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.
