The thought has often occurred to me that current federal and state policy was created by people who got high scores on standardized test takers. Maybe they hope to create a pure meritocracy, in which only those who get high test scores rule everyone else. The problem with my theory is that the real consequences of this approach are too dumb to have been created by the smartest people. Maybe they were the ones who got high scores but were nonetheless not very smart, not at all creative, incapable of thinking outside the box, just good test-takers. And they want all the rewards to go to people just like them.
Here is another take by a Montessori teacher:
“The confession of a good test-taker: I never read an assigned book in entirety when I was in high school. It was part of my secret, quiet, rebellion against the obsession of acquiring points and the focus on testing. I remember thinking to myself that these authors, who poured their souls into creating what was now considered a classic, didn’t write their novels so they would one day be plopped into the lap of a teenager whose only focus was getting the most points on a test. However, I still got good grades because I am good at taking tests.
“I learned early on that tests, especially standardized tests, are a game of strategy. When I took these tests, I didn’t do them from the point-of-view of the test-taker but that of the test-maker. My grades and scores were not a reflection of what I knew or how hard I worked but of how well I could play the game of collecting points. I gained enough points to do well at a large suburban school district, be accepted into a good university, and receive a degree.
“I think that today’s reformers loved collecting points and valued it as students. Maybe it helped them understand their world and gave them a sense of order and meaning. The way I perceive my world and what I value is very different; for me, acquiring knowledge and understanding is very personal and private because it becomes part of who I am.
“So here is yet another message to all of the people in power who are “reforming” our nation’s schools; we do not all think like you or value what you do and that is how it should be. Along with the power that you possess, you also have the responsibility to have empathy, humility, understanding, and respect in order to be good leaders.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love this post. Because that’s me for the most part. I was always a great test-taker. I did the ACT and the LSAT without using a single prep book or taking a prep class and did exceptionally well on both (top 10 percentile). I outscored friends of mine that were definitely smarter than me.
For example, I struggled in math in high school. I went to my best friend’s house every night during my sophomore and junior years of high school so he could somewhat tutor me in math. (He once missed 3 weeks of school for a bad case of mono, I gave him our daily homework assignments, he then walked into calculus and took all three tests after school and got 100% on them all.) I outscored him by 5 points on the ACT math section.
I viewed the test as a game as well. I saw it as me versus the test and I would win. What was the test designed to do to “defeat” me. As an athlete, card player and general gamer, this worked beautifully.
I’ll note that I am not the most creative person in the world. My greatest intellectual skills: a freakish memory, planning and strategy, and the ability to discuss other people’s concepts and theories competently. But, man, can I take a test.
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I too am an excellent test taker. There are three things that give me an unfair advantage. One is that I have superb pattern-recognition skills, so even before there were courses and books devoted to helping one achieve on tests I had figured them out. A second is that I have a garbage mind, that if something catches my attention it stays there forever. Thus I know a lot ABOUT stuff that I really don’t KNOW.
Of greatest importance is that I am a natural speed reader. Most of our high stakes tests are timed, and while it is possible with finagling to get extended time for students with IEPs, most never take advantage of that. How fast I can complete a test should not influence the score I obtain, and yet unless a test gives too much time for most people (to the point that they are bored waiting to move on to the next section) some will NOT finish all the sections in the allotted time, and their scores will consequently be lower, even if given enough time they could successfully answer the questions to which they could not get.
I had occasion about 2 years ago to take GREs for the first time in several decades. I was not overly concerned about my scores, and did not really review advanced math, which kept my performance there down about – something like 82nd percentile, while my other scores were 98th – 99th. On no section did I take more than 2/3 of the allotted time, and on several I took far less than half. But the GRE allows you to move on as soon as you complete a section.
Were it timed strictly, and I completed but others did not, would that be a fair indication of their underlying knowledge and skill, presuming (which I do not) that the test potentially can give such valid information absent results being conflated with time factors?
