Not totally unrelated: Pearson is a piece of trash company. They sell very overpriced textbooks and always use DRM in online copies. They lobby for standardized tests in states and get them mandated. Students are put through them. And guess who provides the certificate required by teachers to evaluate those exam copies? Yes, Pearson. And they make a ton of money. Please watch this talk for more context (even if you d…
> They lobby for standardized tests in states and get them mandated. Students are put through them. This is totally false. State standardized test is the natural consequence of state public education accountability system. There must be a comparable measure across all the public schools in the state as the foundation for accountability measurements. And all (>95%) the students must be tested for equity reasons. No ma…
Standardized tests can be a window in the performance and health of the overall system, or over a group of students, but it is not reasonably determinate of the knowledge level of an individual student. Which is how they are often used
In the beginning it was used to judge the performance of a teacher or school, today is it used to judge the performance of the student something it is not really equipped for.
This is similar to BMI, BMI is useful as a health metric on a population of people, but is not very useful as a metric on the health of an individual