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

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

#411

Post by Bartweiss »

rayiner wrote: post #335
mannykannot wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we are looking at different versions of the article (or did you intend to reply to ascar?) In the test quoted at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad... , Question 35 is this one: 35 The imagery in lines 16 through 19 helps the reader understand – A the shift in the speaker’s attitude B the speaker’s unpleasantness C why the speaker has no friends D what the speaker thinks of others

Sorry, I thought you meant "next question" in my link, not the article. As to Question 35 in the article: that is testing if you know what "imagery" means. What is imagery? It's using words to convey a sensory impression or feeling. B is the only one that describes a sensory impression or feeling. > A the shift in the speaker’s attitude It's not A, because the cited lines contain no reference to any shift. The rest o…

Interestingly, it looks like the author actually did get this one wrong.

I think her answers to several of the other questions are a bit obtuse - she's not actually unable to answer the questions, just showing how several answers could potentially relate while ignoring an obvious best. But her response here chooses C as 'obvious', then discusses how B could also apply. Even with a solid rationale for rejecting C, it's not a fantastic sign if a professional author addressing her own work genuinely gets the answer wrong.

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

#412

Post by xtian »

macspoofing wrote: post #313
xtian wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a good test taker, the answers they want are clear, but that’s not the point. The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something. If the goal of education in a democratic society is to produce an informed, well-rounded electorate…

The problem is you're trying to educate millions of kids and you want some common standard to judge them against (to figure things out like college admissions). You can't just say "put down whatever and we'll judge it by how you feel or how I feel". Besides, you're not testing their artistic abilities, you're testing learning comprehension and and things they learned in English class. Do you know that we're graduatin…

My point is that conditioning children to think of art in this formulaic way can only be attributed to ignorance or malice. There is no need to test for reading comprehension using a banal interpretation of poetry.

For evidence of the significance of art in the human experience, check the historical record. The oldest musical instruments are something like 50,000 years old. As far as I know, similar artifacts were not produced by any other hominids. On both the societal and the individual level, creative inspiration has done more to help people exceed their boundaries than any systemized rubric ever has.

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

#413

Post by MandieD »

btown wrote: post #301
rayiner wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

More generally, even though the question says "why did the author...," the REAL question is "can you detect patterns well enough to understand that the test makers use very particular skin-deep definitions of 'compare/contrast/purpose,' and how to tease out something that will please them from a set of unstructured data." Is that a legitimate question? Kind of. In fact, it's very close to the type of thing that most…

Once I was introduced, via an SAT prep book, to the idea that the objective was not "what is the right answer to this SAT Verbal section question" but "how would Priscilla, who is the blandest person imaginable, answer it," I crushed it. 1490 on the PSAT, 1600 on the SAT.

I am not brilliant, but am a fantastic test taker.

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

#414

Post by kradroy »

MockObject wrote: post #403
kradroy wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned this in freshman interpretation class in college. In the beginning I fought against the TA (English PhD candidate) teaching the class and I ended up with Cs on my assignments. Then midway through I started playing her game. "Oh yeah, that cushion represents a vagina; the broom a phallus! Cinderella has a conundrum - her Electra complex will remain unresolved because her birth mother is dead and her father w…

Seems like a perfectly reasonable comment, nevertheless being silently downvoted. Mysterious.

I've found that some users here hate flippant views and actions for no reason other than to feel superior and principled. I've broken an unspoken rule in the hackernews game.Or maybe my analysis of Cinderella surfaced some unresolved penis envy.

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

#415

Post by cardiffspaceman »

Bartweiss wrote: post #392
yomly wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really liked this post and really hit me deep, given that I grew up hating all "arts"-based subjects only to discover in my 20s that I loved them, but lacked the correct mental model to appreciate them growing up. The concept that education on arts can bias certain mindsets definitely resonates with me as I struggled with English as a child and I recall struggling to grok what a "sentence" was: once a teacher explain…

This is one of my favorite takes ever on the way we teach literature K-12: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2112 I definitely had some English teachers who were simply bad . Your 'sentence' experience resonates with my teacher who insisted that the five sentence "hamburger" paragraph format was inviolate and marked any paragraph shorter than five sentences as 'incorrect'. (Good luck obeying dialogue rule that way...) B…

I thought you were headed to a thesis that testing is driving teaching, which would be supported by examples like, "practice writing brief essays without referencing the text - because that's what standardized tests require"

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

#416

Post by sli »

When I was looking for one of the poems mentioned, I found what appears to be a sample test[0] (or perhaps one of the past tests the author mentions) with the poem and questions about it. I figured some of you folks might like to take a look.