I have to have my AP students practice at the pace at which they will have to work on the AP exam. It is usually not a problem on the constructed responses, but doing 60 multiple choice items in 45 minutes can be a problem for the slower readers.
Just a sampling of what is wrong with our test-obsessed culture.
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teacherken: spot on.
I reinforce one point you made.
The several high-stakes standardized tests I took were not overly difficult for me because given the artificial time constraints—
I was favored. I usually read so quickly that throughout my life people have asked me if I took speed reading, or if I have really and truly read such and such through, or did I actually understand what I read.
In other words, under standardized testing conditions, I had a built-in advantage.
Interesting… guess people are not widgets.
Now how does that fit in the pro-tester paradigm?
😕
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“…for me, acquiring knowledge and understanding is very personal and private because it becomes part of who I am.”
This statement above is profound.
It is as if the insatiable “data dragon” wants to rudely tramp through the private bounds of cognition, extract “learning results”, and twist it into some grotesque quantifiable form, destroying the love of learning in the process, all for profit and power.
Why does any entity have the right to foist this oppressive and manipulative intrusion on our students?
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That is a superb metaphor, readingexchange! It captures so very much–the crudeness of the deformers’ instruments in comparison to the sophistication and complexity of what they are “measuring,” and the violation, the intrusion, upon something that ought to be treated as sacred. Very, very beautifully said. But I REALLY doubt that the folks who support this crap would have ANY IDEA what you are talking about.
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“to rudely tramp through the private bounds of cognition” and “extract “learning results.” Like someone tramping a bed a wild orchids to extract a golf ball.
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Robert:
But what does this mean for compulsory schooling? Doesn’t it suggest ensuring some minimal level of literacy, numeracy and civics and then leaving additional learning to parents, autodidacts and choice to do the rest?
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Those minimal levels will take care of themselves, Bernie, if we treat each child as an individual with his or her own possible trajectories and teach to him or her. Every child should have an IEP and a committee of people overseeing that, working with the parents and the child, throughout the child’s career, to fashion an appropriate trajectory. If we did away with summative testing altogether and replaced it with diagnostic testing MUCH more sophisticated than we have no, with formative testing, and with portfolio work suited to the child, those minimal levels of attainment would, again, be achieved and surpassed as a matter of course.
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Robert:
That is all fine and good, but the rationale for compulsory education is surely undermined – as I am sure John Taylor Gatto would argue.
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Yes, Robert! Standardized testing is a very “crude” form of assessing student learning. The idea that “tests” yield comprehensive and accurate student information is so erroneous I wonder how it has become such an accepted matter-of-course across all levels of education. I know my students as learners, not because I know their test scores, but because I engage with them. I observe them and listen to them as they grapple with new information and ideas. I examine their work and make instructional adjustments, as needed. This formative approach is much more helpful to students and teachers than being “driven” by narrow and flawed standardized test results. (And all tests are flawed … All of them.)
I think “reformers” do understand these principles, however, too many long-term lucrative contracts have been signed with the testing industrial giants. Can you imagine the difficulty of canceling these contracts? This government-sanctioned alliance between public education and profiteers has done so much damage and should be illegal.
Love your metaphor …
“Like someone tramping a bed a wild orchids to extract a golf ball.”
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And, of course, it’s apples and oranges to compare something like “le bac” to these idiotic tests that we give. The former asks substantive questions that require a great deal of actual knowledge but of a kind that can be quite varied from student to student, questions that are answered in widely divergent essays. That’s still not ideal, but it’s certainly a lot better than this junk that we administer–the state tests and the crap that PARCC and Smarter Balanced are creating.
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There’s a Catch-22 here, readingexchange. If the deformers could understand what you are saying here, then they wouldn’t be deformers. Because they can’t understand what you are saying here (and because they are being paid very well NOT to understand), they will persist in their madness.
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The purpose of schooling is to light a fire in each kid. Summative tests are the water we throw on that.
