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Bold of you to assume standardized tests are somehow unbiased. Once I was in my state’s capital with students from all over the state. Some students were from our state’s larger cities, and others were from very rural areas. I overheard some teachers talking about how they had to take their students from a rural area on a field trip to a bigger city so they could ride the elevator up and down so that they could understand the stories on the state tests that had elevators in them. Their lack of experience compared to other children negatively affected their testing performance. This had nothing to do with their education. It was an accident of geographic and socioeconomic birthing locations.
This happens all the time in every test. It’s why they measure sub populations separately and why low SES students do more poorly on tests than anyone else. It’s not lack of good teaching, or a child’s lack of intellect. It is the fact that the tests can never be unbiased.
Standardized tests are hella biased.
There are too many issues for me to actually elaborate on with standardized testing, but I thought I would address this point since it seems to be a big part of your initial post.
!delta for changing my mind about the lack of bias. I still think it's the best way to avoid bias, but, there are clearly opportunities for it to be there like in your example. That reminds me of a question I saw for an iq test where some of it was based on American history, but the test wasn't just for people in the United States.
I will say that there are at least avenues for correction on things like that where questions can be thrown out if they are deemed unfair, but that is obviously not a guarantee.
I’m a teacher. I don’t hate standardized testing. I don’t think in principle, most teachers hate it. However the issue is multi-prone and your post kind of sounds like you really don’t understand teachers gripe with it or the further issues of grade inflation.
1) It’s overdone. Spending up to 20% of your time testing leave that much less time to actually teach.
2) You can “beat the system.” We’re not stupid. After years of the test we know exactly what’s on it. Tests are often made by non educators who just arbitrarily decide what kids should know. Your kid could be learning something new OR we could spend another 10% “practicing for the test” that the teachers livelihood depends on.
3) It’s admin - A lot of the time, we don’t have a choice on how much time is spent on any of this (even #2) because admin (many of which have never been teachers) just want to see pretty numbers.
4) Inflation is a admin/parent problem, not a teacher one. Funny you think teachers WANT to inflate grades. I’m an elementary teacher and I’ve recommended multiple times to have a kid repeat a grade only to be overruled by admin. “The parents will be upset.” Forget what’s best for the kid.
5) Bias of course - The standard MAP test includes loads of concepts alien to non-white suburban kids. Things you may not even think about. “Cheryl and Jimmy” are not common names so everyone so even getting confused by “are those people?” Is a thing. I knew what a “garage sale” was from books but I had never seen one until standardized tests growing up.
Again, it’s not terrible, but your post follows a long line of demonizing the teachers for structural issues teachers have little control over and glazes over the fact that teachers, in general, are looking out for the best in their students. Outsiders, parents and admin seem to have this baffling belief that we want to dick around and do nothing. Look at the salaries, this is not a profession people go into because of the dough.
>“Cheryl and Jimmy”
This sounds more like an issue with understanding context or proper nouns rather than 'minorities don't grock white names'. When have you ever met someone named 'Humpty' and how many kids have you met that don't understand that he's a person?
No. I guarentee you most 'Caucasian' kids would understand something like "Shaniqua has 5 apples, Jabari had 2. If Shaniqua gave Jabari 2 apples, how many apples do they each have?" Unless they're personally failing to grasp basic context.
But black kids wouldn't have to, they'd just know that they're names. They wouldn't need a whole extra layer of decoding context.
If you have to rely on context clues not just for names, but for lots of things because everything is coded for a specific culture for an entire test, it adds up.
My brother in Christ, no name is recognized as a name until it's encountered *in that context*. Familiarity has nothing to do with it. It's all context for everyone regardless of color. See my previous Humpty Dumpty example.
If someone fails to register context they would fail regardless of how it is "coded". This is a reading comprehension problem, not a race problem.
To change your mind a bit more (maybe), there is also a massive industry around preparation for standardized testing. Because there are specific strategies that can be trained to take these tests better, people often benefit from taking prep courses and taking the tests multiple times.
The efforts used to “unbias” and “standardize” the test by psyshometricians is hard to do, especially because questions have to be rotated and updated, and when they are you have to sample the new questions and make sure that they statistically come out with a similar challenge profile as the old ones.
So these tests cost a lot of money, like taking the GRE once is a couple hundred dollars. If student A can boost their score by doing training courses and taking it multiple times, spending literally thousands of dollars, compared to student B who has to scrape together enough dough to take it once, do you think that’s going to accurately reflect ability fairly?
Why are you rolling over on the biased point in response to that completely silly anecdote?
Honestly, I don’t believe either her or the teacher she says she spoke to… something must have been lost in translation. You’re telling me these kids don’t understand that buildings can have multiple floors??
I think they understand buildings can have multiple floors, but she's saying some students may have never seen an elevator in their life and didn't know what that was on the test.
They also don’t have TV or movies? I hadn’t been on a train before college, but was somehow able to answer questions about time and distance in those tests.
Who are these kids without a television or any other way of seeing how people live in a city? The questions on any modern standardized test are generally free, or very, very low, of bias. Can anyone quote a real example of a question on a test like this in the past 20 years?
Is that edge case contrived anecdote really enough for you to change your mind?
I simply don’t believe that they “had to take a field trip to the city” for them to understand what floors/elevators are… unless these were straight up tribespeople from deep in the Amazon that just seems like bs lol.
Also you can just make a math test without reference to encyclopedic knowledge
Standardized tests may not be completely unbiased, but they might as well be when you compare it to any other metric. The fact that Asians who never stepped foot in an English speaking country still have such an easy time with the SAT Math questions proves that the effect of this bias is way overblown.
You hear about colleges banning SATs because it's not fair that rich people can afford tutors to help them study, despite the fact that the best resources on studying the SAT are free online. Meanwhile, no colleges are removing college essays, even though rich people can literally hire a professional ghost writer to write for them.
By your own logic / anecdotal evidence, bold of you to assume any metric can be totally unbiased. Let me ask you this: what isn’t affected by “geographic and socioeconomic factors“? It’s too broad of a statement to the point it can apply to every single metric measured by human beings, who are known to be biased…
What does “good” in the context of standardized test mean to you? If you’re referring to academic success, then standardized testing is extremely reliable.
There’s not much of a debate on this topic if you look at the academic literature. The less ideologically-driven literature, to be precise.
It’s the blatant lie that standardized testing lacks bias that annoys me. We know everything is biased. But let’s not pretend it isn’t so that we can sell tests and make money. My state has a new test every 5-7 years. Why? Some new textbook/test making company has convinced the state their test is less biased or unbiased or otherwise better so the state will spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars buying their test.
Standardized tests simply measure the societal bias that comes with living in a classist, racist, hierarchical society. It doesn’t measure much else. Not worth the time it takes out of a school year (20 or so out of 180 days).
The only people benefiting from the tests are the test making companies.
I’m not sure how to deconstruct the implicit assumptions you’ve made in your response (e.g. classic, racist, hierarchical society comment), as it seems like your comment is ideologically driven more than it is a conceptual proposition.
If you agreed that nothing is unbiased, why do you keep focusing on what is and isn’t biased? Please illuminate me as to what is your rubric for determining what is biased vs unbiased. Like, tell me exactly what it is without the use of platitudes. If I can’t get a specific rubric from you, then I’ll assume it’s whatever you subjectively feel at any point in time, and I wouldn’t consider that a strong argument.
Additionally, can you give me a single example of a society that’s isn’t hierarchical? Humans and the great majority of other animals have had hierarchies since the dawn of time, and it’s a defining feature of a successful society. If you have a problem with hierarchies, you have a problem with evolutionary biology itself, and at that point I would question your motives for having such feelings about a biological process that is intrinsic to human nature.
When it comes to your comment on “classism and racism”, can you tell me more about your analytical approach? I’m curious how you can take a single variable (standardized testing) and draw the line to “racism and classism”? I’m hoping you’re not doing a uni-variable analysis to arrive at these conclusions, as that would not be very scientific…
If only there were extensive media in printed, audio, and video formats that could express and depict concepts and situations to people who had not personally experienced them...
City kids and country kids get the same tests graded to the same criteria. It's not the tests that are biased, it's life that is.
Agreed. Most people have a hard time accepting the nature of the human condition and prefer to spend time thinking about how to fix problems they don’t necessarily understand and / or have the tools to resolve, instead of focusing on the most immediate problems, which are more often than not internal and specific to the individual.
Correct, people are not born equal. That’s life.
What do you mean by “don’t become more equal as life goes on”? If you’re referring to financially equal, I would suggest you do some historical research on the financial success of immigrants in the context of western countries and for a period of time of your choosing. You’ll quickly realize that a given case of an immigrant performing better than a native-born person disproves that notion. And we don’t have a single case of course, we have millions.
Once financial success is achieved by said immigrant, quality of education and health follows. I mean, isn’t that the essence of the American dream?
Just because a few people “don’t become more equal as life goes on” doesn’t mean we have millions of immigrants who have been confronted with cultural, financial, and societal barriers performing better than the native population.
I have my doubts that elevators are that prominent in standardized testing and even if they were, they're devices that are widely depicted in media and are frankly not that complicated. I have my doubts that they're really that befuddling to students and if they can't figure such a thing out that probably does speak to their educational deficiencies.
What about this idea? Teach students problem-solving skills as part of the curriculum with context removed and test on that. If students practice pure logic we can remove context-dependent problems entirely and have students answering questions about entity A described with certain behaviors properties and relations instead of elevators. Abstract away all the context and have every student tested on the questions restated in a generic format.
Example: In entity A (building) there is entity B (elevator) that may move along metric X between -1 and 10... (the floors from basement to 10)" Without the parenthesized parts on the test.
Currently this would be very difficult for all students but add this teaching to the curriculum and not only can we build fair standardized tests we'll train a generation's abstraction and logical reasoning skills. And it would boost the IT sector as well since these skills underly much of it.
So, schools do teach problem solving skills. But in your scenario here, they would also need to teach all of that vocabulary (entity, metric, etc). High school should definitely know that, but again bias against English as a second language learners would be a problem here.
Also, kids aren’t supposed to be able to think abstractly developmentally until fourth or fifth grade. So what do you do with younger kids?
I just wish we could acknowledge that there is no perfectly accurate and unbiased test.
>So, schools do teach problem solving skills. But in your scenario here, they would also need to teach all of that vocabulary (entity, metric, etc). High school should definitely know that, but again bias against English as a second language learners would be a problem here.
Incorporate the vocabulary into the English curriculum or create a standard vocabulary for the other languages and test them in that.
>Also, kids aren’t supposed to be able to think abstractly developmentally until fourth or fifth grade. So what do you do with younger kids?
I was thinking more about high school. Colleges don't care how you did in elementary school.
Students are required to give annual standardized tests starting in 2nd grade. (Age 7) Most schools give 3-4 practice tests per year, too.
Have you heard of the 30 million word gap? Vocabulary and language is one of the most biased aspects of the test. Kids in poverty come to school with fewer words, and they never catch up (obviously barring some outliers). No matter how many words are incorporated into the standard curriculum, that gap isn’t bridge. Nobody has figured out how.
Are we really going to believe there is a child in the United States that doesn't know what an elevator is and needs a field trip to understand?
That might have been possible before the internet and widespread access to online entertainment, but I'm not buying it in 2024.
Idk, that’s what I overheard. Meanwhile, it’s super privileged to assume every family has internet access enough to where young kids in elementary schools can have the same level of experienced as wealthier kids. It’s disingenuous (or just uninformed) to pretend these tests are unbiased or equally fair to all kids from all backgrounds.
Standardized testing is a great way to Ra k students, but only at taking standardised tests. People who are very smart but perform worse at tests such as people with dyslexia or ADHD have their ability hidden by tests, likewise you get people you aren't able to understand things but are able to learn things by wrote and so are great at standardised tests while not being good at applying the actual thing they were tested about outside of the standardised way that is being tested.
I'm pretty sure that people with diagnosed dyslexia get accommodations for these tests, don't they? I will say if you are undiagnosed and don't get an accommodation, that is VERY much a large issue because your abilities are not being properly tested properly. Your ability to solve a math problem shouldn't be hindered by your inability to read the problem because of dyslexia. As someone with multiple friends that have it (but were diagnosed early enough before taking these tests) my heart breaks at the idea that their intelligence may never have been properly fostered or analyzed because of it.
Yes, they often get accommodations. Kids with dyslexia are often given the Read Aloud accommodation, and it's not as rare as that other commenter seems to suggest. I'd say the deployment could vary by school district, but it's not like schools are trying to make students fail by not giving them accommodations. Why would a school do that?
My mom is a special education/behavior disorder teacher. I may be biased because my state/governor has been particularly horrific with education laws compared to most other places, but she is constantly lamenting the lack of funding and attention given to kids who need it. Often, they’ll keep violent and disruptive kids in a normal classroom because it’s too expensive or they’re too understaffed to do anything else. When all the attention from aides and teachers are focused on the worst of the worst, which it usually is, the kids with minor disabilities completely fly under the radar.
