4 ms·

The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and go

by unalone 18y ago

The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.

wallflower 18y ago
The year I took the SATs (1600 scale back then) someone on the Educational Testing Service board threw in a knuckle-ball with an analogy question in the Verbal section that used the term winnowing. I wish I could remember the question.. Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. Winnowing: the act of separating grain from chaf
- unalone 18y ago
  Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range. Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  Winnowing is not a terribly esoteric word. This whole comment thread is a discussion on winnowing. It's often used in literature, and I believe it is used in certain translations of the Bible.
  - yters 18y ago
    The irony is that the word "winnowing" winnowed the students.
yummyfajitas 18y ago
The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful. Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.
- tome 18y ago
  No, his actual complaint is once you standardize a test, schools with a lot of resources will "teach to the test", giving their students an advantage.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    That's not a bad thing for a sufficiently well designed test. Here are examples of decent tests which I taught to. "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aFinal-pub.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aF... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFin... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aF...
    - unalone 18y ago
      "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with. Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.

by unalone 18y ago

wallflower 18y ago

The year I took the SATs (1600 scale back then) someone on the Educational Testing Service board threw in a knuckle-ball with an analogy question in the Verbal section that used the term winnowing. I wish I could remember the question.. Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. Winnowing: the act of separating grain from chaf

unalone 18y ago
Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range. Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
jacoblyles 18y ago
Winnowing is not a terribly esoteric word. This whole comment thread is a discussion on winnowing. It's often used in literature, and I believe it is used in certain translations of the Bible.
- yters 18y ago
  The irony is that the word "winnowing" winnowed the students.

yummyfajitas 18y ago

The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful. Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.

tome 18y ago
No, his actual complaint is once you standardize a test, schools with a lot of resources will "teach to the test", giving their students an advantage.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  That's not a bad thing for a sufficiently well designed test. Here are examples of decent tests which I taught to. "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aFinal-pub.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aF... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFin... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aF...
  - unalone 18y ago
    "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with. Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.