I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#191

Post by Jverse » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:36 AM UTC

ajdlinux wrote: post #129

sytelus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the value of gifted programs. All parents innately want their child to be "gifted" but they don't understand what this program really means. They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level. This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more. I th…

I was accelerated by two full grades in primary school when my parents realised that _not_ asking about gifted and talented support was going to cause me mental health issues. My family and my school did _not_ raise their expectations of me unreasonably. I quite enjoyed the rest of my school life, where I performed quite well but I certainly did not have perfect grades or come top of every class. Didn't win the dux/v…

How did you get along with your older peers? An age difference of two years is quite a lot in primary school.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#192

Post by rcxdude » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:42 AM UTC

fungiblecog wrote: post #9

ben509 wrote: post #3

This feels like the literary version of the "what in tarnation would you ever need this new-fangled multiplication for" critiques of common core math. > Holbrook wrote that asking students to guess an author's intent in writing a piece of literature is doomed to be a pointless exercise. It's pedagogy! Students aren't trying to divine the One True Meaning of the piece. They're trying to learn how to read a piece of li…

But they're not being asked to produce a justifiable answer. This is multiple choice with only 1 'correct' answer. The only way to really test comprehension is through essay questions but then the complaints on subjectivity are raised and we're back at standardised multiple choice

They are given a set of answers and are trying to find the most justifiable among them (note that the questions pretty much all have most likely or some other variant of the phrase in them). The student is tasked with evaluating these interpretations of the poem and picking the one which is most justified, which at least required some understanding of the poem and literary terms.

For example,

The poet includes these lines most likely to suggest that the speaker

—F does not wish to be pushed on a swing

-G wants to deal with the situation alone

-H does not often receive help from others

-J is not physically strong

J is the most obviously wrong, as it is at best irrelevant to the lines in question. F is reasonable if you accept the lines as literal, but it's fairly obviously metaphorical (punning off of the phrase 'mood swing'). H seems relevant in that the passage is about receiving help from others, but it's clearly commenting on how she would react to help, not about the likelyhood of receiving it. J seems the most reasonable: the passage is saying she would push back against attempt to cheer her up, and so concluding she would like to be left alone in this mood is a reasonable interpretation.

Note that the final answer doesn't have to be the one the person taking the test would, it just has to be the most justified and reasonable of the one presented. In terms of evaluating skill at interpreting writing and in terms of evaluating interpretations of this writing, this seems a reasonable approach. Essay questions may be better, and indeed the push to multiple choice is almost certainly to reduce the cost of marking as opposed to any other concerns, but these don't seem like terribly designed multiple choice questions.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#193

Post by csunbird » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:43 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #163

_7fvc wrote: post #107

This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%! My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. If you have some stat…

I took the GATE exam in elementary school (which has a similar 98th percentile cutoff) and the test was an absolute joke. Lots of ambiguous pattern matching that I managed to cheese through because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down (FWIW, I didn't end up getting anything out of it, even though I scored in the 99th percentile, because the school closed the program the following year for "la…

>because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down

I think this is what they are actually looking for

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#194

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:45 AM UTC

shaki-dora wrote: post #165

foxfired wrote: post #37

I was always afraid to read any classical work because no matter what you think you read, someone will tell you "Actually..." Then one day I read this beautiful quote about the old man and the sea: > “Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that…

It’s possible to leave traces of whatever inner conflict tortures you in your writing without even knowing. For example, the disdain of the humanities in this thread (and generally on HN and the tech community) is just begging for an explanation, because the stated reasons (entirely useless, plain wrong) are neither true, nor would they seem sufficient to warrant the level of emotion. So there’s something else in the…

> It’s possible to leave traces of whatever inner conflict tortures you in your writing without even knowing.

Identifying those borders on psychoanalysis. Even trained medical professionals have problems with that.

> the disdain of the humanities in this thread (and generally on HN and the tech community) is just begging for an explanation

It's simple - humanities as most of us here were exposed to, have high propensity to bullshit. Bullshit in the On Bullshit (2005) sense - that is, not caring in the slightest whether what one says is true or false.

As for heightened emotions - well, for many of us, humanities at school were not just the first major exposure to bullshit, but also a situation in which you were graded on your ability to eat it and produce more of your own. The dislike may be particularly higher amount STEM crowd because STEM interests are much less tolerant to bullshit - there are right and wrong answers in hard sciences and engineering, and telling them apart is paramount.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#195

Post by skytreader » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

Veen wrote: post #152

kortilla wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those all proved useful though using real empirical based systems. If your programming class was, “what do you think the author meant by this line of code?” with no evidence to support any kind of guess, then yes it would be dumb.