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Robert:
Throughout Europe, summative testing is the primary form of testing and the sine qua non for getting into Universities in most countries. Your brush is too broad. Like most things, it can be both good and bad. Summative testing of 11 year olds I would say is seldom good. Summative testing for 17 and 18 year olds with thoughts of continued education is fine, as long as there are avenues for exceptions, appeals and open enrollment options.
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Bernie 1815,
No country in the world tests its students as frequently as we do. We have now had a dozen years of NCLB. Where are the results of shifting billions away from the classroom and into the coffers of Pearson and McGraw Hill?
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Diane:
You are right that there does seem to be a mania for standardized testing. I don’t know about the billions. But that is beside the point: Finland, the UK, Germany, France all have high stakes, standardized and summative testing that is aligned against a set curriculum and acts to regulate entry into Universities and higher education. Robert is simply giving in to overstatement when he argues that such summative testing does not motivate learning.
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Bernie,
None of the nations you mention tests every student every year. In Finland, there is no standardized testing at all until the end of high school.
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Diane:
I know and I thought that I had acknowledged as much. The point is that these countries do use summative testing that is standardized. As I have said repeatedly you need to define what issues you want to address and then determine whether some form of testing makes sense. Regulating entry into Universities is one issue where most countries see a role for standardized testing of some form.
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Agreed, Bernie. But you probably know that SAT scores are less predictive of college academic performance than high school grades. And many colleges no longer request SAT scores. The purpose of standardized testing for college admission is a selection process, to winnow out the lowest scoring students. That shows why standardized testing is so pointless in K-12, because schools are not winnowing out students. The best tests in K-12 are teacher-made tests, like the ones that all the elite private schools rely on and like the ones that all public schools used to rely on.
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Diane:
The relative potency of GPA and SAT/ACT scores in predicting performance in college is not that clear cut. Willingham summarizes a recent extensive meta analysis that says as much.
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2013/02/what-predicts-college-gpa.html
I am trying to get access to it as I write this.
On-going grade inflation in High Schools will likely further attenuate the relationship between HS GPA and college performance.
I am not sure I would use the term winnowing out. I think they are used in a more confirmatory fashion – as another piece of evidence – though I am certain that a combined SAT score of less than 2000 is not going to get you very far in applying to a top tier school.
As to the use of standardized tests at other grade levels, it really depends on what issue it being addressed. Entry into exam schools, for example, is essentially the same issue as entry into top flight colleges and there may be a role for such tests. On the other hand, using such tests to set AYP goals for schools and teachers is simply a sign of desperation, IMHO, on the part of those administering schools systems that are far too big to be managed coherently.
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Bernie1815, I really wish I could agree that testing 17 and 18 year old students is “fine” and holding their futures in the balance based on the results would be the ethical and correct thing to do. But I can’t because the tests themselves are too flawed and unsophisticated to capture the depth, breath, and complexity of any student’s intellect or even predict their future success.
You, like many, mistakingly believe the premise that test results are a true reflection of the learner. This allegiance to test results must make Pearson very happy.
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readingexchange:
You need to read what I wrote. I am very much aware of the limitations of standardized testing in all its forms – but as I have said to Duane on occasions too numerous to count, their limitations reduces but does not eliminate their usefulness. The point in my response to Robert was that summative testing is very much standard practice in Europe and among the professions in the US.
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RE,
You are quite correct in in asserting “mistakingly believe the premise that test results are a true reflection of the learner”.
The cultural habitus of sorting and separating out students on the basis of “grades” is a long standing, somewhat subtle in the sense that we are so “conditioned”, “habituated” to the practice that very few ever think about questioning it. This sujectivization of our conceptions of ourselves in regards to the schooling process appears so natural and normal when, in reality, it is quite a false and contrived way (considering how totally invalid these processes are) of viewing ourselves.
All paradigms eventually shift and fade out (see Kuhn) and someday, perhaps sooner with a stronger push from those of us who understand the problems, students in this country will not be subjected to such quakery.
