With the British A-Levels fiasco in the news, hopefully this is still divorced enough from politics to permit critical thinking. Let's find out!
Even beyond the A-levels, standardized testing has had a share of criticisms and controversies. Complaints include inherent biases in the tests, only being able to measure isolated skills and memorized facts, creating anxiety for the students, and others. Criticism of standardized testing is pretty common, but what I rarely see are suggestions for viable alternatives. So how could we do it better? You all get a magic wand to fix this and implement whatever standard or policy or whatever that you want, but after you wave your wand, reality will take over and every vulnerability will be exploited, every unintended consequence made manifest. What's the best solution here?
So stepping back, the problem that standardized testing is meant to solve is to provide an objective metric to compare massive numbers of students across a geographically, culturally, and economically diverse region. In essence, it's supposed to provide an objective means to compare Student A and Student B. It's unlikely that there's any perfect solution here, every solution is going to have flaws. The goal will be to find the solution with the most bearable flaws after we do everything we can to mitigate them.
What are your thoughts? I really don't have anything myself - I can't come up with anything better than slightly tweaked versions of our current systems.