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An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

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Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#71

Post by oblio »

SeeDave wrote: post #58
jbscpa wrote: post #15

My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh…

>2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns. I would have appreciated this as my public school experience was rife with negativity, sarcasm, snark, jeering, insulting, etc. I'm not sure what causes such anti-social behavior but I dream of a day where all students can be kind, considerate, polite, and supportive of one another.

Having been brought up in a positive environment, yet full of sarcasm, I'm not sure I buy this argument.

Yes, there must be a balance. But sarcasm and negativity are part of our everyday life as adults and we should learn how to handle them.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#72

Post by johan_larson »

"Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values."

That's a really odd definition of "wisdom". That's more like "unselfishness" or maybe "benevolence".

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#73

Post by ghaff »

stcredzero wrote: post #68
grandalf wrote: post #59

While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years. Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization, diligence, and repeated practice at the expense of general intelligence. When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who…

When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence. I remember being accosted by a squad of students, who were there to make sure I was going to be a good little TA and run my course according to those "rules."

I did some tutoring in a graduate program. There were definitely some students who were, for reasons of academic background or otherwise, barely able to hang on. And they were very focused on exactly what was going to be on tests and what they really needed to know to squeak through.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#74

Post by cperciva »

Standardized tests are a lousy way of deciding things. But at least they're better than non-standardized tests.

At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high school grades. That's grades awarded by high schools -- we used to have province-wide grade 12 exams, but for almost all subjects those were abolished a few years ago. It's widely recognized at the post-secondary level that a 90% grade from some schools means much more than a 90% grade from some other schools; but if anyone is actually adjusting high school grades to account for these differences, they're not admitting it.

Entrance scholarships, and admission in one faculty (Business), is determined partly based on high school grades and partly based on extracurricular activities -- in most cases, volunteer activities. Great, we're bringing in well-rounded students who are dedicated to helping the community, right? No; it turns out that they admit that they're only volunteering in order to pad their resumes -- in some cases because high-priced consultants hired by their parents told them exactly what volunteering they should do and what to say about it when they're writing their scholarship applications. (I've been lobbying for years to get an analysis done of how the rating of student extracurricular activities correlates with the median income of their postal code. I'm still waiting.)

The SAT become popular because it could identify smart kids who would otherwise have been overlooked due to their race, gender, religion, or class. Is it perfect? Hell no. But as we discard standardized tests, I worry that we're moving back to a world where university admission will depend less on aptitude and more on having parents who have the money and the connections to get you the "right" extracurricular experience.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#75

Post by stcredzero »

kartan wrote: post #17

The article mixes two ideas that partially contradict each other. 1. Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE [...] You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place. 2. Do we know how to cultivate wisdom? Yes we do. I agree with the second statement, and its implications are…

If we give people good education and good role models, that people are going to be wiser.

I think the structure, culture, and emergent properties of web forums have shaped out culture in some insidiously highly negative ways. I think that the totalitarian and high censorious nature of many web forums has conditioned entire generations to subconsciously expect the world to have the same totalitarian and high censorious nature.

I see multiple instances of younger people getting "organized" online, only to engage in mass-groupthink stretches of logic and commonsense in order to manipulate some authority to do what they want under threat of their emotional toxicity, or "yellow journalism" style association of that authority with something unsavory. Never mind that what they want contradicts established law, and that their efforts would best be aimed at changing those laws. Many of the same groups of people seem to expect the authorities to have the same absolute and arbitrary power to change laws, regulations, or even the laws of physics in response to their emotional toxicity. (This applies on both sides of the left-right political divide!)

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#76

Post by cbhl »

cperciva wrote: post #74

Standardized tests are a lousy way of deciding things. But at least they're better than non-standardized tests. At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high school grades. That's grades awarded by high schools -- we used to have province-wide grade 12 exams, but for almost all subjects those were abolished a few years ago. It's widely recognized at the post-secondary level that a 90%…

> but if anyone is actually adjusting high school grades to account for these differences, they're not admitting it.

