An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

Post by pzh » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #119

pzh wrote: post #96

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The problem with these is that they couldn't have been significant enough to make a dent in the outcome. Pretty much all significant achievements are fact-checkable. E.g. you may falsely claim that you were doing karate or basketball, but if you did win any trophies, then most selective schools wouldn't care about you.

You might be surprised. I was on the committee which adjudicated major entrance scholarships for six years, and I can count on my fingers the number of times someone said "can we get some verification of this?" We've never thought that fraud was a common problem, and when you're competing to recruit the top students you really don't want to go back to them and accuse them of dishonesty.. And (although we're revising…

Post by jacobolus » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

SeeDave wrote: post #83

oblio wrote: post #71

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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 o…

Post by yorwba » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 2:52 AM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #138

kyleschiller wrote: post #91

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Yeah, I don't think Sternberg is advocating for ending standardized testing: "My colleagues and I developed assessments for creativity, common sense and wisdom... we doubled prediction [accuracy] for academic performance, and with Kaleidoscope we could predict the quality of extracurricular performance, which the SAT doesn’t do." It sounds like he just wants to reform them, and has some strong initial results to sugg…

Any metric can be gamed. It only works until people figure out how.

Post by criddell » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 3:02 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #146

nharada wrote: post #142

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What's wrong with doing a bunch of stuff instead of being the best? These kids are in high school, maybe they just wanna try out a bunch of clubs and see what interests them in college and beyond.

There is nothing wrong with that, but why should trying out a bunch of stuff make someone more eligible for a scholarship?

Post by yorwba » Sat, Jun 03, 2017, 3:16 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #100

barrkel wrote: post #95

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As we all know, people never judge based on looks or accent or verbal word choice. We select for talent even if it's from someone with a different culture and social mileau to us, right?

Well there's no need to be so sarcastic and snarky. I did say some universities administer their own tests, so that's as objective as a test normally can be (not perfect), and probably more objective than one administered across different schools as people have already said. I don't think it would be unreasonable to combine that with an interview. Teaching is a personal thing - academics will want to check that they…