6 ms·

Our standardized tests lead classes to a sort of "malicious compliance" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious

by jes5199 15y ago

Our standardized tests lead classes to a sort of "malicious compliance" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance - the tests are So Important to the schools that everything becomes a cram session, in lieu of actual teaching and exploring ideas. It doesn't have to be that way. There are counterexamples: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame... [Edit: (Technically it's just Goodhart's Law when there's no malicious intent. Hard to tell the difference sometimes, though. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/ ) ]

waterlesscloud 15y ago
You see a lot of complaints about standardized tests, but the simple fact of the matter is that standardized tests are not going away. People want a way to evaluate student performance in a way that works across many schools, districts, and states. By definition, that's going to be via standardized testing. Complaining about them will not help. Make better tests. Teach better around the tests. Those options are fine. But implying that the very idea of standardized testing is constricting is a waste of time. They aren't going anywhere.
- jes5199 15y ago
  It doesn't have to be a black and white question - I think there would be benefits to having fewer standardized tests, and to de-emphasize them when making policy (especially funding decisions) in favor of other metrics.
  - chives 15y ago
    I love standardized tests, they are easy. Really easy. Anyone who wants to ace them, can and will, many without studying. Are they helpful? Who knows, most likely not at all.
    - eropple 15y ago
      > Anyone who wants to ace them, can and will This is an amazingly provincial comment and it does not reflect well upon you. Rather than assuming malice in your comment, however, I would gently suggest that it would be rather difficult for someone passed from grade to grade without basic functional literacy to ace such a test. Or, for a sneakier, harder to quantify example, there are "standardized" tests in circulation (and I was exposed to some of them in middle and high school) where certain cultural information was implicitly demanded. Probably not a problem for middle-class suburban kids, but unlikely to be appropriate for underprivileged very-rural kids (of which the testing area had many). A narrow worldview isn't something to be ashamed of, but it is something to recognize and compensate for when making statements like yours.
  - bermanoid 15y ago
    What kind of other metrics? Keeping in mind that if it's not standardized, the numbers are statistical garbage...
    - nknight 15y ago
      Is your compensation determined by a standardized test? Why not? How can the world possibly work if we don't use standardized metrics for everything?!
      - bermanoid 15y ago
        My compensation is not determined by a hard metric because my employer has no way of measuring my direct contribution to the company's profits. If they did, you can be sure they'd pay me accordingly; this is why people in sales are often paid on commission, and why people in "billable hour" fields are scolded or fired if they don't hit their billing targets. In performance reviews, or (in my current line of work) consulting, it's not uncommon at all to bring up any and all evidence that you can think of to support a claim that you have (or will) contributed positively to the company's bottom line. Granted, we lack such a clear measure of success in education, and current standardized tests are a ham-fisted approach to creating one. Don't get me wrong - most of the standardized tests we use today follow the exact same approach to testing as they did 50 years ago, and whatever it is that we would like to measure when we say "educational progress", they no more accurately capture it now than they did then. But I'm not convinced that the general idea of measuring education through testing is wrong. I think what most anti-testing people balk at is the particular (and extremely limited) set of knowledge that most standardized tests measure - they tend to be more okay with the idea of measuring mastery of a particular subject (either through in-class tests, or even standardized subject tests, which draw far less criticism than the general tests). I'd be all for trying to figure out a way to measure general achievement in terms of subject-specific but still standardized tests (which not every student takes every one of), but there are a lot of difficulties there, too.