So all that can be true, and the answer isn’t “educators don’t care” the answer is that we need better funding and more supports so that our educators can feel more empowered to do their jobs effectively.
Oh no, I never said educators don’t care. They absolutely do, they’re pulling all the weight here. The schools themselves and the government don’t give a shit, that’s what I meant by ‘they’. I think we are in agreement
>I'm pretty sure that people with diagnosed dyslexia get accommodations for these tests, don't they?
Nope.
Even students who have IEPs get extremely limited accommodations. Getting the test read aloud to is extremely, extremely rare.
Not sure where you’re getting this from, but in my experience a student with dyslexia will almost always receive a read-aloud accommodation. If their disability causes some kind of deficit in reading, this is almost always the first accommodation provided.
The main drawback of standardized testing is that if schools/teachers/whatever are still being held to account for their students' performance on these tests, there's an incredible incentive to teach toward the test. Instead of understanding history, say, you end up teaching how to do well on the history portion of the exams. I'm not sure that's much of an improvement over whatever the current situation is.
Could you elaborate on how testing the students' comprehension of the history subjects covered hinders their understanding of it? Is your implication that not enough history is being covered? If so, then wouldn't that just call for a longer, more comprehensive exam?
There likely aren’t history portions of the exams. I see a huge looming problem as a result of substandard social studies/history education, because it’s not included in many standardized exams, it’s not prioritized in instruction.
It's not included in like the SAT but typically each school district has their own set of testing for all the core subjects that is essentsly used as a metric of how well the school/teacher taught.
Most state standardized tests focus on reading comprehension, grammar, and basic math.
Most school districts absolutely do not run their own high-stakes testing on social studies. A few states (like NY) have things like Regents exams that you have to pass for a certain diploma and those have subject tests.
Unless something has radically changed in the last 10 years, there is very little standardized social studies testing, apart from AP exams
Edit: here’s a [rundown](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab2_16.asp) of which states require social studies assessment. About half the states don’t have it at all, and the rest only are testing on this once or twice in a student’s K-12 career.
Certified Social Studies and Computer teacher checking in.
The reason that we don't do standardized test, in my opinion as a history teacher, is that the content is totally not compatible with tests.
To get my social studies cert in my state i had to take a standardized exam on history.
First of all the areas that were fair game were "prehistory to present". I don't think kids tests would be that comprehensive but the problems that arose in a test like this would show up in standardized tests for kids the same way.
A good example of this would be for you to imagine a test on the founding of America. What does the test ask? Let's use some well known historical information to show how this may go.
Fact that will absolutely be taught in most history classes on the founding of America:
Betsy Ross, a colonial woman, made the first USA flag.
Now first of all this isn't even true. There is no evidence for this but a lot of students will be told this. Does the test have the "real" information or the widely circulated factoid?
Obviously history class would ideally have only "correct" information but the reality is that your history classes are likely littered with these "facts".
Additionally I would argue if a history teacher taught all about the founding of america and never brought up when or who exactly designed or created the very first flag that's also fine. It's really not important,
History is basically a giant trivia game with a ton of specific information. I would literally never in my wildest dreams want a standardized history test given to kids because at the end of the day, no matter what material makes it on to the test, it will be completely arbitrary. This isn't math, there are very few "concepts" in history that you can teach that are actually applicable elsewhere.
Now having said all of that I want to make a point to say that History and English are basically the same topic and are inextricably linked, the same way math is to science.
Math is the skill/concept, Science is our academic application of that skill for practice.
English is the skill/concept, History/Social Studies is our academic application of that skill for practice.
History class has you write essays because it's really just an english class. That's the skill you are normally working on, reading, writing, comprehension, and regurgitation. History tests that focus on content have it all wrong because honestly History's specific content simply isn't important or relevant like math, science, or even english.
English exams are testing the actual skill we are working on in a history room. Adding a historical content exam would be nothing but redundant and necessarily arbitrary. Additionally, even as a teacher of this content myself I'd have a hard time arguing that anyone SHOULD HAVE TO know it. The truth is they don't, and most functioning adults certainly don't have it or need it.
I’m a former history teacher. I don’t think high-stakes standardized tests are good, in general. I wouldn’t advocate for such tests to be expanded to include social studies.
My point is that, when schools build curricula to align with state testing, the lack of social studies testing means the subject gets deprioritized.
Also: understanding history is essential to understanding the world we live in today. It is a core life skill.
Care to explain that? Because I firmly disagree with that take. Teaching you to parrot key information isn’t teaching you anything. If you want to understand something you need to understand the what, the how, and the why. Teaching for the test will give you the what. Basically everyone can tell you the dates for the start and finish of WW2, they can tell you that Stalingrad and Normandy were battles during WW2 but that’s about it. If you ask them the why, they’ll probably say Nazi were trying to take over the world which is true but it’s also a toddler level understanding of the why. If you ask them how it started they’re probably going to blankly stare at you.
Learning how to parrot information doesn’t mean you actually know and understand what you’re parroting.
As somebody who did very well on standardized tests but generally struggled in school as a whole I think you're drastically misrepresenting standardized tests.
I was a terrible student. Couldn't memorize facts for shit. To this day I can't tell you the dates you mentioned and I know a ton about WW2. I was very undisciplined and lazy. But I was also a very curious kid and a good thinker. I would often spend more time educating myself on topics and sources outside the curriculum that caught my interest rather than the material of the class.
The reason I did well on standardized test was my broad knowledge, well developed reading and writing abilities and a natural knack for critical thinking that allowed me to apply processes of elimination to multiple choice questions very effectively.
Rote memorization and practice will not get you very far on standardized tests. "Test taking skills" are just everyday life skills of critical thinking, logical reasoning, reading comprehension and the ability to "connect the dots" of knowledge.
I think our schools have it backwards. Teaching somebody to be a well rounded thinker is the best strategy for improving test scores.
You're correct that it makes more sense to teach critical thinking, logical reasoning and reading comprehension, but that takes a significant amount of effort. You clearly have a natural aptitude for those types of skills, but that's not true for everyone. You can get a larger percentage of students above a baseline in a much shorter period of time by teaching to the test, and that's why schools do it. Which is a good argument as to why standardized testing is arguably counter productive.
Because not all standardized testing just incentives repeating back what you've been told. The mathematics portions of the ACT and SAT require you to take information given in a prompt and be able to use logic to come to the correct conclusion.
The mathematics portion of the SAT is a perfect example of why standardized testing should be reformed. There wouldn't be any need to prep for "SAT math" if this wasn't the case.
I will push back against this as a math teacher and SAT tutor. The problems on the math portion do not do this. They all follow a predictable and learnable structure. I can improve a student’s score by a couple hundred points in just a couple sessions by teaching them how the questions are presented and a few multiple choice strategies. Very few require critical thinking or test your thought process. There’s a reason test prep is a lucrative side job for teachers: it’s quite easy to learn how to take these tests; it’s not a test of intelligence nor a good measure of the quality of education you received.
But that's math, a subject that works better with standardized testing because there are frequently a singular, simple answer in the form of a number.
You do not get that with other subjects where answers need to be far more complex but standardized tests will simplify them in order to work with the multiple-choice format.
How else can you verify that the students in a school/district/state are actually learning the things that they're being taught? I get that some kids won't learn history when they're being taught to the test, but a lot of that same group won't learn it no matter how it's taught. I'm all for teaching the details of whatever subject and letting the kids who can't or won't learn fail, but that isn't acceptable anymore apparently.
Funding shouldn’t be linked to student achievement whatsoever.
Why would you punish a school whose kids are underachieving with less funding? How does that help the kids?
I don't think funding is as tied to funding as people are representing. Depends on the state, I think. But why would you continue funneling huge amounts of money to a failing organization? I know states can try to takeover school districts to right the ship. With....uh...varying results lol.
My honest to God dream solution is less admins and more teachers in every school. And we need more schools in general. We have more people than we did 50 years ago but not nearly as many schools necessary to keep up with the population growth. But for some reason we keep hiring more and more admins. It's ridiculous. There is a clear link between classroom size and student performance. When teachers can give more one on one training, the success rate naturally goes up.
We are getting more admins cause we are asking schools to handle more and more stuff.
Admin to handle curriculum. Admin to handle technology. To handle behavioral issues. To handle special services. To handle business. To handle testing. HR. Equity. Transportation. Funding.
We kinda need all these people, the way school is structured now.
What evidence do you have that admins are redundant?
Firstly, standardized tests are the measuring stick to determine federal funding. Not grades. Local funding components vary by state and locals.
Secondly, high school grades remain a good predictor of future success. They are a far [better predictor than the ACT for example](https://www.aera.net/Newsroom/Research-Finds-that-High-School-GPAs-Are-Stronger-Predictors-of-College-Graduation-than-ACT-Scores), nearly 5x. This is a massive reason behind the decline in popularity of standardized tests as a requirement for admission - it doesn't predict _at all_ whether someone is going to graduate from the college they are being admitted to based on scores.
Why? Well...success is usually fuzzier than standardized tests can capture. The reasons it seem "fair" are the reasons it doesn't tell us about the real world. You have to succeed _in some system_ and not _fail in some system_, and that system ain't standardized.
So...is the goal to know when people are setup to know some facts? Or to know who can and can't succeed in college or the real world?
>This is a massive reason behind the decline in popularity of standardized tests as a requirement for admission -it doesn't predict at all whether someone is going to graduate from the college they are being admitted to based on scores.
"We find that, while SAT scores are statistically significant predictors of college graduation, highschool grades may be more predictive."
"Statistically significant" is much greater than "doesn't predict at all".
https://dspace.sewanee.edu/items/15d4e9eb-0eef-472e-bb75-cece27aba6c4
And while perhaps GPA is a stronger predictor, the whole point is that there is no *standardization* with how grades are calculated across the countless schools across the country.
Can you show me an example of standardized test scores determining the amount of funding you get? I work in several states in education and I've literally never heard of this. It sounds bizarre.
In most states I know of, funding is determined by the size of the district, by how many special ed kids you have, how many Free/Reduced lunch kids you have, local taxes, federal grants, etc.
Do the test scores determine which parents move to the district and start paying in to the school district or is that not publicly available information?
Standardized testing isn't really about being able to recite facts. It's about being able to analyze a problem and come to a solution. A crude example would be that a person wants to know how much rope they need to tie two things from point a to point b at an angle, but they can't measure it by hand because of the angle and length. The test taker is supposed to figure out that they need to make a right angle triangle and use the Pythagorian theorem to find the length.
The study you linked only focused on students graduating from Chicago districts. That's a very small and specific sample. I wouldn't say that's a giant blow to the idea of standardized testing being a way to grade students across the country on equal footing.
It's one of many. Do you think schools are dropping the requirement for no reason? Or do you maybe think they have found it doesn't correlate to success of matriculating students?
Actually the opposite is true, schools are bringing the requirements back after dropping them during COVID. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-sat-act-admissions-requirement/
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2024/0314/Why-some-top-colleges-are-requiring-the-SAT-again
Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard, Texas, Brown and others have brought back testing requirements in the past several months.
Well yeah, I mean how are their alumni going to be guaranteed an income teaching test prep to get into the school to children with rich parents if they can't succeed in their field if the schools no longer require the test? And how will they make sure to have enough rich kids at the school to create networking opportunities for the best and brightest without gatekeeping?
No, but I seriously believe that any Ivy League alumni who fucks up can spend the rest of their life tutoring kids in some major urban center to get in to the school.
The Pythagorean theorem is simply reciting a math fact. There is no logic or reasoning involved in solving a right triangle. A better question would be to derive the Pythagorean theorem using a formal proof. But that is not what’s on standardized tests because it can’t be a multiple choice question.
The problem doesn't ask you to recite the theorem. The problem is making you realize that the theorem is the solution. It's "there is this issue. How do you fix this issue."
I disagree. Being presented with a triangle with a missing side = solve pythagorean theorem. There is no logical reasoning there, it’s essentially asking for the definition. The test even provides the formula as a picture and labels it.
> There is no logical reasoning there, it’s essentially asking for the definition. The test even provides the formula as a picture and labels it.
How are these two sentences not contradictory? How can it simultaneously be asking for a definition if its also providing one?
Let me ask you this, what’s more important, knowing when Columbus discovered America, or knowing what was going on and what was the political, social, religious, scientific motivation that lead to him sailing to America?
I’d argue the latter but that’s harder to test on a standardized system.
Yet because of that, you have a simplistic view of history that now leads to events such where people are destroying statues of historical figures for crimes they were innocent of
People always say this but I have never known a single person in my life who couldn’t remember any “rote facts” but were also geniuses about other stuff. I have known some people who were better/fabulous at context and critical thinking etc and were definitely able to retain information and memorize things. If they can’t remember a date how are they going to remember the Socio-political conditions of that date?
Obviously we should prioritize the latter.
