone about which one did not fit with the other two: "high school, high school student, or college" was a good question involving reasoning to understand basic relationships.
Clearly, the one that did not fit was "high school student". The other two answers are clearly institutions of learning while "high school student" is a student at one of the institutions. If you picked "college" as the outlier, then that shows that your thinking was shallow. You simply looked for similar words "high school" rather than understanding what the words represent.
Perhaps if they had shown a picture of two different buildings and one student and asked you to pick the outlier, then the answer would have been obvious to everyone, but by including the words "high school" in two of the choices, they enticed the shallow thinker to simply pick an answer based on similar wording rather than on their meaning.
I think that standardized tests are best for determining a student's ability to understand relationships and reasoning type problems and for students having good reading comprehension. This tends to favor students with an aptitude for math and the physical sciences and also those with good reading comprehension skills.
Standardized tests aren't much good for predicting who is going to be a success at creative type courses or careers.
The earlier test question posted by someone about which one did not fit with the other two: "high school, high school student, or college" was a good question involving reasoning to understand basic relationships.
Clearly, the one that did not fit was "high school student". The other two answers are clearly institutions of learning while "high school student" is a student at one of the institutions. If you picked "college" as the outlier, then that shows that your thinking was shallow. You simply looked for similar words "high school" rather than understanding what the words represent.
Perhaps if they had shown a picture of two different buildings and one student and asked you to pick the outlier, then the answer would have been obvious to everyone, but by including the words "high school" in two of the choices, they enticed the shallow thinker to simply pick an answer based on similar wording rather than on their meaning.
The question is: Which does not fit: high school; high school student; college.
Your answer is High school student doesn't fit because high school and college are institutions and therefore claimed that someone who said "college" doesn't fit is a shallow thinker. The problem is, you could just as easily turn that around and say that college doesn't fit. After all a high school student attends a high school and not a college, therefore the logical fit is high school goes with high school student and college is obviously the one that doesn't fit. And anyone who doesn't see that is a shallow thinker.
You have presented a great example of a flaw in standardized testing.
The question is: Which does not fit: high school; high school student; college.
Your answer is High school student doesn't fit because high school and college are institutions and therefore claimed that someone who said "college" doesn't fit is a shallow thinker. The problem is, you could just as easily turn that around and say that college doesn't fit. After all a high school student attends a high school and not a college, therefore the logical fit is high school goes with high school student and college is obviously the one that doesn't fit. And anyone who doesn't see that is a shallow thinker.
You have presented a great example of a flaw in standardized testing.
The question is not "Which institution does the high school student attend?" The question is "Which of the three is different from the other two?".
If you were asked "Which of the three is different from the other two" and were shown a picture of a horse, a cow, and a horseracing jockey, which would you pick as being different? I would pick the jockey as being different because the other two are animals. I suppose that you would pick the cow since, by your logic, the horseracing jockey could ride the horse.
The second problem is that standardized testing favors students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds whose parents have the resources to get them the ACT/SAT prep books and courses. It can also work against minority groups who are more likely to come from districts with fewer resources and students with lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Again, what is needed is to either incorporate the SAT/ACT prep classes into the regular high school curriculum at all high schools, or find a way to offer such courses to students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
And, I will go back to my original question: whenever I mention that having the hard AP Bio teacher cost me at least one scholarship, I'm just told life isn't fair, and I'm told that it has no impact on my adult life. Based on that logic, why aren't students who underperform on the SAT/ACT just told that life isn't fair, and/or that it will have to impact on their adult life?
I thought so. That's why I mention that elsewhere. There's a racial stereotype that white's didn't pick cotton. In the South, until after the depression and WW2, a great deal of agriculture was done by sharecropping. Black, white, etc. Race didn't matter; they were all labor on the farms. As kids we all came up the same way. We all fit the same economic status. But all of us had two parent families that expected us to learn in school and be better off than our parents were. Sorry, that relates to a different thread going on at the same time.
I was under the impression that sharecroppers were mostly freed slaves. I'm sorry if I offended you.
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Which is why I prefer the English system of relegation to the playoff system. Consistency is more important than a single day's event.
But the point you are missing is that, even within the same school, classes are not graded consistently. Which do you think is more fair? The current NFL playoff system where every team plays by the same rules, but one bad game during the playoffs ends your season? Or a system that avoids winner takes all playoffs, but assigns random rules to teams, where one team gets 6 points for a touchdown, and another team, playing the same game, gets only 5 points and is not allowed to attempt a 2 point conversion? Obviously the former is more fair, even if it's flawed. I know you will next say that the goal is not fairness, but rather assessment of ability. But how can you accurately compare the ability of 2 football teams if they are not playing under the same rules?
