Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
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Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#2Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#3As a guy who's just been building a robot for a class instead of doing an exam - YES PLEASE!
But I'm probably not a "kid" anymore and college exams have never been all that standardized ...
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#4I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic stats on the questions.
We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bunch of math, trying to find out how many questions there were per section, or how many multiple choice there were in total, basic things like that.
I got in more trouble than I could have ever imagined. The teacher nearly screamed at me for doing math, and threatened to take me to the principle to have me removed from the exam permanently. She feared I was cheating, and forbade me from doing any more math that day outside the strict testing times.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#5Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.
This. Public projects that don't produce sizable sums of bogus data aren't worth it for candidates to support.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#6Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.
Don't forget - realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores.
Why they can't just show a map of median household income (which is a pretty good proxy for standardized test scores) is beyond me.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#7I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic stats on the questions. We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bu…
Reminds me of my primary school's request to my parents that they stop me from having access to books at home as it was making me difficult to teach.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#8There are a number of schools which are now refusing to participate in their states' "mandated" testing. There are a number of conditions that have to be in place for a school to take this step:
- The school has to be really good at educating students. It has to be clear to visitors that high-level learning is happening every day. The school must be able to prove that all of its students make a successful transition to their post-high-school lives. A successful transition means the student has set goals for what they want to do after high school, and their high school education allows them to move on to these goals.
- Administrators, and teachers, must not fear losing their jobs. This is much like the programming world, where the best programmers don't have to submit to stupid managerial decisions because they can always find meaningful work elsewhere.
PG encouraged people to replace universities in his PyCon keynote. When asked about replacing high schools, he laughed and said something along the lines of, "Don't touch high schools. That is way too difficult." I think we fix high schools the same way we fix everything else on PG's list - don't attack the big problem itself, just attack a piece of the problem. Build on your successes, until your model of how to run high school is so compelling that everyone else has to use it.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#9Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.
Don't forget - realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores. Why they can't just show a map of median household income (which is a pretty good proxy for standardized test scores) is beyond me.
1) They don't show median household income because that would discriminate against the poor, or some line of thought like that. 2) The reason that standardized test scores are shown isn't because people are really interested in the tests, but rather that they act as a proxy for the quality of the area; you don't get much in the way of gang violence in areas where kids do well on tests, generally.
There really should be a better way of measuring the quality of an area, but I can't say I see an obvious one.
Re: Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests
#10[deleted]