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An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

scientificamerican.com

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

#81

Post by cperciva »

cbhl wrote: post #76
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 th…

Sorry, I should have elaborated. My understanding is that Toronto, Waterloo, and a few other top universities in Ontario have had a "black book" of this nature for a long time. I'm not aware of any universities in BC admitting to doing the same thing.

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

#82

Post by mturmon »

Shivetya wrote: post #16

Look at the hundreds of billions of dollars the DOE has spent since its inception under President Carter and ask, why have scores and graduations rates not show real improvement? Why are we still asking the same questions we did back then? If there were one Federal agency in dire need of dissolution it is that one. Give the money to states in grants and see which one comes up with the better solution

What if your kid lives in one that comes up with the worst solution?

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

#83

Post by SeeDave »

oblio wrote: post #71
SeeDave wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The best way to handle sarcasm and negativity is, in my opinion, to reduce contact and/or interaction. To not reward such behavior and instead choose to associate with positive people.

The problem is that school-kids are forced into repeated, unsupervised interactions where they are often deliberately and persistently targeted by aggressors.

Out of curiosity, what purpose does sarcasm serve you? What do you get out of sarcastic interactions?

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

#84

Post by cheetos »

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%…

I knew a classmate who openly admitted to putting made up volunteer activities on her college applications, arguing there was no chance the school would fact check her. She was right!

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

#85

Post by SeeDave »

merpnderp wrote: post #63
SeeDave wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

My school wasn't rife with it. Maybe only half my teachers used sarcasm, mockery and negativity towards students.

Half of teachers being outright hostile to students is far too many, in my opinion.

How does this behavior positively impact the lives of their students? Do they not understand the psychological damage they can be inflicting? Do they simply not care?

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

#86

Post by chrisseaton »

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%…

> At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high school grades

Do you not interview the applicants though? I think the best thing to do is to set a basic requirement for grades from their highschool, then get people in and ask them to take your own tests and give them an interview with one of the teaching staff to make your own judgement about whether they're suitable or not.

Accepting someone to be your student for four years without ever having met them is as crazy as any other problems.

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

#87

Post by bluGill »

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…

Java (1.0) had checked exceptions, if you threw something you had to say what it was in your interface. It Seemed like a good, elegant idea: if I use your API I know exactly what exceptions I need to watch for. It works well in trivial programs, but in anything larger it fails because adding a new exception to something core requires thousands of modifications to the API specification for an exception that I will catch only in a few places.

I think Java has made some improvements on this since 1995, but I haven't done java since then so I don't know what.

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

#88

Post by kyleschiller »

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…

Yeah, people with law degrees are probably overrepresented in politics, but pre-med?

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

#89

Post by lr4444lr »

bbctol wrote: post #7
pnathan wrote: post #2

The ancient Western word for this is virtue : to cultivate virtues as part of an education. It's not a novel concept, but it rather got shot in the head in the postmodern revolution in education, and we're a lesser society for it.

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?

I think the parent comment is overstating the case, but the insinuation of critical race theory into some administrators' thinking is very troubling.

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

#90

Post by germinalphrase »

We need reliable ways to measure student achievement, knowledge and skill level. If we're not satisfied with the cost and negative externalities of standardized testing, then IMO we should be seeking ways to make the assessments that teachers are using in their lessons more accurate and trustworthy. We're already paying people to do the work, but we just don't trust the results. That's the problem - so let's fix it.
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