> If they can’t remember a date how are they going to remember the Socio-political conditions of that date?
This is silly. Its like saying "if someone can't memorize the release dates of hundreds of books, movies, games, etc., how can we expect them to be able to remember their plots?" Despite basically no one being able to do the former without an enormous amount of studying, nearly every person over the age of 10 can do the latter without issue.
Dates are way more abstract than event relationships. If I ask anyone about their experiences with covid, they can probably give a pretty detailed description of how life was different for them. If I ask when any of those events happened, I doubt I would get date-specific answers.
Well, I guess I’m impressed that you’re able to remember the relative order of every event on earth, including ones you’ve never heard of somehow, but can’t remember a single date.
That's normal, though. People often memorize events in order or in a chain or cluster of related thoughts and memories. That's why memetic devices are usually based on a poem or song where the entire thing is in a specific order or associating a memory with a picture or acronym or place the subject knows well. I've never heard of a person who uses numbers as a memetic device, because numbers aren't as easy to remember. But a story is simple. Even very small children can remember the order something happened in in a story.
You said you know the relation. Presumably of any event since we weren’t discussing a particular one.
I just wish people would stop acting like memorizing facts isn’t useful because they remember the emotional experience of their own education. Dates are a right or wrong situation, so can be easily marked incorrect. Essay questions leave room for you to blather and are much harder to objectively grade for the average teacher.
So everyone in the world now thinks they’re bad at memorization but great at the deeper context and critical thinking.
Memorizing facts is useful. But memorizing dates is possibly the least useful historical fact for an actual understanding of history, because most of the time history is used to bring context to specific things in our daily life by explaining how they got that way, or to give us problem solving ideas. Memorizing dates would be more important for times in the future. So if you were working on a project where things had to happen on a certain date or a certain number of days apart or something. Medicine, chemistry, government, physical education, economics, etc.
Reading comprehension and mathematic comprehension tests do not delve into history. Which is what the bulk of my argument is about: reading and mathematics SAT. Apologies for not stating that.
That being said, we have standardized testing for AP courses, including history, where motivations of actions are very much tested on.
That hasn’t been my experience.
Most history courses, because they’re concerned with standardized tests, they test on dates not the purpose or reason behind the events. Or if they do, it’s an extremely surface level.
Like, for example, the founding fathers of America were indeed very much against slavery and the slave trade. They were worried, however, of a drastic change immediately after another drastic change causing more harm than good.
So they decided slow and steady.
Then, as it was about to be eliminated, greedy individuals decided to abuse a loophole the fathers didn’t foresee.
Yet, because of that, guess what the modern perspective is? America was founded by racist white men. History is more nuanced than that.
I mean... my history classes mostly just went from the same dates to the same dates over and over each year, with a lot of repetition. We did get to do some fun reenactment projects, though. I love those.
Like elementary school was mostly US history over and over. I was super lucky because in 4th grade they do state history, and I lived in Texas at the time, and yeah, a lot of it is racist, but Texas has a lot of neat things going on historically. Every other year we would start at roughly plymouth rock (mostly skipping Jamestown) and then go roughly to the 1950s. Then they'd be like "by the way hippies existed and the Berlin wall came down" and then we went back to the start the next year. The main focus was on the pilgrims, the pioneers, and the underground railroad. Then when I was in middle school, we did one year of ancient greece and rome, one then we did 3-4 years of "The Italian renaissance and the French revolution" over and over until I didn't have to take history anymore. I didn't get to hear any other world or US history until I took AP classes and electives. Then I had to try to absorb the labor movement, the industrial side of the industrial revolution, Jim Crow, the 1960s and 1970s cultural revolutions in psychology and sociology, the enlightenment, the cold war, the northern renaissance, WWI, etc. All at once. It sucked. If I didn't take AP courses I would only have some vague idea that the pioneers came to america from Italy, planted some corn, had a war over if they were going to have slaves or not, built a railroad and electricity, fought another war in europe over ??? then invented the movies, fought hitler, invented rock and roll, stopped being racist, and then gave birth to the internet.
There's a reason why basically no states do high-stakes standardized testing for history/social studies. You just uncovered it.
Standardized testing is mostly ELA/Math based for this reason.
>Yet because of that, you have a simplistic view of history that now leads to events such where people are destroying statues of historical figures for crimes they were innocent of
This is not the fault of standardized tests. This is the fault of misinformation spreading on social media.
No, it's the opposite. Schools (usually) teach students true statements (such as other countries also had slavery). But students don't learn that, they watch TikTok videos on their phone, where "influencers" make videos saying "white people/America invented slavery", and then they believe that.
I know because I've been through the education system, and I actually payed attention in class, unlike kids who just play on their phones all day.
"Let me ask you this, what’s more important, knowing when Columbus discovered America, or knowing what was going on and what was the political, social, religious, scientific motivation that lead to him sailing to America?" they both are but the latter cannot be taught without the former
Well the current push for individualized assessment largely comes out of the idea that standardized tests as they are written rn don't actually work. They don't actually give you the thing you expect them to give you. What does it mean to get X grade on Y test? Does it mean you actually understand the material in a way that has meaningful value outside of the test? Or does it mean you studied very well for this exact type of test in order to game the system?
And that's without mentioning the cultural and socioeconomic issues with standardized testing
That doesn't mean that the current alternatives we're trying are better - they're still a work in progress. We've identified that standardized testing is not as effective as assumed, but we haven't gotten a good replacement in place yet
I like that.
Also I want to emphasize it's not the end all be all and shouldn't be the only way we measure students, but it is important. It's supplemental to other methods
This is sort of like saying "Blood testing is a good thing"
Is it? Well, sometimes it certainly is. It allows us to measure things that are potentially useful for informing what medical treatments are or are not appropriate. But that doesn't mean it would be good to do blood testing on apparently healthy people every week, or to test somebody coming in for stitches after a knife injury for high cholesterol, or to test for things that have no known medical implications at all.
Any kind of testing, including standardized academic testing, should be appropriate for measuring what it claims to measure and making decisions for the benefit of people based on that. I would argue that the degree of standardized testing in the US (where I live) is excessive. Kids can easily take two or three multi-day standardized state tests every year from 3rd to 10th grade of so and additional classroom to district level standardized tests of different reading and math skills. At some point that's a lot of time taken from instruction by [16 school days](https://www.k12dive.com/news/dod-students-standardized-tests/697458/) of testing. and its not clear that we're getting any useful information that would lead us to act differently than we would be using significantly less time than that.
Let me tell you about one year that I “failed” as a teacher, to illustrate how standardized testing is used to measure teacher performance.
I taught first grade in a school with mostly first gen American kids. I started the year with 23 kids in my roster - the lowest class size on the grade. Early in the year, my students did benchmark testing. Because my roster was low, every new arrival was placed in my class. I love teaching new arrivals, but we’re talking mostly about kids who have had very limited schooling and no English. So on the second round of tests, even though each individual child is making progress, my average takes a big dip. I’m failing.
Realizing that only five students in my class are working at grade level, my principal decides to pull those five kids out of my class so that I can focus on intensive ESL and literacy with the lower-level kids. I have a smaller class size now, which is great for the kids still in my class. They’re making progress. But when we do the next round of testing, those five kids are no longer part of the equation. Moreover, it takes much longer to get a kid from “no English” to “foundational English reading” than it does to take them from “September grade level reading” to “March grade level reading.” But these two jumps are considered equivalent in the context of the test. My average takes a huge nosedive, even though each student is making meaningful progress. Now I’m really failing. My job is at stake.
Even though everyone knows that I’m teaching effectively and my students are learning, the testing doesn’t reflect that, because there has been so much change to my roster. And because the stakes are so high and the testing is so depersonalized, my admin doesn’t really care whether there’s learning happening, they just need to report good scores.
It’s nice to think “well that’s a misuse of data,” but the fact is, misuse of data is exactly the problem that most teachers have with standardized testing. If the tests functioned to provide useful information to further our students’ learning, we’d be all for it. But they’re almost always used to raise stakes and depersonalize education without offering useful data to teachers.
This story does not show that the test provides poor data.. it shows your administrators or people presenting your data are bad. Fixing your data to make it more useful would be relatively easy.
Getting rid of standardized testing does not provide you more information
Unfortunately I think you’ve missed my point. I’m not arguing that this is poor data. I’m arguing that it’s misused. As I mentioned above, it’s all well and good to say “well that’s an easy fix” and it is in a hypothetical world. But this is the reality of how high-stakes standardized tests are used. They’re not interested in addressing any degree of nuance. They’re not interested in providing usable data for teachers to improve learning. Frankly, they’re interested in putting money in the pockets of Kaplan and Pearson and the College Board and that’s really the end of it.
The critical question here is, is your view:
"Standardized testing is a good thing"
Or:
"These specific standardized tests are a good thing"
I think what happens is that if pressed, almost everyone would concede that it would be good to have an accurate standardized assessment of what really matters. But *in practice* it doesn't usually work out that well. Once some standardized testing is chosen at the state and district level, and then teachers end up having to teach to that specific standard in a way that can end up being a net negative for the students. Maybe then everyone complains, and a new standard is adopted, but that ends up sucking too. And eventually teachers are going to adopt the idea that *in practice* "standardized testing sucks", even if their younger selves were fully bought into the *idea* of standardized testing. But if that ideal is not lived up to in practice, at some point you have to wonder if the idea is actually a good one once you account for implementation realities.
This is wrong I went to a charter school that absolutely crushed it. I went to 7 high schools in total because I was a horrible child. The charter school had a specific elective based towards the SAT and the ACT. It is all you did for an entire period. I along with nearly every one of my friends received a 1400+ on the SAT. It never got in the way of any other topics, and we even took random classes such as learning about maritime on top of English, Math, History, etc etc etc. The idea that a teacher will only focus on the test is just no. The issue is you have teachers who suck and don't do their job and after what happened in DC people are afraid to fire horrible teachers since parents have shown time after time they care more about a teachers job than their childrens education. Parents will literally vote out those who are bringing positive change to their children's education to protect teacher unions and bad teachers. Go look at why Arnold lost in Cali when he tried to go after the teacher unions and what happened in DC when they tried to give teachers who perform better security in their jobs and give them tenure rather than base it on who has been there the longest. They fired the woman in charge of the school district then voted out the mayor who appointed her. Even go look at Baltimore recently you had a kid who was in the top 50% of his class with a less that 1.0 GPA and people were blaming the school when the kid missed over 300 days of school.
no they don't entire system is based upon a lottery system. You can actually watch in some of the worst cities in the US mothers and fathers crying as their children are picked or aren't picked, becasue they are aware the only way their child will get a proper education is if they are picked during the lottery.
If that was the case as well could you explain why I ended up getting picked for a charter school when I was dropping out of 6 schools before I got kicked out due to how horrible I was, but then went on to get a 3.5 GPA with a 1450 SAT by the end of my senior year? Break that down for me how I was the cream of the crop and they hand selected me into their school.
Depends on the state and school system. Some are lottery, some are merit.
But in either case, which parents are more likely to put their kids in a lottery for the better charter school?
Spoiler: it’s the parents that care the most. Engaged parents are a massive indicator of student success.
"However, due to the high demand of charter schools, there might not be enough enrollment spots to allow all applicants to attend the school of choice. To fix this problem, **charter schools usually turn to what is known as a school lottery system.**"
But yes I do agree with you 100% that engaged parents are a massive indicator of success. That is why I specifically brought up DC, CA, and Baltimore which have shown time and time again that parents IN MASS openly support a teachers job over their children's education. The entire point as to why Charter school are showing such successful children. In a charter school there is no tenure your renewal of a contract is based upon how well students do in your class. EXACTLY what DC tried to implement. Getting rid of bad teachers and securing jobs for great teachers. Parents have shown time and time again that they DO NOT WANT THIS.
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I’m like 50 comments in and as a teacher find it hysterical that NO ONE has brought up the fact that some kids don’t even try. I have kids finish a 50 question test in which they should have read multiple paragraphs and be done in 20 minutes. The tests have zero accountability for the kids so they click right through just to be done. If you want real results the kids need to take the test seriously. They won’t do that until they’re directly impacted by the results such as not moving on to the next grade level.
Standardized tests really only measure how well you know how to take that test. I didn't do great on the SAT so I took a prep course on it. I scored the same. Zero improvement. The style of SAT questions is something I just can't grasp very well. Are my reading and math skills actually lacking? No, I've since gone on to have a very successful college career. I also took the ACT and only glanced at the essay writing portion the night before the exam. Based on percentiles, I did significantly better on the ACT with barely one night of studying than I did on the SAT after an entire prep course just for that exam. All those two tests measured was how good at taking them I was, and I just got lucky that I am good at taking ACT style tests. AP tests are very similar. If I took a college American history class and then took the APUSH exam I probably wouldn't do very well because the college class doesn't teach me how to take an AP test.
Wouldn't the fact that your prep course didn't effect your score actually prove the *opposite* of what you're saying? Better knowing "how to take the test" did not in fact change your score at all suggesting that it's actually measuring something other than test taking knowledge.
