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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 poli

by 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.)
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        The problem is that programming is a far more heterogeneous task than teaching and the goals are often not known apriori. How do you compare code output while writing an MRI reconstruction algorithm to code output while writing HFT software? In contrast, I taught calculus many times. The goals and methods were exactly the same each time (ignoring small differences between the Rutgers and NYU syllabus): students should know how to differentiate and integrate, understand linear approximation, etc. Measuring performance in reality is usually not that hard. It's just a few special professions (typically creative ones) where you run into difficulties.

by jes5199 15y ago

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.)
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      The problem is that programming is a far more heterogeneous task than teaching and the goals are often not known apriori. How do you compare code output while writing an MRI reconstruction algorithm to code output while writing HFT software? In contrast, I taught calculus many times. The goals and methods were exactly the same each time (ignoring small differences between the Rutgers and NYU syllabus): students should know how to differentiate and integrate, understand linear approximation, etc. Measuring performance in reality is usually not that hard. It's just a few special professions (typically creative ones) where you run into difficulties.