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To Duane …
Agreed … “Quackery” indeed!
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Dr. Ravitch,
I suspect that part of the issue with SAT scores and college performance is a lack of variation in SAT scores at most collages and universities.
Because my institution has a very open admissions policy but is a research one university, we have students with ACT scores of 16 and students with ACT scores of 36 (for the folks on the coasts that translates to an SAT scores of 790 and 1600). With that range of scores you do see significant differences in first year GPA, retention, and graduation rates.
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TE:
Yep, at Ivy League Schools you are going to see very little correlation between SAT scores and GPAs because of restriction of range on the SAT.
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Many of us who work in this business were great test takers. And that means that we have something to UNLEARN. It takes sophistication and wisdom to appreciate the diversity and value of divergent ways of being and kinds of minds.
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In addition to having the benefit of not coming from a poor family, but from one that pushed books and valued thinking, I found treating tests as a game of strategy that bore little relationship to what I was actually learning in class and life was a great way to excel at test taking. Like doing crosswords, you need to figure out the text creators’ strategy. So I agree fully with this blog. But then in the 1950s and 1960s my teachers were not being judged by how well their students did on tests, but how educated we had become.
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Test-taking coaches often tell students not to even read the problems, they just look for tell-tale patterns. Diane is right, it’s not about learning, it’s about playing the game (the Pig’s Game, as soldiers used to say in the Vietnam era).
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YUP
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And with computer adaptive tests, the idea is to identify the content areas that are considered “lower order” and navigate through them quickly so that you can make it to the “higher order” content areas. It is just like playing a video game…navigating obstacles…managing your time in order to bank points quickly…
But as Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
The real question in education is how to acquire knowledge and build capacities for divergent thinking at the same time.
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But clearly, people who are claim to be intelligent (on the basis of test scores or whatever) and who work in education policy, should know a LOT MORE than most seem to know about how tests and curricula are created, about statistics, and what effect a bullet list of standards has on curricula and pedagogy.
And the people who presume to write standards for everyone else really ought to know something about best practices in the various domains that they are writing about; about the various cognitive sciences, including the science of language acquisition, that bear upon those; and about the enormous variety of legitimate and valuable approaches to literature, writing, speaking, thinking, etc. The CCSS in ELA were written by amateurs.
The validity and reliability of these tests are accepted without question. The tests and the standards and the evaluation systems were not vetted. No failure modes and effects analysis was performed on them. They were not subjected to national, expert critique. All this stuff was foisted on the nation by a few powerful people with lots of money to spend and in furtherance of a business plan, not educational objectives. Crudeness, ignorance, and arrogance–these are bad enough by themselves, but in combination, they extraordinarily toxic.
And, a lot of the deformers are simply being used in order to create and solidify monopoly positions in the education market. That they can’t see that (it’s pretty obvious) doesn’t speak well for their intelligence. Perhaps those tests weren’t the great instruments they thought they were. Too bad. I did very well on them too. In fact, I will match my test scores against theirs ANY DAY. And then I will explain to them why those test scores are almost meaningless.
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“The validity and reliability of these tests are accepted without question.”
And that, sir, is one of the main problems considering that Wilson has totally destroyed any vestige of validity, and without validity there can be no reliable reliability.
For a shorter takedown of the validity/reliability or should I say the invalidity and unreliability of educational standards and standardized testing see Wilson’s “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” at: http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5.pdf
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Let us distinguish between good tests and bad tests. According to Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World, most tests in Finland are ESSAY tests. It seems to me that these are good for the teacher in that they give a better “x-ray” of the kid’s understanding of a topic than multiple choice tests do. They also are good in that they induce kids to study and get a handle on the material before entering the test session (kids who know they’ll face a multiple choice test know they can often get away with a superficial understanding of the material). My seventh grade history students take essay tests and I know a lot of them, especially the stronger students, relish the opportunity to “re-collect” their thoughts on the material and put it on paper.