I think it's worth it to mention Goodhart's law or Campbell's law here (I don't know which is most appropriate here, but they're highly related.)
Testing is good. Gaining statistical data is good, it's better to know it than not know it.
When you start making decisions based on statistical data and people know you're doing so and your decisions matter, they'll try to act in such a way to make the data shake out better. You said it yourself - when grades matter, then grades can be inflated.
I suppose I just want to say - it doesn't matter if it's grades or standardized testing or a secret third thing, any measure that becomes a target will stop being a good measure.
Standardized tests don't really help with the function of education though. It incentivizes teachers to teach students *how to do well on the test* more than teaching them to retain the material they were "taught".
You make a good point, but from what I understand, the implementation of standardized tests is often very biased and has a history of racial and cultural bias.
I'd say though, that in the US at least, we designed our school system in such a way that it's impossible to have schools that aren't "falling behind" and schools that are "good" and that's the problem. There shouldn't be "good" schools and and "bad" schools. That contributes to all kinds of problems for students but also creates pressure on the already incredibly stressed housing market for adults who may be struggling so they don't wind up in a "bad" district. In the town I grew up in, all the wealthy people lived in a certain area of town. I just found out the schools on that side of the district have free lunch for all, and the schools on the poorer side have a massive school lunch debt. I worked in real estate in that area for a while, and there are a ton of beautiful old farmhouses and victorians and even a few adorable storybook homes from the 30s that will never sell because they're in the "wrong" school district.
If we really want to have equality of opportunity in our school system, we should start by funding every school the same amount per child, with extra money going towards accessibility programs for disabled students, giving out free school lunch and breakfast to every single student, and having free after school programs with tutoring in every district so that working parents save on daycare, and kids who have parents at home to help them with the subjects they struggle in don't have an advantage on homework assignments over kids that don't, kids that have proper nutrition in the home don't have an advantage over kids that don't, and kids that have parents who can afford to live in the wealthier part of town don't get the opportunity to join the school band or learn to paint while the kids that don't get the opportunity to watch those things on television.
If you're doing standardized testing to tell which schools are underfunded, that's a waste of public funds. We know which schools are underfunded. It's the ones that are in districts where there aren't a lot of residential homes or where property taxes are low. The IRS already has that data for us.
The reason the SAT a thing is that traditionally most Ivy League students attended boys’ prep schools that had arrangements with a particular Ivy League university. The SAT was supposed to make it fairer for talented boys who did not have the good fortune to attend prestigious New England boarding schools.
I'd like to share a perspective from my country, which has standardized testing. I'll focus on the state math exams, which are considered very important.
Some background: Math exams are split into brackets. The smartest students take the hardest exams. The struggling students take easier exams. Your final evaluation is both your grade and your bracket.
> gives them an excuse to inflate grades ... Standardized testing nullifies this issue
Turns out math is hard. Politicians don't like low grades, they need to show improvements in the education system. They can find the flaws of the education system and try to fix it. Or they can change the way the exams are evaluated.
Some changes made by various ministries of Education over the years:
- The easiest bracket (most struggling students) have changed their exams to have 150% of the maximum grade. That means you only need to get 66% of the questions right in order to get a perfect score. A student with 75% of the perfect score has only succeeded in 50% of the exam. In other circumstances it would be consider that he failed to pass the exam. This vastly increases the number of students who passed math and didn't improve their education at all.
- Instead of pushing students to excel and advance to higher brackets, students are instead incentivized to study at a lower bracket. This raises grades (particularly in comparison to recent years before that change) but doesn't improve anything.
This is achieved in various ways - change the math bracket requirement to study other things, such as physics, chemistry, computer science.
To sum up, standardized testing doesn't nullify bad incentives - it merely moves them to a political level.
Standardized tests are actually extremely bias in a lot of ways most people won't pick up on. I teach in a state where our standardized test for my grade level had a written essay. The prompt was to describe a day at an amusement park. The vast majority of my students had never been to one and couldn't answer this prompt regardless of their skill level.
Additionally, this causes schools to heavily focus on "bubble students" aka the ones who may possibly bump up to proficient. Which takes away time and resources from students who truly need help and let them fall more and more behind.
Because it doesn't matter if a student showed growth on these tests, they often just look at what percentage passed it.
Don't even get me started on how poorly these work as a reflection on schools with high ESL populations.
I want to add, not only are these tests biased, they are out right against large groups of people!
In my state, they base the authenticity of the scores based on 3 counties.
If those 3 did badly, the test is considered too hard. If those 3 do super well, the test is too easy.
All the scores are based on comparing to those 3 counties.
Plus, tying funding to scores only hurts poor areas. The 3 counties that everything is compared to, are the 3 richest counties.
They aren't affected by those scores. But the county I teach in is 100% affected by the scores and funding.
We don't even have working class sets of computers/laptops. How can our kids affectively take those tests on old and broken computers? And the funding is the only way to get better technology for them to use.
Add on the questions don't take into account student experiences. A practice question had mentions of the speed of a merry-go-round. None of the students knew what that was or how fast it moved.
These tests are for the rich and those that can afford to be in a good district that can give you experiences.
There are a couple issues that come to mind:
One is simply the format that standardized tests are made in. In order to be graded by a computer rather than a person, they are composed of multiple choice questions rather than essay questions. This means that on some questions, it may be easier to eliminate wrong answers than to actually know the right answer. When I'm confronted with a math problem in real life, it doesn't come with a short list of possibilities for me to choose from.
They don't test most of the subjects the school is supposed to be teaching. Typically, they only test math and linguistics. Science, history, and shop skills are disregarded. Simply including English skills in a test that will determine the future of the student or the school is inherently culturally biased.
The idea of judging all students across the country by a common standard rather than by the subjective assessment of a multitude of individual teachers is obviously desirable, but we don't actually have a real way to evaluate millions of kids objectively in this manner.
So I worked at an elite private school in Asia in which parents would pay thousands of dollars over the course of years to SAT tutors. These kids would end up with 1400 or above despite, at times, not being very bright or hard working. The problem is that there are always factors that make these tests unfair in some ways. Also, my experience in both public and private schools has basically taught me that broadly public school teachers are usually better and more knowledgeable but just looking at test scores wouldn’t reveal this.
Disagree. Standardized testing isn't for the sake of being compared to the same standard. It is so that teachers don't actually teach and instead are given guidelines of what to teach. It's set in a way for teachers to teach for testing and not for learning. In other words, actual learning takes a back seat to performing well on tests. It sets a standard where every single student learns the same way. Humans simply do not work like that. Some can learn through memory, others through reading, and so on. A child who has a hard time memorizing formulas or whatnot is going to do poorly while the opposite is true for a child who can easily do it. A student might learn how to do chemistry by reading a step by step formula, while another student might need a visual example of how it's done. That is just to name a few examples.
When I was in high school, it felt like the only way the school board knew how to handle a problem was to throw a standardized test at it. I'm not necessarily against the SATs and ACTs existing as concepts (though they shouldn't be the Only metrics people are judged by), but I remember one year our Government class got to present a resolution to the state government and ours was to *reduce* standardized testing *to* a mere seven different standardized tests of the exact same material every single time. The time set aside for taking the test cut into the time that could be used to actually teach. Not to mention the fact that the tests were held up as so important that kids were pretty much only taught how to take multiple choice tests instead of how to think.
Your argument is a bit all over the place, but it seems your thrust is the SAT is better than GPA for college admissions. It seems you’re not talking about state standardized tests.
The SAT and GPA are both imperfect measures of “merit.” They “measure” different things. Every college is different, too. So blanket statements like “the SAT is better than GPA” are somewhat meaningless.
I was on the board of a small school that had a lot of parents who were "alternative" and so would opt their younger children out of the standardised tests but we needed them to take the test in order to promote the school to potential parents.
What we realised is that standardised tests have a value on a macro level to show that the individual school is producing results, and potentially spotting a child who "slipping through the cracks" but it for the most part, should not be used for individual students. And students should not be made aware of results. They should not be allowed to compare grades
It can be biased but a standardized test on all of school knowledge is almost too broad. We can talk SAT, ACT, GRE, etc. they have a problem with the industry teaching how to take the test. The other issue is tests can train you to focus on memorization not how to actually problem solve.
Now I do support standardized tests for certain important professions. The bar exam in my opinion sets the minimum expected criteria for a lawyer, or a professional engineering license or medical speciality exams for board certification. It shows competency in a specialized field or acts as a bar to entry to more critical jobs. Not saying these are the only critical jobs but the ones that came to mind.
Basically a standardized test for college entrance or high school graduation is almost too broad to be meaningful and just focuses on people learning how to take the test rather than show competency. But a standardized test to show basic qualification or specialized qualification of certain professions makes sense.
>Yes, it sucks to take these tests and gives students anxiety.
After standardized testing each year at my high school, many students said something along the lines of "I didn't really try because I know it won't impact my grade."
At least in my experience, students aren't anxious about standardized tests and they don't seem to be a great measure of how well students are actually doing in school, because many of them don't see the point in putting any effort in.
Don't standardized tests also determine school funding? This could mean teachers either teach to the test instead of teaching in a meaningful way or even help students cheat so their school can get more funding. In fact, from what I remember, standardized/state testing is the primary way schools are chosen for funding.
What actionable insights have been mined from standardized tests? Are there any that have been developed into policy and implemented and resulted in better outcomes?
Yes. When a school sees that certain grade levels are suffering on certain skills or standards, they can modify their curriculum, train their teachers, and secure instructional resources to address those deficiencies for the following year.
No. Because teachers are not psychometricians.
That means that every teacher's test can have a different level of rigor, cover different skills, and can have wildly different alignment to a curriculum.
Without standardization as a north star, there's no way to calibrate a teacher's test for quality, alignment, or rigor.
For example, I got straight A's in one of my college courses cause the professor didn't give two f\*\*\*ks. How do we know those students acquired the skills they were supposed to?
It sounds like your assuming students will give an effort in the test. In order for tests to measure differences between school, you're assuming all students are giving their best efforts (or at least the same percentage of students are giving their best efforts at each school). This is just not reality. Teachers at schools whose parents are really involved will have students who gave their best effort and try their best. Teachers at schools with parents who don't care will have students who are apathetic and race through the test or simply click through.
You realize disabled children have to take the same tests that non disabled children take? How is that not biased. I've had to help students who couldn't write or fully read take these tests. It is not a good system.
They can be a good thing
I also had a class miss a question because none of the students realized that mackerel were a fish, so you needed to count them in order to get the total number of fish.
Studies have shown for years that the strongest correlation with standardized test scores is socioeconomic status so it’s good for filtering out poor kids but doesn’t measure intelligence
Wealthy kids can take classes to improve their standardized testing scores significantly. They're not any smarter or better at the material. They just learn tricks, patterns, and shortcuts for recognizing certain question types and efficiently moving through the question list. Some of this test prep is simply taking old versions of the test, over and over.
High scores show you are good at taking the test. They are not valid indicators of general intelligence, measurements of academic fitness, or whatever they purport to be.
Despite these shortcomings, your standardized test scores carry on outsized impact on your future life trajectory. I don't believe that's fair.
Source: I used to teach these classes part-time.
As someone who’s a great standardized test taker married to a poor test taker I can tell you with 100% of my being that standardized tests do not test much. A standardized math test might tell me I’m better at math than my partner, but it’s not gonna tell me how much better my partner is at event planning.
And on your comment about teachers not giving less than a 55 or 60%, that makes perfect sense. If you get an 0% on one assignment but a 100% on the next, it is unfair for you to literally still have a low F. Rather, you should have a C.
Giving students below a 50% is a slap in the face. If I had two assignments all year and on the first I got a 20%, what’s the point of doing the second one? The absolute best grade I can get is a 60%. I’m all but guaranteed to fail the class. That’s dumb.
Brother, my middle school teachers didn’t let me fail and now I’m a lawyer with 3 degrees representing some of the largest companies in the world. But yeah, let the kid fail and learn.
By the way, 50% is still an F.
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Bold of you to assume standardized tests are somehow unbiased. Once I was in my state’s capital with students from all over the state. Some students were from our state’s larger cities, and others were from very rural areas. I overheard some teachers talking about how they had to take their students from a rural area on a field trip to a bigger city so they could ride the elevator up and down so that they could understand the stories on the state tests that had elevators in them. Their lack of experience compared to other children negatively affected their testing performance. This had nothing to do with their education. It was an accident of geographic and socioeconomic birthing locations. This happens all the time in every test. It’s why they measure sub populations separately and why low SES students do more poorly on tests than anyone else. It’s not lack of good teaching, or a child’s lack of intellect. It is the fact that the tests can never be unbiased. Standardized tests are hella biased. There are too many issues for me to actually elaborate on with standardized testing, but I thought I would address this point since it seems to be a big part of your initial post.
