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)

#281

Post by throwawaymath » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #238

atian wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.

There are somewhat few notable people from MENSA... It is not a great standard for giftedness, more of a smart people club. People who do things are more often than not either too busy to join this club or see no point in it.

What I'm reading from your comment is that you have a strong, implicit association between "giftedness" and "notability" - perhaps the latter taking the form of socially recognizable achievement.

Speaking as someone who was in a gifted program in my youth (and who knew others in more advanced programs), I would like to caution against this perspective. My achievements are not notable, and I would not use that as a heuristic for determining whether or not a particular program/standard is successful or useful. Yet I found my experience to be very positive. Despite the fact that not all programs are created equal, I would generally recommend a suitable one to any parent with a gifted child.

I understand MENSA is a bit loaded since it can come across as pretentious, so let me reframe the example for you. Take a look at past winners of the Putnam exam. Most of them are not nearly as notable as cperciva[1], but they're all demonstrably gifted.

Giftedness is not about being entrepreneurial or about how you apply your intelligence in a notable way. Programs designed for gifted people are not trying to create a class of people who are more impressive. In general, they try to foster natural talent in a way that cannot typically be accommodated in the modal classroom setting.

________________

1. For those unaware I'm referring to Colin Percival, an HN user who designed scrypt and developed Tarsnap. He won the Putnam.

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

#282

Post by cascom » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:40 PM UTC

1. I think it’s generally sort of amusing to see a bunch of STEM oriented people (who generally are less than sympathetic to people who are math or computer illiterate) take the position that the art subjects they probably struggled with are BS

2. I actually think many creators/authors of art are sometimes least well positioned to describe its cultural implications/significance

3. As everyone here knows standardized tests are less about the perfect/correct answer, but rather the least bad vs the other choices

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

#283

Post by snazz » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #142

dragonwriter wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too bad I can't read it because HN quotes suck on mobile HN quotes are fine on mobile. But, just to be clear, this is how HN does quotes: “quoted text” And this is how HN does code blocks def this_is(code) not_a_quote end HN code blocks abused for long prose quotations suck on mobile (and aren't appealing on desktop, either), but that's abusing code blocks.

You'd have a point if the quote in question was a long prose quotation. It isn't; it's a poem and code formatting is often the only way to get poetry to appear reasonable.

HN gobbles up literal new lines without code blocks so either the poem would all run together or have blank lines between each line.

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

#284

Post by rayiner » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:47 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #234

I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive. Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. Hell, I'm pretty certai…

That was not my experience. I went through a libertarian phase in college and wrote lots of papers that were rather contrarian. I always got "As." Of course you can't just say "the text is boring" or that "you don't see talent in it." That's a really dull thing to say. You need to be able to understand the status quo well enough to be able to articulate it on its own merits, and then go beyond that to explain why you disagree. (And that's an important life skill! If you can't articulate your opponent's argument as well as they can, you can't hope to persuade them to change their mind.)

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

#285

Post by mikorym » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

I don't know if this holds in national exams or in many countries, but my teacher used to follow logical argument and would score that.

I do remember a few cases where there were outright red question marks when essentially I was trying to make elaborate con arguments.

Fortunately, we had no multiple choice questions for any of our three English tests.

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

#286

Post by TallGuyShort » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

jtms wrote: post #139

_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 was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.

I think there's a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they're outliers. If you're going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don't make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I'm screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don't know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it's strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A's in the gifted program, and D's in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D's so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not gifted.

Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don't just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they're doing to kids...

edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I've obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.

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

#287

Post by ordinaryperson » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

> Dose of reality: test makers are for-profit organizations

The College Board, the maker of the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, is a not-for-profit organization. While the test in question the author refers to is the Texas state assessment tests (STAAR), it is factually incorrect to say test makers are for-profit organizations.

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

#288

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:53 PM UTC

_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…

Is the test out of 100%?

I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it.

Why don't they make it harder and differentiate more easily?

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

#289

Post by rayiner » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

ascar wrote: post #254

sametmax wrote: post #234

I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive. Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. Hell, I'm pretty certai…

> Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. I absolutely agree with this. This was a constant source of frustration for me in literature classes. I enjoyed exploring alternative solutions and answers. Most science teachers encouraged that, even though th…

I think that part of the article actually perfectly captures why the author's argument is wrong. Nobody cares why she put the stanza break where she did. That's not what the question is asking. The question is asking about the objective effect of the stanza break in the context of the poem. All the student is being asked to do is recognize that there is an (objective) shift in subject from one stanza to the other, and recognize what those subjects are. Moreover, the student is only being asked to choose the best answer out of the four presented, not to derive the "correct" answer.

Out of the answer choices, only one (C) fits:

> A. compare the speaker's schedule with the train's schedule [incorrect because the first stanza isn't about the speaker's schedule]

> B. ask questions to keep the reader guessing about what will happen [incorrect; the only questions in the poem are rhetorical]

> C. contrast the speaker's feelings about weekends and Mondays [correct, because the first stanza mentions feelings about the weekend, while the second is about dread for Monday]

> D. incorporate reminders for the reader about where the action takes place [incorrect, because both stanzas take place in the reader's bed]

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

#290

Post by everdrive » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #234

I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive. Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. Hell, I'm pretty certai…

>And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don't. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what's school is supposed to teach.

I completely agree with this, but just want to note that it's possible to do this properly. Usually this happens in college. The societal approval must still be taught, but it ends up being a discussion unto itself. "This writing style was popular at the time, and people had the following social expectations for men and women of the upper class, and these were informed by the following social movements, etc, etc." A real discussion of why this work gained so much esteem allows for constructive criticism, or might even help a student to understand a work that would have otherwise been impenetrable.

[edit]

If anyone's read "The Rape of the Lock" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock), this is a great example of a work that would have been impossible for me to understand without a great literature teacher an some historical and contextual education. The social norms, expectations, and how someone would politely and indirectly talk around them would have been completely impossible for me to grasp if I were left to my own devices.