[0]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/scschoolfiles/200/a_real_case_1.pdf

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

#417

Post by dragonwriter »

rayiner wrote: post #278

The whole poem and questions are here: https://www.jiskha.com/questions/1027961/Midnight-by-Sara-Ho... . Frankly, I think the author is being a bit disingenuous. Question 5 for example: What function does the stanza break serve? She says she put it where it is because she's a performance poet and thought it should go there. One, that isn't the question. The question isn't asking about the author's subjective state of…

> But to an objective observer

“objective observer” is a phrase that indicates a failure to understand either objectivity or observation, but, in the context of a reader of a written text, a distressingly common failure in the society that views the narrowest forms of biblical literalism (and also, arguably, Constitutional textualism) as even coherent, much less correct.

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

#418

Post by usgroup »

singingboyo wrote: post #410
usgroup wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with the same percentage score will obviously be in the same percentile ... so if you have a limited number of places and everyone scores the same mark, then the fact that you’re filtering by a percentile doesn’t help you in the slightest: it’s tantamount to picking at random. If none scores 99% then you just don’t take anyone ... in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch. I don’t think tha…

Differentiation between candidates with equal scores is probably done by going through applications and whatever subjective info is provided there. That can be effectively random, but there's not much of an option at that point. > in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch. Yes, and they will. My understanding is it's still a normal school, just with a special selection of students; what are they g…

Lol, this is getting a bit hypothetical... but running a "gifted" programme for a selection of kids that score 0% in the test sounds like a waste of time. I think you'd reasonably be better off just not doing it.

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

#419

Post by Bartweiss »

cardiffspaceman wrote: post #415
Bartweiss wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my favorite takes ever on the way we teach literature K-12: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2112 I definitely had some English teachers who were simply bad . Your 'sentence' experience resonates with my teacher who insisted that the five sentence "hamburger" paragraph format was inviolate and marked any paragraph shorter than five sentences as 'incorrect'. (Good luck obeying dialogue rule that way...) B…

I thought you were headed to a thesis that testing is driving teaching, which would be supported by examples like, "practice writing brief essays without referencing the text - because that's what standardized tests require"

That's definitely part of what I'm driving at. I didn't mean to blame individual teachers, and on re-reading that should have been clearer. If I were to distill this to a thesis, I'd go with:

"Education, particularly in literature, is seriously worsened by structural limitations teachers can't control."

Standardized tests are a big part of that, and I do think "analyze this book in detail without access to the text" is a singularly useless task that actively rewards shallow thought. Multiple choice analysis questions are another problem, especially "what did the author intend by this passage" questions which set people up to totally misunderstand 'death of the author' later. Less directly, test questions like "compare and contrast the handling of death in two novels" put teachers under pressure to cover laundry lists of themes so that their classes will have something relevant to write about - which gets in the way of any other kind of focused study, like reading theory or following one author across multiple works.

But standardized tests aren't the only structural pressures which crop up regularly. I mentioned consistent homework and daily class periods - discussing "yesterday's reading" for a book like 1984 is a ridiculous approach, but there's relatively little room for finishing and then discussing books, or choosing a few key check-ins mid-book. (And these problems all tie together: with more time for theory, you might do that in class while reading at night. With better cross-class organization, you might offer lots of reading some nights while shorting other classes, then no reading on other nights.) Short grading periods and always-visible Blackboard grades drive time-wasting assignments; I've heard plenty of teachers say that they gave out tasks just to have baseline grades for the first interim report. The lack of block scheduling means every class is effectively I could go on at enormous length, but that's the gist. For all that schools demand cutting-edge educational practices (which are often bunk), testing and organizational demands leave teachers with worse learning arrangements than your average book club.

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

#420

Post by e12e »

skookumchuck wrote: post #58
dejaime wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good analogy. It's really hard to "measure knowledge," and in my humble opinion, as someone who once was a teacher, tests are one of the hardest ways of doing so.

> tests are one of the hardest ways of doing so I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it. In my experience, people who did well on tests tended to understand the topic, and the people who didn't do well made excuses.

It might be somewhat safe to take a poor test result as correlating with poor knowledge on a subject.

And it might be safe to assume a high test score is repeatable.

The challenge is to find a test that correlate high scores with good knowledge - not merely with being good at taking tests.

Because rarely do we care about how good someone is at taking tests; we'd like to measure how good their knowledge is. That's hard to do if we only can infer poor knowledge from a poor test result, but not good knowledge from a good test result.

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