!delta for changing my mind about the lack of bias. I still think it's the best way to avoid bias, but, there are clearly opportunities for it to be there like in your example. That reminds me of a question I saw for an iq test where some of it was based on American history, but the test wasn't just for people in the United States. I will say that there are at least avenues for correction on things like that where questions can be thrown out if they are deemed unfair, but that is obviously not a guarantee.
I’m a teacher. I don’t hate standardized testing. I don’t think in principle, most teachers hate it. However the issue is multi-prone and your post kind of sounds like you really don’t understand teachers gripe with it or the further issues of grade inflation. 1) It’s overdone. Spending up to 20% of your time testing leave that much less time to actually teach. 2) You can “beat the system.” We’re not stupid. After years of the test we know exactly what’s on it. Tests are often made by non educators who just arbitrarily decide what kids should know. Your kid could be learning something new OR we could spend another 10% “practicing for the test” that the teachers livelihood depends on. 3) It’s admin - A lot of the time, we don’t have a choice on how much time is spent on any of this (even #2) because admin (many of which have never been teachers) just want to see pretty numbers. 4) Inflation is a admin/parent problem, not a teacher one. Funny you think teachers WANT to inflate grades. I’m an elementary teacher and I’ve recommended multiple times to have a kid repeat a grade only to be overruled by admin. “The parents will be upset.” Forget what’s best for the kid. 5) Bias of course - The standard MAP test includes loads of concepts alien to non-white suburban kids. Things you may not even think about. “Cheryl and Jimmy” are not common names so everyone so even getting confused by “are those people?” Is a thing. I knew what a “garage sale” was from books but I had never seen one until standardized tests growing up. Again, it’s not terrible, but your post follows a long line of demonizing the teachers for structural issues teachers have little control over and glazes over the fact that teachers, in general, are looking out for the best in their students. Outsiders, parents and admin seem to have this baffling belief that we want to dick around and do nothing. Look at the salaries, this is not a profession people go into because of the dough.
>“Cheryl and Jimmy” This sounds more like an issue with understanding context or proper nouns rather than 'minorities don't grock white names'. When have you ever met someone named 'Humpty' and how many kids have you met that don't understand that he's a person?
Those who haven’t heard that fairly Caucasian nursery rhyme?
No. I guarentee you most 'Caucasian' kids would understand something like "Shaniqua has 5 apples, Jabari had 2. If Shaniqua gave Jabari 2 apples, how many apples do they each have?" Unless they're personally failing to grasp basic context.
But black kids wouldn't have to, they'd just know that they're names. They wouldn't need a whole extra layer of decoding context. If you have to rely on context clues not just for names, but for lots of things because everything is coded for a specific culture for an entire test, it adds up.
My brother in Christ, no name is recognized as a name until it's encountered *in that context*. Familiarity has nothing to do with it. It's all context for everyone regardless of color. See my previous Humpty Dumpty example. If someone fails to register context they would fail regardless of how it is "coded". This is a reading comprehension problem, not a race problem.
To change your mind a bit more (maybe), there is also a massive industry around preparation for standardized testing. Because there are specific strategies that can be trained to take these tests better, people often benefit from taking prep courses and taking the tests multiple times. The efforts used to “unbias” and “standardize” the test by psyshometricians is hard to do, especially because questions have to be rotated and updated, and when they are you have to sample the new questions and make sure that they statistically come out with a similar challenge profile as the old ones. So these tests cost a lot of money, like taking the GRE once is a couple hundred dollars. If student A can boost their score by doing training courses and taking it multiple times, spending literally thousands of dollars, compared to student B who has to scrape together enough dough to take it once, do you think that’s going to accurately reflect ability fairly?
Why are you rolling over on the biased point in response to that completely silly anecdote? Honestly, I don’t believe either her or the teacher she says she spoke to… something must have been lost in translation. You’re telling me these kids don’t understand that buildings can have multiple floors??
I think they understand buildings can have multiple floors, but she's saying some students may have never seen an elevator in their life and didn't know what that was on the test.
They also don’t have TV or movies? I hadn’t been on a train before college, but was somehow able to answer questions about time and distance in those tests.
Who are these kids without a television or any other way of seeing how people live in a city? The questions on any modern standardized test are generally free, or very, very low, of bias. Can anyone quote a real example of a question on a test like this in the past 20 years?
Is that edge case contrived anecdote really enough for you to change your mind? I simply don’t believe that they “had to take a field trip to the city” for them to understand what floors/elevators are… unless these were straight up tribespeople from deep in the Amazon that just seems like bs lol. Also you can just make a math test without reference to encyclopedic knowledge
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Standardized tests may not be completely unbiased, but they might as well be when you compare it to any other metric. The fact that Asians who never stepped foot in an English speaking country still have such an easy time with the SAT Math questions proves that the effect of this bias is way overblown. You hear about colleges banning SATs because it's not fair that rich people can afford tutors to help them study, despite the fact that the best resources on studying the SAT are free online. Meanwhile, no colleges are removing college essays, even though rich people can literally hire a professional ghost writer to write for them.
By your own logic / anecdotal evidence, bold of you to assume any metric can be totally unbiased. Let me ask you this: what isn’t affected by “geographic and socioeconomic factors“? It’s too broad of a statement to the point it can apply to every single metric measured by human beings, who are known to be biased… What does “good” in the context of standardized test mean to you? If you’re referring to academic success, then standardized testing is extremely reliable. There’s not much of a debate on this topic if you look at the academic literature. The less ideologically-driven literature, to be precise.
It’s the blatant lie that standardized testing lacks bias that annoys me. We know everything is biased. But let’s not pretend it isn’t so that we can sell tests and make money. My state has a new test every 5-7 years. Why? Some new textbook/test making company has convinced the state their test is less biased or unbiased or otherwise better so the state will spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars buying their test. Standardized tests simply measure the societal bias that comes with living in a classist, racist, hierarchical society. It doesn’t measure much else. Not worth the time it takes out of a school year (20 or so out of 180 days). The only people benefiting from the tests are the test making companies.
I’m not sure how to deconstruct the implicit assumptions you’ve made in your response (e.g. classic, racist, hierarchical society comment), as it seems like your comment is ideologically driven more than it is a conceptual proposition. If you agreed that nothing is unbiased, why do you keep focusing on what is and isn’t biased? Please illuminate me as to what is your rubric for determining what is biased vs unbiased. Like, tell me exactly what it is without the use of platitudes. If I can’t get a specific rubric from you, then I’ll assume it’s whatever you subjectively feel at any point in time, and I wouldn’t consider that a strong argument. Additionally, can you give me a single example of a society that’s isn’t hierarchical? Humans and the great majority of other animals have had hierarchies since the dawn of time, and it’s a defining feature of a successful society. If you have a problem with hierarchies, you have a problem with evolutionary biology itself, and at that point I would question your motives for having such feelings about a biological process that is intrinsic to human nature. When it comes to your comment on “classism and racism”, can you tell me more about your analytical approach? I’m curious how you can take a single variable (standardized testing) and draw the line to “racism and classism”? I’m hoping you’re not doing a uni-variable analysis to arrive at these conclusions, as that would not be very scientific…
Nah, most standardized tests simply measure IQ and all of the benefits of deficits that come along with it.
We can make math testing unbiased. If it’s just solving equations there is no social, classist,etc bias in the questions.
If only there were extensive media in printed, audio, and video formats that could express and depict concepts and situations to people who had not personally experienced them... City kids and country kids get the same tests graded to the same criteria. It's not the tests that are biased, it's life that is.
Agreed. Most people have a hard time accepting the nature of the human condition and prefer to spend time thinking about how to fix problems they don’t necessarily understand and / or have the tools to resolve, instead of focusing on the most immediate problems, which are more often than not internal and specific to the individual.
People are not born equal, and don't become more equal as life goes on.
Correct, people are not born equal. That’s life. What do you mean by “don’t become more equal as life goes on”? If you’re referring to financially equal, I would suggest you do some historical research on the financial success of immigrants in the context of western countries and for a period of time of your choosing. You’ll quickly realize that a given case of an immigrant performing better than a native-born person disproves that notion. And we don’t have a single case of course, we have millions. Once financial success is achieved by said immigrant, quality of education and health follows. I mean, isn’t that the essence of the American dream? Just because a few people “don’t become more equal as life goes on” doesn’t mean we have millions of immigrants who have been confronted with cultural, financial, and societal barriers performing better than the native population.
It would take an incredibly stupid person to not understand an elevator. I grew up in a rural area where there weren't any.
I have my doubts that elevators are that prominent in standardized testing and even if they were, they're devices that are widely depicted in media and are frankly not that complicated. I have my doubts that they're really that befuddling to students and if they can't figure such a thing out that probably does speak to their educational deficiencies.
What about this idea? Teach students problem-solving skills as part of the curriculum with context removed and test on that. If students practice pure logic we can remove context-dependent problems entirely and have students answering questions about entity A described with certain behaviors properties and relations instead of elevators. Abstract away all the context and have every student tested on the questions restated in a generic format. Example: In entity A (building) there is entity B (elevator) that may move along metric X between -1 and 10... (the floors from basement to 10)" Without the parenthesized parts on the test. Currently this would be very difficult for all students but add this teaching to the curriculum and not only can we build fair standardized tests we'll train a generation's abstraction and logical reasoning skills. And it would boost the IT sector as well since these skills underly much of it.
So, schools do teach problem solving skills. But in your scenario here, they would also need to teach all of that vocabulary (entity, metric, etc). High school should definitely know that, but again bias against English as a second language learners would be a problem here. Also, kids aren’t supposed to be able to think abstractly developmentally until fourth or fifth grade. So what do you do with younger kids? I just wish we could acknowledge that there is no perfectly accurate and unbiased test.
>So, schools do teach problem solving skills. But in your scenario here, they would also need to teach all of that vocabulary (entity, metric, etc). High school should definitely know that, but again bias against English as a second language learners would be a problem here. Incorporate the vocabulary into the English curriculum or create a standard vocabulary for the other languages and test them in that. >Also, kids aren’t supposed to be able to think abstractly developmentally until fourth or fifth grade. So what do you do with younger kids? I was thinking more about high school. Colleges don't care how you did in elementary school.
Students are required to give annual standardized tests starting in 2nd grade. (Age 7) Most schools give 3-4 practice tests per year, too. Have you heard of the 30 million word gap? Vocabulary and language is one of the most biased aspects of the test. Kids in poverty come to school with fewer words, and they never catch up (obviously barring some outliers). No matter how many words are incorporated into the standard curriculum, that gap isn’t bridge. Nobody has figured out how.
Are we really going to believe there is a child in the United States that doesn't know what an elevator is and needs a field trip to understand? That might have been possible before the internet and widespread access to online entertainment, but I'm not buying it in 2024.
Idk, that’s what I overheard. Meanwhile, it’s super privileged to assume every family has internet access enough to where young kids in elementary schools can have the same level of experienced as wealthier kids. It’s disingenuous (or just uninformed) to pretend these tests are unbiased or equally fair to all kids from all backgrounds.
Standardized testing is a great way to Ra k students, but only at taking standardised tests. People who are very smart but perform worse at tests such as people with dyslexia or ADHD have their ability hidden by tests, likewise you get people you aren't able to understand things but are able to learn things by wrote and so are great at standardised tests while not being good at applying the actual thing they were tested about outside of the standardised way that is being tested.
I'm pretty sure that people with diagnosed dyslexia get accommodations for these tests, don't they? I will say if you are undiagnosed and don't get an accommodation, that is VERY much a large issue because your abilities are not being properly tested properly. Your ability to solve a math problem shouldn't be hindered by your inability to read the problem because of dyslexia. As someone with multiple friends that have it (but were diagnosed early enough before taking these tests) my heart breaks at the idea that their intelligence may never have been properly fostered or analyzed because of it.
Yes, they often get accommodations. Kids with dyslexia are often given the Read Aloud accommodation, and it's not as rare as that other commenter seems to suggest. I'd say the deployment could vary by school district, but it's not like schools are trying to make students fail by not giving them accommodations. Why would a school do that?
They’re not trying. They just don’t care.
Wrong but ok
My mom is a special education/behavior disorder teacher. I may be biased because my state/governor has been particularly horrific with education laws compared to most other places, but she is constantly lamenting the lack of funding and attention given to kids who need it. Often, they’ll keep violent and disruptive kids in a normal classroom because it’s too expensive or they’re too understaffed to do anything else. When all the attention from aides and teachers are focused on the worst of the worst, which it usually is, the kids with minor disabilities completely fly under the radar.
So all that can be true, and the answer isn’t “educators don’t care” the answer is that we need better funding and more supports so that our educators can feel more empowered to do their jobs effectively.
Oh no, I never said educators don’t care. They absolutely do, they’re pulling all the weight here. The schools themselves and the government don’t give a shit, that’s what I meant by ‘they’. I think we are in agreement
>I'm pretty sure that people with diagnosed dyslexia get accommodations for these tests, don't they? Nope. Even students who have IEPs get extremely limited accommodations. Getting the test read aloud to is extremely, extremely rare.
