Should Testing Be Banned?
From the Guardian (source):
All national exams should be abolished for children under 16 because the stress caused by over-testing is poisoning attitudes towards education, according to an influential teaching body.
I found this piece interesting because, when I recently went back to the university, I felt a great deal of anxiety and was happy when everything was over-- I even lost 70 lbs! Why? I don't know because I was an A/A- student as an undergraduate.
I know that testing can be helpful but, especially in college, it's used, seemingly, to filter out the "good students" from "the bad" students. i.e. I don't see tests as being used to diagnose and remedy personal learning issues.
Because I am starting to become fully commited to self-led study, I find myself taking "self created tests" a lot more often because I'm aware of what goals I want to achieve and I see and evaluate the type of progress I am making.
I can argue both sides of this issue because I can understand why we test (the community's stamp of approval) and why we don't (learning is non-linear).
Does anyone else think we can survive in a world without a testing bureaucracy?
The issue is not as arbitrary as "community standards" but it is an interesting question. On the one hand no one would want to go to a self-educated physician. On the other hand university literature departments don't produce first line writers and poets.
De Tocqueville observed that education in America ends at about the same time it begins in Europe. At the age of about fifteen the tipical American student chooses his vocation and from then on his education serves only to train him in that work. For Europeans of De Tocqueville's time, education was a life long pursuit and formal education merely provided the tools for that journey. The American way of education hasn't changed from the time of De Tocqueville.
For myself I prefer a testing environment for both vocational and liberal education. Be it physics, philosophy or Windows Vista, I am acquiring the knowledge of others and I find it helpful to be tested on the success of my efforts to that end. As to expressions of my own thoughts, that is what TPM Cafe is for.
June 11, 2007 2:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
On the subject of testing, I'll always remember a comment that one of my professors made. He said that, if he had another way to tell that we had studied and learned things, he'd give us a day off on the day of the test. His point was that the studying was important, not the test.
True, that was college. I think the drive for testing has been to have some kind of objective standard, some benchmark for comparison. And that is, I think, a legitimate concern. What we need to be careful of, however, is the false assumption that a standardized test, likely multiple choice, tells us everything about a person's education or intellectual development.
June 11, 2007 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
The best test I ever took was also the shortest. It was an essay final examination (of course), and the course was 19th century European social and intellectual history. Here's the question:
Explain 1914
aMike
June 11, 2007 11:38 AM | Reply | Permalink