A thoughtful and quirky look at the testing craze, from a young (class of '98) reporter:
...I just took last year’s standardized English Language-Arts Test for the 11th grade - which anyone can sample at the state Department of Education’s Web site and which the state uses to monitor its districts’ progress - and while I scored well (a 95 percent, thank you very much), there were only 38 questions, nine of which were devoted to understanding a car rental agreement and the instructions of a food processor. Only one great literary work was examined - “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne - and there were scant vocabulary questions, which, maybe, is a good thing....I can say that my foray into the world of standardized testing didn’t exactly fill me with the overwhelming confidence that the results of these tests will mean anything significant. Sure, the state will use them to decide which school districts are doing their job and how to parcel out an increasingly limited chunk of resources, but is it more than just a numbers game?
In speaking with the district’s curriculum director, Elizabeth Chapin-Pinotti, about the county’s California High School Exit Exam and Standardized Testing and Reporting results, which were released last week, it occurred to me that the above question doesn’t simply have a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.
Chapin-Pinotti said that California schools tend to get a bad rap on the national stage when the test results come out, because what’s not factored in is that the state employs some of the strictest standards in the country. “The state set the bar very high and we’re not backing down,” Chapin-Pinotti said.
Reporter Raheem Hosseini goes on to discuss the Connecticut lawsuit before wondering why we care so much:
So what is it about tests we all love so much (and don’t kid yourself, we’re obsessed with them)? I think it has something to do with the simplicity of being able to quantify an amorphous concept such as intelligence. Color in a few bubbles, feed your sheet into the Scantron machine and find out how smart you are. And the strange thing is that even after high school and college and after having taken hundreds of scholastic tests through roughly 20 years of school, we’re not done with them.Posted by kswygert at August 24, 2005 03:49 PMThere are employee evaluations and credit assessments and loan applications and - even weirder - the tests we actually choose to take in our spare time: crossword puzzles, jumbles, online IQ and personality tests. It never stops.
But is it really so bad for people to crave a little disposable evaluation? Maybe what they’re really craving is intellectual stimulation. Heck, even Tommy Lee is back in school.