Not sure where you’re getting this from, but in my experience a student with dyslexia will almost always receive a read-aloud accommodation. If their disability causes some kind of deficit in reading, this is almost always the first accommodation provided.
The main drawback of standardized testing is that if schools/teachers/whatever are still being held to account for their students' performance on these tests, there's an incredible incentive to teach toward the test. Instead of understanding history, say, you end up teaching how to do well on the history portion of the exams. I'm not sure that's much of an improvement over whatever the current situation is.
Could you elaborate on how testing the students' comprehension of the history subjects covered hinders their understanding of it? Is your implication that not enough history is being covered? If so, then wouldn't that just call for a longer, more comprehensive exam?
There likely aren’t history portions of the exams. I see a huge looming problem as a result of substandard social studies/history education, because it’s not included in many standardized exams, it’s not prioritized in instruction.
It's not included in like the SAT but typically each school district has their own set of testing for all the core subjects that is essentsly used as a metric of how well the school/teacher taught.
Most state standardized tests focus on reading comprehension, grammar, and basic math. Most school districts absolutely do not run their own high-stakes testing on social studies. A few states (like NY) have things like Regents exams that you have to pass for a certain diploma and those have subject tests. Unless something has radically changed in the last 10 years, there is very little standardized social studies testing, apart from AP exams Edit: here’s a [rundown](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab2_16.asp) of which states require social studies assessment. About half the states don’t have it at all, and the rest only are testing on this once or twice in a student’s K-12 career.
Certified Social Studies and Computer teacher checking in. The reason that we don't do standardized test, in my opinion as a history teacher, is that the content is totally not compatible with tests. To get my social studies cert in my state i had to take a standardized exam on history. First of all the areas that were fair game were "prehistory to present". I don't think kids tests would be that comprehensive but the problems that arose in a test like this would show up in standardized tests for kids the same way. A good example of this would be for you to imagine a test on the founding of America. What does the test ask? Let's use some well known historical information to show how this may go. Fact that will absolutely be taught in most history classes on the founding of America: Betsy Ross, a colonial woman, made the first USA flag. Now first of all this isn't even true. There is no evidence for this but a lot of students will be told this. Does the test have the "real" information or the widely circulated factoid? Obviously history class would ideally have only "correct" information but the reality is that your history classes are likely littered with these "facts". Additionally I would argue if a history teacher taught all about the founding of america and never brought up when or who exactly designed or created the very first flag that's also fine. It's really not important, History is basically a giant trivia game with a ton of specific information. I would literally never in my wildest dreams want a standardized history test given to kids because at the end of the day, no matter what material makes it on to the test, it will be completely arbitrary. This isn't math, there are very few "concepts" in history that you can teach that are actually applicable elsewhere. Now having said all of that I want to make a point to say that History and English are basically the same topic and are inextricably linked, the same way math is to science. Math is the skill/concept, Science is our academic application of that skill for practice. English is the skill/concept, History/Social Studies is our academic application of that skill for practice. History class has you write essays because it's really just an english class. That's the skill you are normally working on, reading, writing, comprehension, and regurgitation. History tests that focus on content have it all wrong because honestly History's specific content simply isn't important or relevant like math, science, or even english. English exams are testing the actual skill we are working on in a history room. Adding a historical content exam would be nothing but redundant and necessarily arbitrary. Additionally, even as a teacher of this content myself I'd have a hard time arguing that anyone SHOULD HAVE TO know it. The truth is they don't, and most functioning adults certainly don't have it or need it.
I’m a former history teacher. I don’t think high-stakes standardized tests are good, in general. I wouldn’t advocate for such tests to be expanded to include social studies. My point is that, when schools build curricula to align with state testing, the lack of social studies testing means the subject gets deprioritized. Also: understanding history is essential to understanding the world we live in today. It is a core life skill.
You make good points but it doesn't change my view. I definitely think there are drawbacks, but on the whole, I still consider them to be a net good.
Care to explain that? Because I firmly disagree with that take. Teaching you to parrot key information isn’t teaching you anything. If you want to understand something you need to understand the what, the how, and the why. Teaching for the test will give you the what. Basically everyone can tell you the dates for the start and finish of WW2, they can tell you that Stalingrad and Normandy were battles during WW2 but that’s about it. If you ask them the why, they’ll probably say Nazi were trying to take over the world which is true but it’s also a toddler level understanding of the why. If you ask them how it started they’re probably going to blankly stare at you. Learning how to parrot information doesn’t mean you actually know and understand what you’re parroting.
As somebody who did very well on standardized tests but generally struggled in school as a whole I think you're drastically misrepresenting standardized tests. I was a terrible student. Couldn't memorize facts for shit. To this day I can't tell you the dates you mentioned and I know a ton about WW2. I was very undisciplined and lazy. But I was also a very curious kid and a good thinker. I would often spend more time educating myself on topics and sources outside the curriculum that caught my interest rather than the material of the class. The reason I did well on standardized test was my broad knowledge, well developed reading and writing abilities and a natural knack for critical thinking that allowed me to apply processes of elimination to multiple choice questions very effectively. Rote memorization and practice will not get you very far on standardized tests. "Test taking skills" are just everyday life skills of critical thinking, logical reasoning, reading comprehension and the ability to "connect the dots" of knowledge. I think our schools have it backwards. Teaching somebody to be a well rounded thinker is the best strategy for improving test scores.
You're correct that it makes more sense to teach critical thinking, logical reasoning and reading comprehension, but that takes a significant amount of effort. You clearly have a natural aptitude for those types of skills, but that's not true for everyone. You can get a larger percentage of students above a baseline in a much shorter period of time by teaching to the test, and that's why schools do it. Which is a good argument as to why standardized testing is arguably counter productive.
Buddy… you just agreed with me. You did the opposite of learning how to parrot information.
Because not all standardized testing just incentives repeating back what you've been told. The mathematics portions of the ACT and SAT require you to take information given in a prompt and be able to use logic to come to the correct conclusion.
The mathematics portion of the SAT is a perfect example of why standardized testing should be reformed. There wouldn't be any need to prep for "SAT math" if this wasn't the case.
I will push back against this as a math teacher and SAT tutor. The problems on the math portion do not do this. They all follow a predictable and learnable structure. I can improve a student’s score by a couple hundred points in just a couple sessions by teaching them how the questions are presented and a few multiple choice strategies. Very few require critical thinking or test your thought process. There’s a reason test prep is a lucrative side job for teachers: it’s quite easy to learn how to take these tests; it’s not a test of intelligence nor a good measure of the quality of education you received.
But that's math, a subject that works better with standardized testing because there are frequently a singular, simple answer in the form of a number. You do not get that with other subjects where answers need to be far more complex but standardized tests will simplify them in order to work with the multiple-choice format.
How else can you verify that the students in a school/district/state are actually learning the things that they're being taught? I get that some kids won't learn history when they're being taught to the test, but a lot of that same group won't learn it no matter how it's taught. I'm all for teaching the details of whatever subject and letting the kids who can't or won't learn fail, but that isn't acceptable anymore apparently.
Funding shouldn’t be linked to student achievement whatsoever. Why would you punish a school whose kids are underachieving with less funding? How does that help the kids?
Well, that would be my dream scenario to not have funding linked to student achievement in any capacity, but I think that's a fair bit away.
I don't think funding is as tied to funding as people are representing. Depends on the state, I think. But why would you continue funneling huge amounts of money to a failing organization? I know states can try to takeover school districts to right the ship. With....uh...varying results lol.
My honest to God dream solution is less admins and more teachers in every school. And we need more schools in general. We have more people than we did 50 years ago but not nearly as many schools necessary to keep up with the population growth. But for some reason we keep hiring more and more admins. It's ridiculous. There is a clear link between classroom size and student performance. When teachers can give more one on one training, the success rate naturally goes up.
We are getting more admins cause we are asking schools to handle more and more stuff. Admin to handle curriculum. Admin to handle technology. To handle behavioral issues. To handle special services. To handle business. To handle testing. HR. Equity. Transportation. Funding. We kinda need all these people, the way school is structured now. What evidence do you have that admins are redundant?
I mean, we could always close the school and pay the parents to stay home and homeschool, but otherwise....
Firstly, standardized tests are the measuring stick to determine federal funding. Not grades. Local funding components vary by state and locals. Secondly, high school grades remain a good predictor of future success. They are a far [better predictor than the ACT for example](https://www.aera.net/Newsroom/Research-Finds-that-High-School-GPAs-Are-Stronger-Predictors-of-College-Graduation-than-ACT-Scores), nearly 5x. This is a massive reason behind the decline in popularity of standardized tests as a requirement for admission - it doesn't predict _at all_ whether someone is going to graduate from the college they are being admitted to based on scores. Why? Well...success is usually fuzzier than standardized tests can capture. The reasons it seem "fair" are the reasons it doesn't tell us about the real world. You have to succeed _in some system_ and not _fail in some system_, and that system ain't standardized. So...is the goal to know when people are setup to know some facts? Or to know who can and can't succeed in college or the real world?
>This is a massive reason behind the decline in popularity of standardized tests as a requirement for admission -it doesn't predict at all whether someone is going to graduate from the college they are being admitted to based on scores. "We find that, while SAT scores are statistically significant predictors of college graduation, highschool grades may be more predictive." "Statistically significant" is much greater than "doesn't predict at all". https://dspace.sewanee.edu/items/15d4e9eb-0eef-472e-bb75-cece27aba6c4 And while perhaps GPA is a stronger predictor, the whole point is that there is no *standardization* with how grades are calculated across the countless schools across the country.
Can you show me an example of standardized test scores determining the amount of funding you get? I work in several states in education and I've literally never heard of this. It sounds bizarre. In most states I know of, funding is determined by the size of the district, by how many special ed kids you have, how many Free/Reduced lunch kids you have, local taxes, federal grants, etc.
Do the test scores determine which parents move to the district and start paying in to the school district or is that not publicly available information?
Standardized testing isn't really about being able to recite facts. It's about being able to analyze a problem and come to a solution. A crude example would be that a person wants to know how much rope they need to tie two things from point a to point b at an angle, but they can't measure it by hand because of the angle and length. The test taker is supposed to figure out that they need to make a right angle triangle and use the Pythagorian theorem to find the length.
Weird thing to focus on in response. What about it not predicting anything?
The study you linked only focused on students graduating from Chicago districts. That's a very small and specific sample. I wouldn't say that's a giant blow to the idea of standardized testing being a way to grade students across the country on equal footing.
It's one of many. Do you think schools are dropping the requirement for no reason? Or do you maybe think they have found it doesn't correlate to success of matriculating students?
Actually the opposite is true, schools are bringing the requirements back after dropping them during COVID. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-sat-act-admissions-requirement/ https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2024/0314/Why-some-top-colleges-are-requiring-the-SAT-again Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard, Texas, Brown and others have brought back testing requirements in the past several months.
Well yeah, I mean how are their alumni going to be guaranteed an income teaching test prep to get into the school to children with rich parents if they can't succeed in their field if the schools no longer require the test? And how will they make sure to have enough rich kids at the school to create networking opportunities for the best and brightest without gatekeeping?
Do you seriously believe that most SAT prep teachers are Ivy League alumni?
No, but I seriously believe that any Ivy League alumni who fucks up can spend the rest of their life tutoring kids in some major urban center to get in to the school.
The Pythagorean theorem is simply reciting a math fact. There is no logic or reasoning involved in solving a right triangle. A better question would be to derive the Pythagorean theorem using a formal proof. But that is not what’s on standardized tests because it can’t be a multiple choice question.
The problem doesn't ask you to recite the theorem. The problem is making you realize that the theorem is the solution. It's "there is this issue. How do you fix this issue."
I disagree. Being presented with a triangle with a missing side = solve pythagorean theorem. There is no logical reasoning there, it’s essentially asking for the definition. The test even provides the formula as a picture and labels it.
> There is no logical reasoning there, it’s essentially asking for the definition. The test even provides the formula as a picture and labels it. How are these two sentences not contradictory? How can it simultaneously be asking for a definition if its also providing one?
Let me ask you this, what’s more important, knowing when Columbus discovered America, or knowing what was going on and what was the political, social, religious, scientific motivation that lead to him sailing to America? I’d argue the latter but that’s harder to test on a standardized system. Yet because of that, you have a simplistic view of history that now leads to events such where people are destroying statues of historical figures for crimes they were innocent of
People always say this but I have never known a single person in my life who couldn’t remember any “rote facts” but were also geniuses about other stuff. I have known some people who were better/fabulous at context and critical thinking etc and were definitely able to retain information and memorize things. If they can’t remember a date how are they going to remember the Socio-political conditions of that date? Obviously we should prioritize the latter.
