Sunday, February 20, 2011

Testing


I f*cking hate tests.

I understand why they're there. They've been a time-honored way for educators to gauge their students' comprehension of the material they're teaching. some tests are bearable for me, particularly essay tests. The answers aren't so cut-and-dry, and you can actually inform your teacher exactly how you arrived at the answers you did. Even if your end result isn't exactly what they had in mind, they may find merit in how you arrive at that answer, and you usually have an opportunity to talk with an instructor later about why you deserve more points.

Multiple-choice tests are the bane of my existence, mainly because there is NO SITUATION IN LIFE other than other multiple choice tests where your answers will be a predetermined batch of options for you to pick. Some teachers, that are douches, will make the answers so similar that it becomes less about actually understanding the material, and more about what stupid tricks the teachers will pull to squeeze another point or two out of you. Multiple choice tests also, I think, teach kids badly about how to reason through their lives: how much do you really have to know something intuitively if people are just teaching kids how to fill in the right bubble?

In Washington State, we had to undergo a practice of domestic torture called the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL. This was a series of multiple-choice tests to be taken on various subjects in order to gauge how much funding certain schools would receive at the state level, and was administered at the 4th, 7th, and 10th grade levels. This, to me, was a f*cking nightmare. Thankfully, I graduated the year before passage of the WASL became a graduation requirement in the Washington public school system, because I know that probably wouldn’t have worked out well due to my sheer seething hatred for such standardized tests. The funny thing, to me, is that the WASL no longer exists because people realized what a stupid f*cking idea it was pretty quickly.

When results came in and showed that scores were very low, at the state PTA convention in 2006 the delegates unanimously voted to, “oppose any efforts to use a single indicator for making decisions about individual student opportunities such as grade promotion, high school graduation, or entrance into specific educational programs.” Some of the scorers were prone to human error, there was a deficit in comparing failure rates of minority students, and people even complained about some of the questions being “unusual” and “unfair.” Thankfully, the WASL got an overdue death sentence and starting last year, it was no longer required for students to take it.

I understand that some people can use multiple-choice tests responsibly, and that they’re so ingrained in the educational underpinnings of our society that we probably won’t ever do away with them. That does little to stop my hate for them. Maybe it’s because I should be studying for one right now instead of blogging, but I don’t think so. There’s a very special place in hell for multiple choice testing if it ever does humanity a service and dies.

Instead, it continues to bring hell on Earth for students at every level, everywhere.

I stand in solidarity with them now, because we all have to hope that we’ll live to see our lives without such a stupid “necessity.”