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Essay tests may be better, but when you start having everyone write a ton of essays, you start to have problems with length and who is going to grade them.
This coming spring in Utah, all students grades 7 and up will write two full essays, using documents that they will not have seen before. The writers of the test assume that these two essays will take a total of 90 minutes, which is ridiculous. It was take many more hours than that.
Plus, who grades these essays? I just read student essays last week. We use a writing program that helps the kids fix grammar and spelling and such, and then I read the essays for content. A girl got a decent score on the essay, but when I read it, I immediately knew something was up, because no 8th grader uses the terms that were used in the essay. It was completely plagiarized. If I hadn’t read the essays myself, I would never have caught that. So who will grade these?
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Know who was “never much of a student”? The guy who started all of this nonsense via NCLB: George W Bush.
Would Bush’s own teachers have been able to keep their jobs if subjected to his highly misguided education policies?
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1999/11/08/bush.homework.html
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It must have taken poor GW a long, long time to memorize the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
But perhaps you misunderestimate him, Mercedes! (Hee hee) I don’t think so. I don’t think there is any refudiating (hee hee again) what you say here.
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Anyone who can coin a word like “misunderestimate” is a genius, or at least an idiot savant.
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duetsch29, Robert D. Shepherd, and Michael Fiorillo: if I may—
“I fled from the tigers. I fled from the fleas. What got me at last? Mediocrities.” [Bertolt Brecht]
If used as a noun, we live in an era where the mediocrities set the standards [artificial and misleading] of excellence and failure for everyone else—a task for which they are singularly unequipped but not to worry — — they have “no regrets.”
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. Michael Fiorillo: again, I have been contacted by an aggrieved group asking me to intervene on their behalf. The Idiot Savants Protective League has asked me to urge you to quit associating their members with former President G. W. Bush Jr. They feel it significantly lowers their public image. Rumor [unconfirmed, of course] has it, though, that MENSA is quite happy to associate themselves with him as long as their current grant applications to the Gates Foundation go through.
Make$ ₵ent₵…
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Ponderosa:
Ripley is referring to the matriculation exams which are similar to A-levels in the UK. These are genuine high stakes tests and they are subject to the same distortions and issues that standardized tests are though because of the relative emphasis on constructive responses they may have more construct validity than multiple choice standardized tests.
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In the end, it isn’t even grades that matter if one is from a “connected” family.
This from a 2001 _Time_ article (right on the heels of NCLB):
“‘To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, ‘Well done,'” he told Yale graduates before breaking into a grin. ‘To the ‘C’ students, I say, “You, too, can be president of the United States.”‘
“True enough. But it’s a lot easier if your last name is Bush.”
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,127630,00.html#ixzz2llkVv4i8
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My error: NCLB of 2001 signed into law Jan 2002:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/no-child-left-behind/
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Dubya actually said once (I wish I were making this up):
“I solved the education problem in the United States on my first day in office.”
He was referring to NCLB, which he sent to congress on his third day in office, January 23, 2001–a day that will live in infamy–the day of the beginning of the deform movement.
And after 10 years of the utter failure of NCLB, we have now decided to ratchet that up–to do a lot more of that.
Idiotic.
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Like many others here, I could have written this post (especially this bit)
“The way I perceive my world and what I value is very different; for me, acquiring knowledge and understanding is very personal and private because it becomes part of who I am.”
I was very lucky to have been born in a generation when such intrinsic motivation was still valued and encouraged in students. Like Teacher Ken, I also have a “garbage mind”. I never know when little bits of knowledge will be useful so I collect what I can for future use. Loving to learn has had two lifelong benefits apart from whatever economic benefits I have derived. First, I can connect with many types of people since I tend to know a little bit about a lot of things. Most people will find you deeply engaging and intelligent if you talk about things that they find interesting and important. Second, knowledge brings me dignity. No matter what might happen to me in life, I know that no one can ever take away my habits of the mind because they have become (as the anonymous teacher above says) “part of who I am.”
