Keep Your Hand On That Plow

Keep Your Hand On That Plow
Keep Your Hand On That Plow

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Meet Your Testiny!



Or Don't because test results are at most one indicator of your destiny

Two days into his freshmen year of high school, I overheard my son recounting a conversation about I.Q. scores to his younger brother. "My friend said my IQ must be higher than I was told because he thinks I'm smarter than him."

I couldn’t stop myself from telling him: forget that number and try never to think of it again.

An unintended consequence of the current preoccupation with standardized testing is that your scores stand in for who you are – they become your testiny. Never mind asking someone “what’s your sign.” You want their test scores. Even from young ages students internalize the lesson from educators and parents that a test result influences the chance to get in to medical school or shapes which colleges might admit them.

Today’s test takers assume that these scores predict their future, and, unfortunately, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As a college professor and adviser I've had many conversations with students who think their abilities have been tested and accurately scored. They assume that these numbers tell them what they are good at and what they are not. They do not realize that the mountain of scores in their lives — I.Q., PSSAs, PSATs, SATs, ACTs, A.P.s, ASVAB, GREs, MCATs, LSATs— ultimately won’t amount to a hill of used bubble sheets when it comes to defining them as human beings. Unless they let it.

It isn’t that tests can’t be useful metrics. No one wants board-optional certification for doctors or many other professions. Yet the wide variety of practitioners even in the most stringently tested professions shows that the test is really the entry point. Students and admissions committees too often lose track of the crucial skills that these tests can’t measure—work ethic, character, imagination, creativity, and the ability to plan and carry out projects. 

These tests’ adherents lose track of the fact that a great many students who struggle with timed multiple choice tests are quite brilliant at writing research essays or thinking divergently in class discussions. Tests like the SAT leave so much out but manage to present themselves as authoritative, thus reducing the taker to a score.

I have been engaged in research to determine what students learn through out-of-class experiences such as summer reading programs, and attending lectures, plays, and concerts. The five years we have spent on this research has been a profound lesson in how difficult it is to account for varied people, varied experiences, and widely differing outcomes: standardized testing certainly cannot account for these things.

People, in the end, are not numbers. In elementary school I tested so low on the second-grade mathematics placement test that I spent a year in remedial math. The next year I went back in to the regular class, but I carried with me an assumption—one backed up by a test score—that I was bad at math.

From third grade through the rest of my education, including graduate degrees, I couldn’t shake the test-proven “fact” that I was bad at math. To this day it frustrates me to think how poorly designed and executed that system was and that I allowed it to define my future of low expectations and a negative attitude.

As I begin a new academic year I am well aware, then, that students, especially first-year college students, place great store on the results they receive on tests. A few bad tests in chemistry or calculus or history can reinforce existing insecurities and lead to decisions as momentous as closing off career paths.

A considerable backlash has developed against the ever-expanding testing regimen. Every year additional colleges and universities move to SAT optional applications, as Hofstra did this summer. Hampshire College has taken this considerably farther and removed the ‘optional.’ They now refuse test scores in the application process.

I applaud the move to place less weight on standardized measures such as these, but some testing will and must take place. What must not happen is for students to believe they are reduced to these numbers. It took until I was an adult to come to understand the proper place and proper limits of assessments and it came after it could do me any good. All of us, parents, teachers, college faculty, and administrators, are required to make sure that students at all levels know that your score is not your testiny.