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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)

#421

Post by manicdee »

segmondy wrote: post #330
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…

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising…

Another lesson the poet learned from these studies is that these tests are about having the means to pass them, by which I mean having the money to buy the correct answers (whether that be in the form of written answers or a tutor who has seen the answers and knows how to guide your student to the right answer without explicitly communicating it).

It’s the college enrolment thing all over again.

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

#422

Post by Izkata »

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.

My understanding is that your experience is correct, but incomplete - it doesn't account for people who don't know the subject, but do well on the test.

Particularly with multiple-choice tests, this is not only possible, but in my experience common. It became a kind of running joke among my classmates that we know our teachers, not the material - over time we just learned the quirks of whoever designed the test and eliminated the wrong answers based on that.

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

#423

Post by ordinaryperson »

elliekelly wrote: post #302
ordinaryperson wrote: post #287

> 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.

The author never said anything about the SAT or AP exams. She was referring to the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) where her poems appear. STAAR is developed by Pearson, a publicly-traded for-profit publishing corporation.

Yes, and she generalizes about all testing organizations. To repeat hear exact line in full context:

> Dose of reality: test makers are for-profit organizations. My poems are a whole lot cheaper than Mary Oliver’s or Jane Kenyon’s, so there’s that.

She does not say, "Texas state test makers..." -- she just says "test makers." She singles out STAAR in the rest of the article but that graph explicitly says "test makers."

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

#424

Post by p1esk »

kiriakasis wrote: post #164
p1esk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. War and Peace was written 150 years ago and depicts events happening over 200 years ago - the difference between that society and the one you grew up in is far greater than the difference between modern Russia and modern US. Just to give one example (ironic in this context): the language usually spoken by most characters is not Russian, it’s French! Something like 5% of the novel is literally in French, a…

The surface can be very similar, but they are foundationally different, that will not change soon

What is "foundationally" different?

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

#425

Post by skookumchuck »

Izkata wrote: post #422
skookumchuck wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My understanding is that your experience is correct, but incomplete - it doesn't account for people who don't know the subject, but do well on the test. Particularly with multiple-choice tests, this is not only possible, but in my experience common. It became a kind of running joke among my classmates that we know our teachers, not the material - over time we just learned the quirks of whoever designed the test and e…

> learned the quirks

Why waste your time learning that? Just learn the material. I'm often bemused by the effort people put into avoiding learning the material, much more than it would take to just learn the material.

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

#426

Post by skookumchuck »

rocqua wrote: post #248
grandmczeb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand biases in a specific test (e.g. cultural biases), but those can (and should!) be corrected with better design and specific accommodations. Do you think that testing as a general method of evaluation is biased though? Because the objection I typically see isn't "we need better test design" it's "there's a component of student ability that cannot be measured by a test".

It is more about things like stressing over tests, dyslexia, ability to sit still for x hours and ability to express yourself in writing. These all affect how well you test, but do not determine your skill in the subject. Hence, having a disadvantage in any of the above gives you a system disadvantage in the educational system.

The cure for test stress is preparation, i.e. studying. Nothing works better on a test than knowing the material. The rest is just excuses.

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

#427

Post by Torgo »

Intermernet wrote: post #251
pvaldes wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the plural of anecdote is not data. ... and the definition of experience is not anecdote. I think that 2 years of experience qualify as data. Anecdote is when you walk in a street and slip casually in a banana skin once.

I'd actually like to see a study on slipping on banana skins. When I was young I heard the phrase and soon after I tested it. Banana skins aren't that slippery unless the medium under it, or the shoe above it is slippery. Admittedly, this is just my experience, and probably not statistically significant

The type of banana you get at the grocery store now is called Cavendish. When the slip on banana peel meme was invented, the common banana was the Gros Michel, which has a more slippery skin.

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

#428

Post by mcguire »

MockObject wrote: post #405
mcguire wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many teachers are pretty crappy. For these sorts of topics, there are no right answers, although there are certainly some wrong ones. Your job, as a student, is to learn to, and to demonstrate that you can, think about the material, to have some sort of insight beyond the surface features. You can certainly say some author is not interesting to you ; you can say you didn't learn anything from it. You cannot say the t…

Very few actual social dynamics are "a grand conspiracy".

That's what they want you to think.

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

#429

Post by abathur »

i4t wrote: post #348
segmondy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising…

"... are all about conformity." You give them too much credit, imo. That would be way to clever, too much 'conspiracy'-like. But, I agree that if you go against the grain, confront their bs... you're toast.

This might be too flippant, but I'm not sure how much stock I would put in any academic/intellectual that hasn't directly challenged at least one professor/advisor/mentor/peer's thinking with rigorously researched/reasoned/argued scholarship.

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

#430

Post by rdiddly »

beobab wrote: post #208
rdiddly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting point - sacrificing quality for quantity. You see it in so many fields. Like agriculture. Back in the day, every farm was 100% organic. But just try feeding today's population that way. Now you pay a premium for organic. So in some sense maybe education is no different. Just doing more with less, or rather, doing less, for more people.

Another interesting point: People graded on quantity (making pots) made better pots than those graded on quality (one masterpiece). https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic...

"Quantity has a quality all its own!" :)
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