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Does any one know where I can find percentile ranges for the GRE from around 2000??
I know my score but I don’t know where it falls on the scale. I think it was at that time that the test started to use the computer adaptive format.
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May I put in my 2 cents worth. On the other side of the coin. What about people like Thomas Edison and Bill Gates etc. Were they great scholars, test takers, etc? Did these creative people make a contribution to our society? Does the “over emphasis” on tests and test taking stifle that creative urge?
And of course when I was teaching many years ago we were concerned that so very many of our students were cheating. I really do not believe with all the emphasis on testing rather than on learning that cheating has diminished – to put it mildly. Is the goal of education to encourage cheating? Is the “paper chase” what education is about? I think not.
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I have only taken one high stakes, multiple-choice standardized test, the GRE exams. In the 1970s in the UK such tests were and may still be viewed as a peculiar US device and extremely shallow. However, that was by reputation only, since I had no experience and no access to preparation material beyond the little ETS booklet. Despite its manifold limitations, the GRE served essentially to ensure that the admissions folks at Stanford gave my application the scrutiny it deserved. (My situation was a bit like Elle Woods in Legally Blond without the bathing suit video.) Like many Universities in Europe at the time, we essentially only did exams at the end of 3 years. There was not much else the admissions folks could go on besides the reputation of my University and HS exam results that enabled me to get into a pretty good school. I did well enough to earn a free ride. I have to admit the reading comprehension bits are tough when you strongly disagree with the position taken in the extract on a topic you know a lot about. (I doubt this surprises anyone here.)
As I have said, I see Standardized Tests like the SAT and GRE as being imperfect but potentially useful depending on the issue that is being addressed. Only very silly people would claim that they do anything beyond showing that a person can do basic math, has a reasonable vocabulary and can read short articles with understanding while time constrained. What they can do is raise questions about other supposedly more substantive metrics like course grades. If I had had strong math exam results (O-levels and A-levels) but only a modest GRE-Q score, then the Admissions folks could and should have raised questions.
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I am clearly the low person on the intellectual totem pole here. Some off this discussion has been challenging for me. That said, I did enjoy the “Bushisms” !
I had originally planned to post that as a child who read voraciously, if I had had to take a quiz every time I read a book (Accelerated Reader), I would have quit reading. Yuck.
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Standardized tests can be a valuable alternative assessment to teacher assigned grades.
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TE:
I still see standardized tests as additional rather than an alternative to teacher assigned grades.
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I think we are thinking of the two measures the same way. I am thinking of standardized test scores as a kind of second opinion.
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TE:
That works, but not in the sense as when my wife asks if I like the item she just bought. ;D
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Standardized test results … “valuable”? “second opinion”?
No thanks … too many flaws … Wrong premise …
http://www.care2.com/causes/standardized-test-flaws-fail-students.html
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It is not clear to me that teacher assigned grades are any less flawed. Just as an example, one of my sons missed an A in his sophomore English class by two Kleenex boxes.
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The concept of identifying an essential body of knowledge and sharing it to all educators across the country is a positive idea. It allows local school districts to not have to spend their time on that phase of developing their curriculum. In a better world, the local districts would then be allowed to use that information to inform and guide their efforts to prepare their students for academic, personal, and professional success. The system gets off track when the national resource is used to create profit opportunities for testing, charter school, and online course companies; and for belittling teachers to weaken their political strength as unions.
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Well stated.
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I envy all of you here who are good MC test takers. Even when I know a topic inside and out, I still do poorly. I don’t know why I’m not wired well for these tests (probably my anxiety and self doubt) but I have always envied those who could not study at all and come in and get a great grade on standardized exams. Meanwhile, I have never failed an essay exam, presentation, or paper. Give me a pen and paper and I can give you a well written, grammatically correct essay faster than it would take me to go through 10 MC questions. What’s the secret? How do you win the game?
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