Solutions for Standardized Testing

[Wraith]

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.

[Lewkowski]

The purpose of the test is to evaluate someone's skills and competencies. The people most opposed to it are those who hate the idea of a meritocracy. If the test isn't a useful metric currently then amend the test to have better/different questions on it.

[Flixy]

Over here they weigh three standardized tests at the end of high school 50/50 with regular exams over a period of up to three years (depends on what level you are), which gives an end result based on overall performance instead of a one time exam. While not perfect, i think that already reduces some of the negatives.

[Ominous Gamer]

I haven't read the other thread, or even news about it.

Here we now have standardized testing starting in VPK. That's what my wife teaches. She hates the tests because so much of it is presented in such an artificial way that the kids don't get what's being asked of them, but the answers have to be exact to be counted as correct. The school is also graded on the performance of the tests, and those grades are made public, and with kids that young how well the kids are prepared for kindergarten still rests on the parents and their home life. This results in the schools being hyper paranoid after a less than perfect grade, but more creative when the previous year resulted in a high grade (this results in a bit of a pendulum swing). She is also really good at predicting how the students will score by the end of the year, even when you consider that at this age most parents are still head in the sand about development or mental issues their kids have.


But it is implemented in a way that I have fewer issues with (compared to 4th through college standardized testing). The kids are tested within the first few days of the school year starting and are tested monthly. It's also done individually and is somewhat dictated at them. A process like that I feel cuts out a lot of anxiety. I also like the way the county tests for gifted students, with creative questions that get progressively harder and harder until you reach a threshold of not being able complete them.

Did I answer your question? Not really. Could some of this be implemented in higher levels? Possibly.

[Aimless]

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.

- Better tests—constant work on improving tests to ensure they test for what you really want, and ongoing debate about what that should be.

- Multiple opportunities, so that failure on one occasion does not determine course of one's life. If standardized tests truly can—and are intended to—be used to determine a person's level of knowledge & skill in specific domains, multiple opportunities should not be a problem. This also mitigates issues with crappy tests.

- Ensure availability of alternative routes to higher ed so that people may compensate for inadequate performance on tests—as well as for unfairness in other aspects of grading (eg. one route via tests after graduation, one via grades that may have incorporated standardized testing at some stage).

- Implement standardized evaluation of progression throughout kids' schooling—not just on a few critically important occasions—similar to what Khan Academy does.

- Implement standardized testing in such a way that people who have been disadvantaged throughout their grade- & highschool years at least have a shot—or several—to compensate for it later in life.

- Increase access to higher ed by increasing number of spots and sharply reducing costs.

- Ensure an adequate and high baseline for teaching outside of what standardized tests focus on.

- Make room for discretion, but try to reduce incentives for using that discretion to game the system eg. for financial gain.

Standardized testing has limitations and can lead to or exacerbate many problems, just as is the case with many of our approaches to eg. research in various fields. We need to be mindful of these issues and work constantly to improve the quality of testing—both wrt quality of tests as well as how they're implemented and used—but also work to mitigate the most harmful consequences of our inevitable failures to get it right. So a single test can't be allowed to determine the course of a person's educational career—there must be multiple opportunities as well as alternative routes to success. I suspect that a properly—fairly—implemented system for standardized testing can be one of the best ways to give socioeconomically disadvantaged students a fighting chance, and they can at least help ameliorate the problems that arise due to teacher bias, perverse incentives, etc

The purpose of the test is to evaluate someone's skills and competencies. The people most opposed to it are those who hate the idea of a meritocracy. If the test isn't a useful metric currently then amend the test to have better/different questions on it.

I dunno man. I presume you've done reasonably well on standardized tests, yet you're demonstrably a moron—so they can't be all that conducive towards building a meritocracy can they now. My guess is that you have a disproportionate and irrational appreciation for such tests because you think/hope they'll offer idiots a chance to get through school and higher ed without being tripped up by other deficiencies in thinking skills & knowledge that might be easier for an attentive and skilled teacher to detect.

[Khendraja'aro]

I'm rather fond of the idea to get away from this "Big One" test.

And instead get custom-tailored tests for the task/subject the person wants to take.

Like the University of Heidelberg did for their med students. Other universities used the grade of the Abitur to determine who got a chance at studying medicine and who did not. While that is certainly the easiest way to do it, Heidelberg decided to take a different approach, due to the simple fact that they found that the Abitur grade was not very strongly correlated to success at studying.

Instead, they had every aspirant take a difficult entrance test but one which was tailored to the future requirements they'd face during their studies: Memorization, pattern recognition, personality, and others. Some of that could be learned, other things not. They found their approach to be more reliable.

Coincidentally, they also found that age was negatively correlated with success at studying - the higher your age, the more likely you were to drop out.

Though, to be fair, in this case they were also motivated by the fact that the study of medicine is one of the most expensive ones there is - so if you can increase the numbers of students succeeding you've already paid for the higher effort regarding the entrance exam.

Doesn't Finland take a similar approach to selecting which people can become teachers?

[RandBlade]

A-Levels aren't standardised. Ironically that's what led to the complaints about grade inflation in recent decades - they used to be standardised then decades ago switched to absolute grades and since then the proportion of people getting better grades have gone up dramatically.

To try and come up with a fair method of awarding exam results in a year without exams OFQUAL came up with the idea of standardising results. Stupid system, glad it has been abolished.

[Wraith]

But it is implemented in a way that I have fewer issues with (compared to 4th through college standardized testing). The kids are tested within the first few days of the school year starting and are tested monthly. It's also done individually and is somewhat dictated at them. A process like that I feel cuts out a lot of anxiety. I also like the way the county tests for gifted students, with creative questions that get progressively harder and harder until you reach a threshold of not being able complete them.

Did I answer your question? Not really. Could some of this be implemented in higher levels? Possibly.

I kinda like that. It'd give a better picture of where the student started from, establishing individualized baselines and giving a more complete picture of the student's progress. The biggest problem I see is that it'd be pretty easy to game - it'd just take some parents coaching their kids to throw the earlier tests so that their later tests look more impressive. There's a lot at stake in the SATs/ACTs/A-levels, so the incentive to cheat is a lot higher than when it's used at a smaller level. I think there'd need to be something to deal with the metatesting aspect here before it could be successfully scaled up.