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In general I agree with what you said there. To me, the best measure is consistency over time and across multiple courses/teachers.
Would you at least agree that there needs to be nationwide policies as far as grading, so that all students are graded under the same system, even if they aren't taking the same exams? For example, nationwide cutoffs as to what is an A, what is a B, etc, how to round borderline grades, what the penalty should be for mis-spelling, etc.
Because it's not a common yardstick. Here's an example, and this is a true story. There was a boy in elementary school, in an economically disadvantaged area. A word problem on a standardized test asked to take the number of meals you normally eat in a day and multiply it by the number of days in the week. This boy knew what 3 times 7 was. But the problem was that he didn't know how many meals people normally eat in a day. Because he didn't get to eat 3 meals a day. In his world, people didn't get that luxury. So the test was not a measure of his mathematical ability.
That's just a lousy question, not a flaw with standardized tests. A teacher could have just as easily written that exact same question. The difference is, for whatever reason, when a teacher writes such a question, a student who doesn't have 3 meals per day will just be told that life isn't fair, and that the teacher can write whatever exams he/she chooses. But when it's a standardized tests, it's treated like it's a huge injustice. And I don't understand why the difference.
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My own daughter is in the gifted and talented program, including advanced math. She got a question a few weeks ago that said if a picture is X inches wide and Y inches long and has a 3 inch mat, write a formula to find the area of the picture and the area of the picture and mat. Here's the thing...my daughter had no idea what a picture mat was. It was a homework problem, and I could explain it, but if it were a test question, she would have gotten it wrong.
But she should be able to figure it out based on context. But my point remains: a teacher could just as easily have that question on an exam, as it can be on a standardized tests. Why is it that you seem ok with a teacher putting such a question on a test, but not ok with it being on a standardized exam?
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I am not against a standardized measurement of ability. But most of these tests are horrible. BTW, I'm a former educator.
So that explains your bias.
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I've seen the tests. They are not an accurate assessment.
And the tests that teachers write are not an accurate assessment either.
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And most aren't even developed by people with education experience.
My kids do very well on these tests (95% or better), but I still think they are horrible.
And I think that most teacher written exams are horrible.
I think that standardized tests are best for determining a student's ability to understand relationships and reasoning type problems and for students having good reading comprehension. This tends to favor students with an aptitude for math and the physical sciences and also those with good reading comprehension skills.
Standardized tests aren't much good for predicting who is going to be a success at creative type courses or careers.
The earlier test question posted by someone about which one did not fit with the other two: "high school, high school student, or college" was a good question involving reasoning to understand basic relationships.
Clearly, the one that did not fit was "high school student". The other two answers are clearly institutions of learning while "high school student" is a student at one of the institutions. If you picked "college" as the outlier, then that shows that your thinking was shallow. You simply looked for similar words "high school" rather than understanding what the words represent.
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.
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Perhaps if they had shown a picture of two different buildings and one student and asked you to pick the outlier, then the answer would have been obvious to everyone, but by including the words "high school" in two of the choices, they enticed the shallow thinker to simply pick an answer based on similar wording rather than on their meaning.
I guess you are saying that my teacher was a shallow thinker, since she wanted "college" as the answer.
The question is: Which does not fit: high school; high school student; college.
Your answer is High school student doesn't fit because high school and college are institutions and therefore claimed that someone who said "college" doesn't fit is a shallow thinker. The problem is, you could just as easily turn that around and say that college doesn't fit. After all a high school student attends a high school and not a college, therefore the logical fit is high school goes with high school student and college is obviously the one that doesn't fit. And anyone who doesn't see that is a shallow thinker.
You have presented a great example of a flaw in standardized testing.
But this was a teacher written exam, not a standardized tests. You just presented a great example of a flaw in teacher written tests.
The question is not "Which institution does the high school student attend?" The question is "Which of the three is different from the other two?".
If you were asked "Which of the three is different from the other two" and were shown a picture of a horse, a cow, and a horseracing jockey, which would you pick as being different? I would pick the jockey as being different because the other two are animals. I suppose that you would pick the cow since, by your logic, the horseracing jockey could ride the horse.
I remember hearing in the news about a girl who wanted a horse, and her parents said no, so she trained a cow to act like a horse. So one can argue that choosing either cow or jockey is not thinking outside the box.
One other thing that nobody has mentioned is that standardizes tests are inherently fairer, since they are graded either by a machine or by a stranger that has no bias. Teacher written exams are graded by the teacher, who is going to be biased in favor or against certain students, and grade some students more harshly, even if it's something that they do subconsciously.
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