> If they can’t remember a date how are they going to remember the Socio-political conditions of that date? This is silly. Its like saying "if someone can't memorize the release dates of hundreds of books, movies, games, etc., how can we expect them to be able to remember their plots?" Despite basically no one being able to do the former without an enormous amount of studying, nearly every person over the age of 10 can do the latter without issue. Dates are way more abstract than event relationships. If I ask anyone about their experiences with covid, they can probably give a pretty detailed description of how life was different for them. If I ask when any of those events happened, I doubt I would get date-specific answers.
I struggle a bit with dates, but if you ask me on the other stuff, oh boy we’d be here all day
Would you say that information would be more or less useful if you could remember where it came in relation to other events?
I know the relation, as in x event occured before y event. But the exact exact date? No. I have the approx
Well, I guess I’m impressed that you’re able to remember the relative order of every event on earth, including ones you’ve never heard of somehow, but can’t remember a single date.
That's normal, though. People often memorize events in order or in a chain or cluster of related thoughts and memories. That's why memetic devices are usually based on a poem or song where the entire thing is in a specific order or associating a memory with a picture or acronym or place the subject knows well. I've never heard of a person who uses numbers as a memetic device, because numbers aren't as easy to remember. But a story is simple. Even very small children can remember the order something happened in in a story.
Where did I say that?
You said you know the relation. Presumably of any event since we weren’t discussing a particular one. I just wish people would stop acting like memorizing facts isn’t useful because they remember the emotional experience of their own education. Dates are a right or wrong situation, so can be easily marked incorrect. Essay questions leave room for you to blather and are much harder to objectively grade for the average teacher. So everyone in the world now thinks they’re bad at memorization but great at the deeper context and critical thinking.
Memorizing facts is useful. But memorizing dates is possibly the least useful historical fact for an actual understanding of history, because most of the time history is used to bring context to specific things in our daily life by explaining how they got that way, or to give us problem solving ideas. Memorizing dates would be more important for times in the future. So if you were working on a project where things had to happen on a certain date or a certain number of days apart or something. Medicine, chemistry, government, physical education, economics, etc.
Said I know the relation between event x and y. Where is that “every event”? And a lack of critical thinking leads to easily fooled masses
Reading comprehension and mathematic comprehension tests do not delve into history. Which is what the bulk of my argument is about: reading and mathematics SAT. Apologies for not stating that. That being said, we have standardized testing for AP courses, including history, where motivations of actions are very much tested on.
That hasn’t been my experience. Most history courses, because they’re concerned with standardized tests, they test on dates not the purpose or reason behind the events. Or if they do, it’s an extremely surface level. Like, for example, the founding fathers of America were indeed very much against slavery and the slave trade. They were worried, however, of a drastic change immediately after another drastic change causing more harm than good. So they decided slow and steady. Then, as it was about to be eliminated, greedy individuals decided to abuse a loophole the fathers didn’t foresee. Yet, because of that, guess what the modern perspective is? America was founded by racist white men. History is more nuanced than that.
History is not a subject that is covered by most standardized tests. This whole example is not accurate.
I mean... my history classes mostly just went from the same dates to the same dates over and over each year, with a lot of repetition. We did get to do some fun reenactment projects, though. I love those. Like elementary school was mostly US history over and over. I was super lucky because in 4th grade they do state history, and I lived in Texas at the time, and yeah, a lot of it is racist, but Texas has a lot of neat things going on historically. Every other year we would start at roughly plymouth rock (mostly skipping Jamestown) and then go roughly to the 1950s. Then they'd be like "by the way hippies existed and the Berlin wall came down" and then we went back to the start the next year. The main focus was on the pilgrims, the pioneers, and the underground railroad. Then when I was in middle school, we did one year of ancient greece and rome, one then we did 3-4 years of "The Italian renaissance and the French revolution" over and over until I didn't have to take history anymore. I didn't get to hear any other world or US history until I took AP classes and electives. Then I had to try to absorb the labor movement, the industrial side of the industrial revolution, Jim Crow, the 1960s and 1970s cultural revolutions in psychology and sociology, the enlightenment, the cold war, the northern renaissance, WWI, etc. All at once. It sucked. If I didn't take AP courses I would only have some vague idea that the pioneers came to america from Italy, planted some corn, had a war over if they were going to have slaves or not, built a railroad and electricity, fought another war in europe over ??? then invented the movies, fought hitler, invented rock and roll, stopped being racist, and then gave birth to the internet.
There's a reason why basically no states do high-stakes standardized testing for history/social studies. You just uncovered it. Standardized testing is mostly ELA/Math based for this reason.
>Yet because of that, you have a simplistic view of history that now leads to events such where people are destroying statues of historical figures for crimes they were innocent of This is not the fault of standardized tests. This is the fault of misinformation spreading on social media.
Which starts at the school
No, it's the opposite. Schools (usually) teach students true statements (such as other countries also had slavery). But students don't learn that, they watch TikTok videos on their phone, where "influencers" make videos saying "white people/America invented slavery", and then they believe that. I know because I've been through the education system, and I actually payed attention in class, unlike kids who just play on their phones all day.
That’s not what I’m referring to. Were the founding fathers racist?
Why is that relevant? We're talking about standardized tests here.
"Let me ask you this, what’s more important, knowing when Columbus discovered America, or knowing what was going on and what was the political, social, religious, scientific motivation that lead to him sailing to America?" they both are but the latter cannot be taught without the former
Well the current push for individualized assessment largely comes out of the idea that standardized tests as they are written rn don't actually work. They don't actually give you the thing you expect them to give you. What does it mean to get X grade on Y test? Does it mean you actually understand the material in a way that has meaningful value outside of the test? Or does it mean you studied very well for this exact type of test in order to game the system? And that's without mentioning the cultural and socioeconomic issues with standardized testing That doesn't mean that the current alternatives we're trying are better - they're still a work in progress. We've identified that standardized testing is not as effective as assumed, but we haven't gotten a good replacement in place yet
It’s bad like capitalism but it’s the best system we got
I like that. Also I want to emphasize it's not the end all be all and shouldn't be the only way we measure students, but it is important. It's supplemental to other methods
This is sort of like saying "Blood testing is a good thing" Is it? Well, sometimes it certainly is. It allows us to measure things that are potentially useful for informing what medical treatments are or are not appropriate. But that doesn't mean it would be good to do blood testing on apparently healthy people every week, or to test somebody coming in for stitches after a knife injury for high cholesterol, or to test for things that have no known medical implications at all. Any kind of testing, including standardized academic testing, should be appropriate for measuring what it claims to measure and making decisions for the benefit of people based on that. I would argue that the degree of standardized testing in the US (where I live) is excessive. Kids can easily take two or three multi-day standardized state tests every year from 3rd to 10th grade of so and additional classroom to district level standardized tests of different reading and math skills. At some point that's a lot of time taken from instruction by [16 school days](https://www.k12dive.com/news/dod-students-standardized-tests/697458/) of testing. and its not clear that we're getting any useful information that would lead us to act differently than we would be using significantly less time than that.
Let me tell you about one year that I “failed” as a teacher, to illustrate how standardized testing is used to measure teacher performance. I taught first grade in a school with mostly first gen American kids. I started the year with 23 kids in my roster - the lowest class size on the grade. Early in the year, my students did benchmark testing. Because my roster was low, every new arrival was placed in my class. I love teaching new arrivals, but we’re talking mostly about kids who have had very limited schooling and no English. So on the second round of tests, even though each individual child is making progress, my average takes a big dip. I’m failing. Realizing that only five students in my class are working at grade level, my principal decides to pull those five kids out of my class so that I can focus on intensive ESL and literacy with the lower-level kids. I have a smaller class size now, which is great for the kids still in my class. They’re making progress. But when we do the next round of testing, those five kids are no longer part of the equation. Moreover, it takes much longer to get a kid from “no English” to “foundational English reading” than it does to take them from “September grade level reading” to “March grade level reading.” But these two jumps are considered equivalent in the context of the test. My average takes a huge nosedive, even though each student is making meaningful progress. Now I’m really failing. My job is at stake. Even though everyone knows that I’m teaching effectively and my students are learning, the testing doesn’t reflect that, because there has been so much change to my roster. And because the stakes are so high and the testing is so depersonalized, my admin doesn’t really care whether there’s learning happening, they just need to report good scores. It’s nice to think “well that’s a misuse of data,” but the fact is, misuse of data is exactly the problem that most teachers have with standardized testing. If the tests functioned to provide useful information to further our students’ learning, we’d be all for it. But they’re almost always used to raise stakes and depersonalize education without offering useful data to teachers.
This story does not show that the test provides poor data.. it shows your administrators or people presenting your data are bad. Fixing your data to make it more useful would be relatively easy. Getting rid of standardized testing does not provide you more information
Unfortunately I think you’ve missed my point. I’m not arguing that this is poor data. I’m arguing that it’s misused. As I mentioned above, it’s all well and good to say “well that’s an easy fix” and it is in a hypothetical world. But this is the reality of how high-stakes standardized tests are used. They’re not interested in addressing any degree of nuance. They’re not interested in providing usable data for teachers to improve learning. Frankly, they’re interested in putting money in the pockets of Kaplan and Pearson and the College Board and that’s really the end of it.
The critical question here is, is your view: "Standardized testing is a good thing" Or: "These specific standardized tests are a good thing" I think what happens is that if pressed, almost everyone would concede that it would be good to have an accurate standardized assessment of what really matters. But *in practice* it doesn't usually work out that well. Once some standardized testing is chosen at the state and district level, and then teachers end up having to teach to that specific standard in a way that can end up being a net negative for the students. Maybe then everyone complains, and a new standard is adopted, but that ends up sucking too. And eventually teachers are going to adopt the idea that *in practice* "standardized testing sucks", even if their younger selves were fully bought into the *idea* of standardized testing. But if that ideal is not lived up to in practice, at some point you have to wonder if the idea is actually a good one once you account for implementation realities.
This is wrong I went to a charter school that absolutely crushed it. I went to 7 high schools in total because I was a horrible child. The charter school had a specific elective based towards the SAT and the ACT. It is all you did for an entire period. I along with nearly every one of my friends received a 1400+ on the SAT. It never got in the way of any other topics, and we even took random classes such as learning about maritime on top of English, Math, History, etc etc etc. The idea that a teacher will only focus on the test is just no. The issue is you have teachers who suck and don't do their job and after what happened in DC people are afraid to fire horrible teachers since parents have shown time after time they care more about a teachers job than their childrens education. Parents will literally vote out those who are bringing positive change to their children's education to protect teacher unions and bad teachers. Go look at why Arnold lost in Cali when he tried to go after the teacher unions and what happened in DC when they tried to give teachers who perform better security in their jobs and give them tenure rather than base it on who has been there the longest. They fired the woman in charge of the school district then voted out the mayor who appointed her. Even go look at Baltimore recently you had a kid who was in the top 50% of his class with a less that 1.0 GPA and people were blaming the school when the kid missed over 300 days of school.
Charter schools can crush because they pull out all the best students from public schools, leaving the public schools to flounder.
no they don't entire system is based upon a lottery system. You can actually watch in some of the worst cities in the US mothers and fathers crying as their children are picked or aren't picked, becasue they are aware the only way their child will get a proper education is if they are picked during the lottery. If that was the case as well could you explain why I ended up getting picked for a charter school when I was dropping out of 6 schools before I got kicked out due to how horrible I was, but then went on to get a 3.5 GPA with a 1450 SAT by the end of my senior year? Break that down for me how I was the cream of the crop and they hand selected me into their school.
Depends on the state and school system. Some are lottery, some are merit. But in either case, which parents are more likely to put their kids in a lottery for the better charter school? Spoiler: it’s the parents that care the most. Engaged parents are a massive indicator of student success.
"However, due to the high demand of charter schools, there might not be enough enrollment spots to allow all applicants to attend the school of choice. To fix this problem, **charter schools usually turn to what is known as a school lottery system.**" But yes I do agree with you 100% that engaged parents are a massive indicator of success. That is why I specifically brought up DC, CA, and Baltimore which have shown time and time again that parents IN MASS openly support a teachers job over their children's education. The entire point as to why Charter school are showing such successful children. In a charter school there is no tenure your renewal of a contract is based upon how well students do in your class. EXACTLY what DC tried to implement. Getting rid of bad teachers and securing jobs for great teachers. Parents have shown time and time again that they DO NOT WANT THIS.
How did they hand select you? Because that's different from the lottery system you seem to be describing.
What? I was in a lotter system wtf are you talking about rn.
Your last line said you were hand selected into their school in a post talking about your charter school. So how were you entered into the lottery?
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I’m like 50 comments in and as a teacher find it hysterical that NO ONE has brought up the fact that some kids don’t even try. I have kids finish a 50 question test in which they should have read multiple paragraphs and be done in 20 minutes. The tests have zero accountability for the kids so they click right through just to be done. If you want real results the kids need to take the test seriously. They won’t do that until they’re directly impacted by the results such as not moving on to the next grade level.