As I said in another comment, at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop rudimentary skills of textual interpretation. You learn what symbolism is and are asked to produce some examples. It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction and variable speeds and the changing mass of trains as they burn fuel when you work out how fast they're going in…

> at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop...skills of textual interpretation

But it is also at this level that multiple-choice tests about which bits of a text mean what (as the original article illustrates) proliferate. It is at this level that the textbook is the One Truth about what a text means. As one other comment points out, at this level there is no recourse but "authority" which is, ironically, detached from the author.

> It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction

This is a false equivalence. When we ignore 'what the poem "actually" means' it opens up interpretation to a colossal array of extremely subjective possibilities. "The curtains are blue" could symbolize anything from the author's depression to his thoughts about the Yuan dynasty. In contrast, the effects of ignoring friction can be objectively proven (if not empirically demonstrated) and would give us a definite answer, no mental gymnastics required.

In real-life engineering, we also tolerate a certain amount of slack and simplification in our models so long as the discrepancy between computation and observation is not so drastic. In this sense, ignoring those variables is tantamount to practice in iterative refinement (you are launching a projectile in an indoors gymnasium; you wouldn't really care if your computation is off by a foot or so because you ignored air resistance and the curvature of the Earth). The simplification can still provide value (not to mention practicality). But eking out an explanation just for the sake of giving an explanation, relegating "the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on" to more advanced levels, is just sloppy scholarship and build poor habits.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#196

Post by goodcanadian » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

evandijk70 wrote: post #184

Out of curiosity, I took the test for the first poem and got all questions correct. I've always been relatively good at standardised tests, and agree they don't always measure something meaningful. The author is being a little harsh, testing reading skills is difficult, and she does not provide a better alternative to evaluate students reading ability. Moreover, based on her comments, I'm pretty sure that if she were…

Well, I could probably figure out all of the "best" answers, but at the same time, I felt only the first question had a choice that was even remotely correct. As you say, it is more of a test of test taking skills than of reading comprehension.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#197

Post by mikojan » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #124

I think few people probably knows how textbooks are written. Given millions of students spend millions of hours on these textbooks, one would expect there is a great care taken in writing textbooks. This is often not true and it was very well described by Richard Feynman. He was so repulsed by the quality of textbooks that this Nobel prize winning physicist decided to be part of committee. To his surprise, in committ…

Nobody has time for that. The hypocrisy rises to heaven when you decry "low level leaf nodes" even though they showed up and you didn't.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#198

Post by netcan » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:47 AM UTC

Funny...

As I write this, the office I work with is abuzz with game of thrones talk. Does Arya fullfil the prophecy. How winter fell to the Starks. If it gets to pints after work it'll be the war of roses, white walkers as a symbol of climate change, dragons as nuclear weapons...

We delve into art we like, insert meaning and extend the stories with our interpretations. Sometimes we hope, imagine or expect that the artist intended it this way. Sometimes we don't. We know this is our own embellishment.

I don't think the stuff the writer is describing is a problem really. It's fine that people understand poems in ways that are unrecognisable to the poet. I think the medium of standardized testing is just awkward applied to metaphorical babble about (possibly) metaphorical art.

You can standardize-test arithmetic, because they's an objective answer.

Poetry & literature classes are about making students engage with stuff. Most teachers won't care if the kids read their own crazy theories into a poem or whatnot.

But... imagine forcing someone who isn't into game of thrones into articulating a metaphorical theory about it. Awkward.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#199

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:49 AM UTC

rland wrote: post #182

TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's call spade a spade: if a literary critic is creating an interpretation that goes beyond what the author intended to convey, they're pulling meaning out of their ass. It's completely arbitrary and has no validity; at best it boils down to psychoanalyzing the author (and the critic is not qualified for that), trying to guess what the author "truly wanted" to say without realizing they want it to say. A simple exp…

“Goes beyond what the author intended to convey” — there is no such thing. What the author intended to convey was exactly what was written. Interpretations differ, and hence a literary critic is born.

There are two things. 1) what the author wrote, and 2) what they meant to write. Whey may have wanted to communicate something but failed at it. As long as the author is alive, or as long as they left notes or explanatory works, you can learn it. But going beyond these two things and claiming "this is what's in the text" is where literary criticism becomes bullshit.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#200

Post by kabouseng » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:50 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #123

_7fvc wrote: post #107

This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%! My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. If you have some stat…

> She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%! > My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. Either one of these is wrong, or they somehow managed to craft a test where the score percentage matches the score percentile, which while possible to engineer is somewhat improbable and also contradicts the next sentence: > For a first grader to score…

It's a form of Goodheart's law [1]. If you use the test scores to select for gifted students and the requirement is this high you will only select for highly test prepared students (the set of prepared and gifted or prepared and capable students). You're final student selection will be higher correlated to preparation and less to how naturally gifted a student is. This is not necessarily a bad thing though.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law