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Ok, so you have your metric. What next? They plug all of your stats into the function, and it says, "you will never be a good NBA player." With the NBA, we'r

Ok, so you have your metric. What next? They plug all of your stats into the function, and it says, "you will never be a good NBA player." With the NBA, we're comfortable saying "meh, not too many of those anyway -- moving on to high stakes poker -- never liked playing basketball anyway." But when the metric is of something much more broad, such as "success at a 4 year college" we're not so comfortable doing that. I just don't see what problem the standardized test actually solves.

gizmo686 9y ago
We want a well educated population. To do this, we have set up an educational system. However, education is a difficult problem, and it is not clear what works and what does not. What we need is some way of measuring how well things work. That is the problem that standardized testing is meant to solve. There are some tests that are intended to assist in accademic discrimination (eg. we only want good students here, so you need a good SAT score to get in), but that is not the usage we are talking about when we say California's are flatlining. Google A/B tests moving a pixel on their home page. Compiler writers performance test optimization passes. Educators want objective feedback too.
- dogruck 9y ago
  The SAT is explicitly designed to predict success at college. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    We are not talking about the SAT. This article is talking about the CAASPP, which is intended to provide feedback and ratings for the schools, not the students.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Does CAASPP differ in any salient way from SAT? If someone from another nation took each of them without seeing the cover sheet, could she say that the tests were different in any important way?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > If someone from another nation took each of them without seeing the cover sheet, could she say that the tests were different in any important way? SAT is a paper-based fixed set of questions, CAASPP is an adaptive computer-based exam. So, yes, quite.
    - dogruck 9y ago
      Most things in life are not measured and evaluated with a standardized test. Instead, they are measured by aggregated choice or surveys/votes. I haven't used a scantron form in many years. We could dispense with these tests and let people vote with their feet and wallets.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > We could dispense with these tests and let people vote with their feet and wallets. If the policy goal was short-term satisfaction rather than achieving some educational result, and we wanted to weight results by people's ability to bear the extra cost of changing schools from the one most physically convenient to their current residence, sure, that would be sensible. But as problematic as then-current testing regime may be, it's at least in principle aimed at something resembling the public policy goal public education is held out to serve, whereas your option would not be.

gizmo686 9y ago

We want a well educated population. To do this, we have set up an educational system. However, education is a difficult problem, and it is not clear what works and what does not. What we need is some way of measuring how well things work. That is the problem that standardized testing is meant to solve. There are some tests that are intended to assist in accademic discrimination (eg. we only want good students here, so you need a good SAT score to get in), but that is not the usage we are talking about when we say California's are flatlining. Google A/B tests moving a pixel on their home page. Compiler writers performance test optimization passes. Educators want objective feedback too.

dogruck 9y ago
The SAT is explicitly designed to predict success at college. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
- gizmo686 9y ago
  We are not talking about the SAT. This article is talking about the CAASPP, which is intended to provide feedback and ratings for the schools, not the students.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Does CAASPP differ in any salient way from SAT? If someone from another nation took each of them without seeing the cover sheet, could she say that the tests were different in any important way?
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > If someone from another nation took each of them without seeing the cover sheet, could she say that the tests were different in any important way? SAT is a paper-based fixed set of questions, CAASPP is an adaptive computer-based exam. So, yes, quite.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    Most things in life are not measured and evaluated with a standardized test. Instead, they are measured by aggregated choice or surveys/votes. I haven't used a scantron form in many years. We could dispense with these tests and let people vote with their feet and wallets.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > We could dispense with these tests and let people vote with their feet and wallets. If the policy goal was short-term satisfaction rather than achieving some educational result, and we wanted to weight results by people's ability to bear the extra cost of changing schools from the one most physically convenient to their current residence, sure, that would be sensible. But as problematic as then-current testing regime may be, it's at least in principle aimed at something resembling the public policy goal public education is held out to serve, whereas your option would not be.