Standardized tests really only measure how well you know how to take that test. I didn't do great on the SAT so I took a prep course on it. I scored the same. Zero improvement. The style of SAT questions is something I just can't grasp very well. Are my reading and math skills actually lacking? No, I've since gone on to have a very successful college career. I also took the ACT and only glanced at the essay writing portion the night before the exam. Based on percentiles, I did significantly better on the ACT with barely one night of studying than I did on the SAT after an entire prep course just for that exam. All those two tests measured was how good at taking them I was, and I just got lucky that I am good at taking ACT style tests. AP tests are very similar. If I took a college American history class and then took the APUSH exam I probably wouldn't do very well because the college class doesn't teach me how to take an AP test.
Wouldn't the fact that your prep course didn't effect your score actually prove the *opposite* of what you're saying? Better knowing "how to take the test" did not in fact change your score at all suggesting that it's actually measuring something other than test taking knowledge.
I think it's worth it to mention Goodhart's law or Campbell's law here (I don't know which is most appropriate here, but they're highly related.) Testing is good. Gaining statistical data is good, it's better to know it than not know it. When you start making decisions based on statistical data and people know you're doing so and your decisions matter, they'll try to act in such a way to make the data shake out better. You said it yourself - when grades matter, then grades can be inflated. I suppose I just want to say - it doesn't matter if it's grades or standardized testing or a secret third thing, any measure that becomes a target will stop being a good measure.
Standardized tests don't really help with the function of education though. It incentivizes teachers to teach students *how to do well on the test* more than teaching them to retain the material they were "taught".
You make a good point, but from what I understand, the implementation of standardized tests is often very biased and has a history of racial and cultural bias. I'd say though, that in the US at least, we designed our school system in such a way that it's impossible to have schools that aren't "falling behind" and schools that are "good" and that's the problem. There shouldn't be "good" schools and and "bad" schools. That contributes to all kinds of problems for students but also creates pressure on the already incredibly stressed housing market for adults who may be struggling so they don't wind up in a "bad" district. In the town I grew up in, all the wealthy people lived in a certain area of town. I just found out the schools on that side of the district have free lunch for all, and the schools on the poorer side have a massive school lunch debt. I worked in real estate in that area for a while, and there are a ton of beautiful old farmhouses and victorians and even a few adorable storybook homes from the 30s that will never sell because they're in the "wrong" school district. If we really want to have equality of opportunity in our school system, we should start by funding every school the same amount per child, with extra money going towards accessibility programs for disabled students, giving out free school lunch and breakfast to every single student, and having free after school programs with tutoring in every district so that working parents save on daycare, and kids who have parents at home to help them with the subjects they struggle in don't have an advantage on homework assignments over kids that don't, kids that have proper nutrition in the home don't have an advantage over kids that don't, and kids that have parents who can afford to live in the wealthier part of town don't get the opportunity to join the school band or learn to paint while the kids that don't get the opportunity to watch those things on television. If you're doing standardized testing to tell which schools are underfunded, that's a waste of public funds. We know which schools are underfunded. It's the ones that are in districts where there aren't a lot of residential homes or where property taxes are low. The IRS already has that data for us.
The reason the SAT a thing is that traditionally most Ivy League students attended boys’ prep schools that had arrangements with a particular Ivy League university. The SAT was supposed to make it fairer for talented boys who did not have the good fortune to attend prestigious New England boarding schools.
I'd like to share a perspective from my country, which has standardized testing. I'll focus on the state math exams, which are considered very important. Some background: Math exams are split into brackets. The smartest students take the hardest exams. The struggling students take easier exams. Your final evaluation is both your grade and your bracket. > gives them an excuse to inflate grades ... Standardized testing nullifies this issue Turns out math is hard. Politicians don't like low grades, they need to show improvements in the education system. They can find the flaws of the education system and try to fix it. Or they can change the way the exams are evaluated. Some changes made by various ministries of Education over the years: - The easiest bracket (most struggling students) have changed their exams to have 150% of the maximum grade. That means you only need to get 66% of the questions right in order to get a perfect score. A student with 75% of the perfect score has only succeeded in 50% of the exam. In other circumstances it would be consider that he failed to pass the exam. This vastly increases the number of students who passed math and didn't improve their education at all. - Instead of pushing students to excel and advance to higher brackets, students are instead incentivized to study at a lower bracket. This raises grades (particularly in comparison to recent years before that change) but doesn't improve anything. This is achieved in various ways - change the math bracket requirement to study other things, such as physics, chemistry, computer science. To sum up, standardized testing doesn't nullify bad incentives - it merely moves them to a political level.
Standardized tests are actually extremely bias in a lot of ways most people won't pick up on. I teach in a state where our standardized test for my grade level had a written essay. The prompt was to describe a day at an amusement park. The vast majority of my students had never been to one and couldn't answer this prompt regardless of their skill level. Additionally, this causes schools to heavily focus on "bubble students" aka the ones who may possibly bump up to proficient. Which takes away time and resources from students who truly need help and let them fall more and more behind. Because it doesn't matter if a student showed growth on these tests, they often just look at what percentage passed it. Don't even get me started on how poorly these work as a reflection on schools with high ESL populations.
I want to add, not only are these tests biased, they are out right against large groups of people! In my state, they base the authenticity of the scores based on 3 counties. If those 3 did badly, the test is considered too hard. If those 3 do super well, the test is too easy. All the scores are based on comparing to those 3 counties. Plus, tying funding to scores only hurts poor areas. The 3 counties that everything is compared to, are the 3 richest counties. They aren't affected by those scores. But the county I teach in is 100% affected by the scores and funding. We don't even have working class sets of computers/laptops. How can our kids affectively take those tests on old and broken computers? And the funding is the only way to get better technology for them to use. Add on the questions don't take into account student experiences. A practice question had mentions of the speed of a merry-go-round. None of the students knew what that was or how fast it moved. These tests are for the rich and those that can afford to be in a good district that can give you experiences.
There are a couple issues that come to mind: One is simply the format that standardized tests are made in. In order to be graded by a computer rather than a person, they are composed of multiple choice questions rather than essay questions. This means that on some questions, it may be easier to eliminate wrong answers than to actually know the right answer. When I'm confronted with a math problem in real life, it doesn't come with a short list of possibilities for me to choose from. They don't test most of the subjects the school is supposed to be teaching. Typically, they only test math and linguistics. Science, history, and shop skills are disregarded. Simply including English skills in a test that will determine the future of the student or the school is inherently culturally biased. The idea of judging all students across the country by a common standard rather than by the subjective assessment of a multitude of individual teachers is obviously desirable, but we don't actually have a real way to evaluate millions of kids objectively in this manner.
So I worked at an elite private school in Asia in which parents would pay thousands of dollars over the course of years to SAT tutors. These kids would end up with 1400 or above despite, at times, not being very bright or hard working. The problem is that there are always factors that make these tests unfair in some ways. Also, my experience in both public and private schools has basically taught me that broadly public school teachers are usually better and more knowledgeable but just looking at test scores wouldn’t reveal this.
Disagree. Standardized testing isn't for the sake of being compared to the same standard. It is so that teachers don't actually teach and instead are given guidelines of what to teach. It's set in a way for teachers to teach for testing and not for learning. In other words, actual learning takes a back seat to performing well on tests. It sets a standard where every single student learns the same way. Humans simply do not work like that. Some can learn through memory, others through reading, and so on. A child who has a hard time memorizing formulas or whatnot is going to do poorly while the opposite is true for a child who can easily do it. A student might learn how to do chemistry by reading a step by step formula, while another student might need a visual example of how it's done. That is just to name a few examples.
When I was in high school, it felt like the only way the school board knew how to handle a problem was to throw a standardized test at it. I'm not necessarily against the SATs and ACTs existing as concepts (though they shouldn't be the Only metrics people are judged by), but I remember one year our Government class got to present a resolution to the state government and ours was to *reduce* standardized testing *to* a mere seven different standardized tests of the exact same material every single time. The time set aside for taking the test cut into the time that could be used to actually teach. Not to mention the fact that the tests were held up as so important that kids were pretty much only taught how to take multiple choice tests instead of how to think.
Your argument is a bit all over the place, but it seems your thrust is the SAT is better than GPA for college admissions. It seems you’re not talking about state standardized tests. The SAT and GPA are both imperfect measures of “merit.” They “measure” different things. Every college is different, too. So blanket statements like “the SAT is better than GPA” are somewhat meaningless.
I was on the board of a small school that had a lot of parents who were "alternative" and so would opt their younger children out of the standardised tests but we needed them to take the test in order to promote the school to potential parents. What we realised is that standardised tests have a value on a macro level to show that the individual school is producing results, and potentially spotting a child who "slipping through the cracks" but it for the most part, should not be used for individual students. And students should not be made aware of results. They should not be allowed to compare grades
It can be biased but a standardized test on all of school knowledge is almost too broad. We can talk SAT, ACT, GRE, etc. they have a problem with the industry teaching how to take the test. The other issue is tests can train you to focus on memorization not how to actually problem solve. Now I do support standardized tests for certain important professions. The bar exam in my opinion sets the minimum expected criteria for a lawyer, or a professional engineering license or medical speciality exams for board certification. It shows competency in a specialized field or acts as a bar to entry to more critical jobs. Not saying these are the only critical jobs but the ones that came to mind. Basically a standardized test for college entrance or high school graduation is almost too broad to be meaningful and just focuses on people learning how to take the test rather than show competency. But a standardized test to show basic qualification or specialized qualification of certain professions makes sense.
>Yes, it sucks to take these tests and gives students anxiety. After standardized testing each year at my high school, many students said something along the lines of "I didn't really try because I know it won't impact my grade." At least in my experience, students aren't anxious about standardized tests and they don't seem to be a great measure of how well students are actually doing in school, because many of them don't see the point in putting any effort in.
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Don't standardized tests also determine school funding? This could mean teachers either teach to the test instead of teaching in a meaningful way or even help students cheat so their school can get more funding. In fact, from what I remember, standardized/state testing is the primary way schools are chosen for funding.
What actionable insights have been mined from standardized tests? Are there any that have been developed into policy and implemented and resulted in better outcomes?
Yes. When a school sees that certain grade levels are suffering on certain skills or standards, they can modify their curriculum, train their teachers, and secure instructional resources to address those deficiencies for the following year.
What is an example of that being done? Couldn’t those teachers just use testing they’ve developed themselves to find that information?
No. Because teachers are not psychometricians. That means that every teacher's test can have a different level of rigor, cover different skills, and can have wildly different alignment to a curriculum. Without standardization as a north star, there's no way to calibrate a teacher's test for quality, alignment, or rigor. For example, I got straight A's in one of my college courses cause the professor didn't give two f\*\*\*ks. How do we know those students acquired the skills they were supposed to?
It sounds like your assuming students will give an effort in the test. In order for tests to measure differences between school, you're assuming all students are giving their best efforts (or at least the same percentage of students are giving their best efforts at each school). This is just not reality. Teachers at schools whose parents are really involved will have students who gave their best effort and try their best. Teachers at schools with parents who don't care will have students who are apathetic and race through the test or simply click through.
You realize disabled children have to take the same tests that non disabled children take? How is that not biased. I've had to help students who couldn't write or fully read take these tests. It is not a good system.
They can be a good thing I also had a class miss a question because none of the students realized that mackerel were a fish, so you needed to count them in order to get the total number of fish.
Studies have shown for years that the strongest correlation with standardized test scores is socioeconomic status so it’s good for filtering out poor kids but doesn’t measure intelligence
Wealthy kids can take classes to improve their standardized testing scores significantly. They're not any smarter or better at the material. They just learn tricks, patterns, and shortcuts for recognizing certain question types and efficiently moving through the question list. Some of this test prep is simply taking old versions of the test, over and over. High scores show you are good at taking the test. They are not valid indicators of general intelligence, measurements of academic fitness, or whatever they purport to be. Despite these shortcomings, your standardized test scores carry on outsized impact on your future life trajectory. I don't believe that's fair. Source: I used to teach these classes part-time.
what do you mean?
What is meant by “the” country?
As someone who’s a great standardized test taker married to a poor test taker I can tell you with 100% of my being that standardized tests do not test much. A standardized math test might tell me I’m better at math than my partner, but it’s not gonna tell me how much better my partner is at event planning. And on your comment about teachers not giving less than a 55 or 60%, that makes perfect sense. If you get an 0% on one assignment but a 100% on the next, it is unfair for you to literally still have a low F. Rather, you should have a C. Giving students below a 50% is a slap in the face. If I had two assignments all year and on the first I got a 20%, what’s the point of doing the second one? The absolute best grade I can get is a 60%. I’m all but guaranteed to fail the class. That’s dumb.
That’s just cold hard math. Let the kid fail and learn not to be a lazy ass.
Brother, my middle school teachers didn’t let me fail and now I’m a lawyer with 3 degrees representing some of the largest companies in the world. But yeah, let the kid fail and learn. By the way, 50% is still an F.