I am pretty sure this was the standard line for campus tours at the University of Waterloo -- that you should take high school exams at your school and not at some diploma mill, because Waterloo did adjust your entrance average based on what high school you came from, and how those students did once they got to university.

(That said, I also heard that there are so many "perfect" candidates that they're contemplating rejecting students at random in order to hit class size numbers, because scaling up requires more lecture halls and more dorms, and those things take years to build out.)

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#77

Post by clock_tower »

johan_larson wrote: post #72

"Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values." That's a really odd definition of "wisdom". That's more like "unselfishness" or maybe "benevolence".

I think it's a tolerably accurate definition; it's almost always more wise to cultivate enlightened self-interest instead of the unenlightened kind. Another generation of the current state of affairs, and the US will probably have another civil war -- and it'd be the height of folly to let things escalate to that point.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#78

Post by stcredzero »

dmix wrote: post #70
stcredzero wrote: post #65

...IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”... A lot of coding pathologies and programming language pathologies seem to be the product of such "smart fools." ( Mea culpa! ) There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Come to think of it, a big chunk of, "The devil is in the details," can be tran…

> There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Do you have any good examples of this in programming? I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust). It's possible that many of the good, e…

Do you have any good examples of this in programming?

The CORBA "sea of objects" concepts infesting Linux distributions and making everything sinfully slow. (Sometime just after Red Hat 7.) My own Smalltalk meta-level "browser helper" wrappers in the "new" ObjectStudio Smalltalk browser. (For making the browser extensible, great, but didn't really have to be instantiated until actually operating on the class.) The Smalltalk-inspired implementation of "everything is an object" by making everything a pointer to a different struct. (Not good for cache coherence!)

I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust).

So it goes. Same thing happened with many OOP concepts -- both good and bad. I'm not saying that everything that rises is scum. The cream also rises. I did not say that all things which seem like good, elegant ideas are actually programming pathologies in disguise.

It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular languages/platforms.

And some of the good, elegant ideas turn out to be bad ones when you start to scale in different ways.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#79

Post by clock_tower »

Terr_ wrote: post #20
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education as job training rather than education for intrinsic value.

Historically speaking, I suspect there's a correlation between "virtue-focused" schooling and bodies of predominantly-upper-class students who are already nearly guaranteed to get an entry-level job in a prestigious field. The study is designed to help them compete inside a more-rarefied social circle. Meanwhile, other students were in apprenticeships or going somewhere that focused on the on the three R's of readin'…

> Historically speaking, I suspect there's a correlation between "virtue-focused" schooling and bodies of predominantly-upper-class students who are already nearly guaranteed to get an entry-level job in a prestigious field. The study is designed to help them compete inside a more-rarefied social circle.

Absolutely. The "liberal" in "liberal education" means "free from having to earn a living" -- education for the independently rich, the ruling class, to ensure that they can rule wisely, justly, and prudently. Those who don't have property yet have always been better off with a technical education -- a category which historically even included law and medicine.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#80

Post by hyperdunc »

pmoriarty wrote: post #28
bbctol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the idea that there was a 'postmodern revolution' in education (or even what that would look like?) What changes are you referring to?

See "The Myth of the Postmodern University" .[1] What the above article is missing, however, is that "postmodernism" in English departments, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, etc, has been long been boogymen among right-wingers like David Horowitz,[2] who don't like criticism or questioning of the oppressive social systems they benefit from and take the position that where such criticism is dominant, conservative an…

Oppressive social systems? You mean like the capitalist patriarchy boogeyman?

I'm all for questioning social systems because goodness knows the ones we have contain many problems.

But the article you linked is from 2004 and out of date with regards to what is happening. Postmodernism in universities is moving into the social sciences and attempting to destroy the bedrock of modern Western civilization.

It wouldn't be so bad if proponents had something better to replace it with - but all they have is a labored version of Marxism that increases racism and segregation, and lowers meritocracy through identity politics. Social equity is the goal, but increased oppression will be the result.

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