        _delirium 15y ago
        I would personally want to see it work in industry first. Once someone comes up with a way to directly tie programmers' pay/promotions to code metrics in a fully automated, standardized way, and shows that it works, then I'll believe there's a possible way to make that approach work for education, too. (If anything, the code-metrics problem should be easier, because you get a large sample of data over an extended period of time that represents their actual work output, not an artificially staged test that takes a few hours.)
- slowpoke 15y ago
  >People want a way to evaluate student performance in a way that works across many schools, districts, and states. Except what they are evaluating holds no meaning. Standardized tests are nonsense. Tests in general are. What you're measuring isn't knowledge, or understanding, what you're measuring is compliance to artificial and highly contrived environments. Which is a pretty useless skill, especially when compared to a deep understanding of the subject matter. >Teach better around the tests. By the FSM, NO. Teach around understanding, around critical thinking, logic and reason. But not around tests. This is exactly the kind of teaching that destroyed any interest I had in subjects that where taught back in school. There's nothing more frustrating to learn things not because they might be interesting, or because the deep understanding of the subject might be useful, but because they are on the next test. Granted, there are subjects where you can't teach "understanding" per se. History is such a subject. It's based on a lot of numbers, names and places, most of which are simple facts (WWII happened from 1933-1945 etc). However, I would argue that this means it's completely useless to do tests on history. What are you testing? Essentially memorization. Which is a useful skill, but not one on which a lot of your grades should depend. Especially because a lot of students spend hours memorizing facts which they will have forgotten a week after the test, and that time time could have been better spend on sensible things. >But implying that the very idea of standardized testing is constricting is a waste of time. They aren't going anywhere. You're essentially saying that because we can't do much about them makes them any less useless and constricting. Arguing that the problem can't be solved doesn't make the problem go away.
  - waterlesscloud 15y ago
    My point is that it doesn't matter if standardized testing has "meaning" or not, people still want it. They will continue to want it. People want to compare student and school and district performance, and standardized testing is how they're going to measure that. It doesn't really matter if it "works" or not, the decision making behind it is not logical, and it never will be. I'm not saying to center the teaching on the test, but to teach around them. The tests are here to stay. You have to do well on them. This is not something there is a choice about. But that doesn't mean you can't do well on the test and at the same time teach around it. Not for it, around it. Also, that's a strange idea that history is about rote memorization and not about understanding. Maybe I got lucky with my history teachers, but for me it was all about understanding how it all fit together, not raw facts.
- almost 15y ago
  Please don't be so defeatist. The US education system is horribly broken. Maybe the chances of it ever being fixed are low but I hope people continue to try.

