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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)

#431

Post by Izkata »

skookumchuck wrote: post #425
Izkata wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You completely misunderstood; no effort was put into it. There was no active learning, just recognized patterns from prior tests.

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

#432

Post by skookumchuck »

e12e wrote: post #420
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.

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 har…

A perfect system is hardly necessary. Just a good system. Tests have worked for a thousand years. People wouldn't use them if they were useless.

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

#433

Post by skookumchuck »

Izkata wrote: post #431
skookumchuck wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You completely misunderstood; no effort was put into it. There was no active learning, just recognized patterns from prior tests.

I once asked my history teacher why his multiple choice questions followed predictable patterns. Such as, "all of the above" or "none of the above" were always the right answers.

He laughed, and said the stupid kids needed a break.

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

#434

Post by int_19h »

mcguire wrote: post #383
mox1 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is soo very spot on and exactly how I felt about a lot of my humanities classes in college. I almost failed the first one, then learned how to play the game and did a lot better. Sad but true. I always say I loved engineering classes simply because 1 + 1 = 2, not much room for debate there.

Unfortunately, most interesting questions in life don't have single, un-debatable, simple answers.

They do, actually, if you choose a consistent set of basic axioms. Just as in math.

Problem is, unlike math, there's no particular objective reason to prefer some axioms over the others, and so there's substantial disagreement over which ones are "correct". And, of course, depending on which ones you choose, the conclusions derived from them can be radically different, opposite even.

But this is still formalizable - you can make statements such as "from an utilitarian perspective, X is the preferred course of action". You don't have to agree with that perspective for the conclusion to be testable and practically useful.

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

#436

Post by lumberingjack »

This happened in real time in my high school we were one of the first classes to use the two-way classroom cameras and we interviewed a writer. Our English teacher was sure that the writer had made items in a scene that was depicted in the book red because the "red makes you feel a certain way"I straight-up ask the writer why he made the curtains in that scene red and they responded with "well they had to be a color why not red!"

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

#437

Post by hjk05 »

_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…

You seem to have a bias in this case. Obviously the will accept higher scores before lower scores. It would make no sense to eliminate anyone who scored above 98% based on an assumed “they cheated or trained too much” assertion. Just to include the “addequately but not too good students” who are scoring around 95%, which must be objectively better because that’s where your daughter happened to land. In the alternate reality you would be on here complaining that your daughter didn’t get in even though she had a perfect score and instead a bunch of kids with only 95% got in...

I hate to break it too you, but there’s no conspiracy or broken system, a lot of other kids just scored better than your daughter.

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

#438

Post by Ace17 »

mcguire wrote: post #383
mox1 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is soo very spot on and exactly how I felt about a lot of my humanities classes in college. I almost failed the first one, then learned how to play the game and did a lot better. Sad but true. I always say I loved engineering classes simply because 1 + 1 = 2, not much room for debate there.

Unfortunately, most interesting questions in life don't have single, un-debatable, simple answers.

> Unfortunately, most interesting questions in life don't have single, un-debatable, simple answers.

Because as soon as they have, they stop being interesting.

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

#439

Post by isostatic »

btilly wrote: post #393
blackflame7000 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a number of things youth sports helps foster: 1) leadership qualities 2) coping with adversity 3) how to win and lose gracefully 4) coordination (all sports take practice) 5) fights childhood obesity 6) forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation 7) Experience working with a team from an early age These will work for any child, not just me.

Yes, it fights childhood obesity. None of the rest is universally true. Let me go through them one by one to demonstrate. 1) leadership qualities Constant reminders of how I was at the bottom of the totem pole didn't develop leadership for me. You develop leadership by doing something you are good at, not bad at. My positive experiences only happened much later in life. 2) coping with adversity I got lots of practice…

> leadership qualities, coping with adversity, forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation, Experience working with a team from an early age

Got all that from IT club (adversity being when things didn't go well - bugs, network crashes etc)

> how to win and lose gracefully

LAN parties

> coordination

rock climbing

> fights childhood obesity

Not eating junk food seemed to work for me. I wouldn't be so arrogant to say that works for everyone though.

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

#440

Post by macspoofing »

xtian wrote: post #412
macspoofing wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

>My point is that conditioning children to think of art in this formulaic way can only be attributed to ignorance or malice.

I can believe that that this is your contention.

>There is no need to test for reading comprehension using a banal interpretation of poetry.

You say things as if they were obviously true.

>For evidence of the significance of art in the human experience, check the historical record.

OK.

I'm not sure what this red herring is supposed to do for your argument.

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