by jes5199 15y ago

waterlesscloud 15y ago

You see a lot of complaints about standardized tests, but the simple fact of the matter is that standardized tests are not going away. People want a way to evaluate student performance in a way that works across many schools, districts, and states. By definition, that's going to be via standardized testing. Complaining about them will not help. Make better tests. Teach better around the tests. Those options are fine. But implying that the very idea of standardized testing is constricting is a waste of time. They aren't going anywhere.

jes5199 15y ago
It doesn't have to be a black and white question - I think there would be benefits to having fewer standardized tests, and to de-emphasize them when making policy (especially funding decisions) in favor of other metrics.
- chives 15y ago
  I love standardized tests, they are easy. Really easy. Anyone who wants to ace them, can and will, many without studying. Are they helpful? Who knows, most likely not at all.
  - eropple 15y ago
    > Anyone who wants to ace them, can and will This is an amazingly provincial comment and it does not reflect well upon you. Rather than assuming malice in your comment, however, I would gently suggest that it would be rather difficult for someone passed from grade to grade without basic functional literacy to ace such a test. Or, for a sneakier, harder to quantify example, there are "standardized" tests in circulation (and I was exposed to some of them in middle and high school) where certain cultural information was implicitly demanded. Probably not a problem for middle-class suburban kids, but unlikely to be appropriate for underprivileged very-rural kids (of which the testing area had many). A narrow worldview isn't something to be ashamed of, but it is something to recognize and compensate for when making statements like yours.
- bermanoid 15y ago
  What kind of other metrics? Keeping in mind that if it's not standardized, the numbers are statistical garbage...
  - nknight 15y ago
    Is your compensation determined by a standardized test? Why not? How can the world possibly work if we don't use standardized metrics for everything?!
    - bermanoid 15y ago
      My compensation is not determined by a hard metric because my employer has no way of measuring my direct contribution to the company's profits. If they did, you can be sure they'd pay me accordingly; this is why people in sales are often paid on commission, and why people in "billable hour" fields are scolded or fired if they don't hit their billing targets. In performance reviews, or (in my current line of work) consulting, it's not uncommon at all to bring up any and all evidence that you can think of to support a claim that you have (or will) contributed positively to the company's bottom line. Granted, we lack such a clear measure of success in education, and current standardized tests are a ham-fisted approach to creating one. Don't get me wrong - most of the standardized tests we use today follow the exact same approach to testing as they did 50 years ago, and whatever it is that we would like to measure when we say "educational progress", they no more accurately capture it now than they did then. But I'm not convinced that the general idea of measuring education through testing is wrong. I think what most anti-testing people balk at is the particular (and extremely limited) set of knowledge that most standardized tests measure - they tend to be more okay with the idea of measuring mastery of a particular subject (either through in-class tests, or even standardized subject tests, which draw far less criticism than the general tests). I'd be all for trying to figure out a way to measure general achievement in terms of subject-specific but still standardized tests (which not every student takes every one of), but there are a lot of difficulties there, too.
      - _delirium 15y ago
        I would personally want to see it work in industry first. Once someone comes up with a way to directly tie programmers' pay/promotions to code metrics in a fully automated, standardized way, and shows that it works, then I'll believe there's a possible way to make that approach work for education, too. (If anything, the code-metrics problem should be easier, because you get a large sample of data over an extended period of time that represents their actual work output, not an artificially staged test that takes a few hours.)
slowpoke 15y ago
>People want a way to evaluate student performance in a way that works across many schools, districts, and states. Except what they are evaluating holds no meaning. Standardized tests are nonsense. Tests in general are. What you're measuring isn't knowledge, or understanding, what you're measuring is compliance to artificial and highly contrived environments. Which is a pretty useless skill, especially when compared to a deep understanding of the subject matter. >Teach better around the tests. By the FSM, NO. Teach around understanding, around critical thinking, logic and reason. But not around tests. This is exactly the kind of teaching that destroyed any interest I had in subjects that where taught back in school. There's nothing more frustrating to learn things not because they might be interesting, or because the deep understanding of the subject might be useful, but because they are on the next test. Granted, there are subjects where you can't teach "understanding" per se. History is such a subject. It's based on a lot of numbers, names and places, most of which are simple facts (WWII happened from 1933-1945 etc). However, I would argue that this means it's completely useless to do tests on history. What are you testing? Essentially memorization. Which is a useful skill, but not one on which a lot of your grades should depend. Especially because a lot of students spend hours memorizing facts which they will have forgotten a week after the test, and that time time could have been better spend on sensible things. >But implying that the very idea of standardized testing is constricting is a waste of time. They aren't going anywhere. You're essentially saying that because we can't do much about them makes them any less useless and constricting. Arguing that the problem can't be solved doesn't make the problem go away.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  My point is that it doesn't matter if standardized testing has "meaning" or not, people still want it. They will continue to want it. People want to compare student and school and district performance, and standardized testing is how they're going to measure that. It doesn't really matter if it "works" or not, the decision making behind it is not logical, and it never will be. I'm not saying to center the teaching on the test, but to teach around them. The tests are here to stay. You have to do well on them. This is not something there is a choice about. But that doesn't mean you can't do well on the test and at the same time teach around it. Not for it, around it. Also, that's a strange idea that history is about rote memorization and not about understanding. Maybe I got lucky with my history teachers, but for me it was all about understanding how it all fit together, not raw facts.
almost 15y ago
Please don't be so defeatist. The US education system is horribly broken. Maybe the chances of it ever being fixed are low but I hope people continue to try.