What is the standard for standardized tests? How was the standard determined? Who has this amazing gift of omniscience to know what every person should know at any given age? Who considers the test scores to be important and for what purpose? I have asked these questions many times have not received any rational answer
So this reply is about three years late but I'm taking a tests and measurements class that is talking about this. The book we are using is "Tests and Measurements for People Who (Think They) Hate Tests and Measurements" which is a great resource to help answer some of your questions. There's also a book by James Popham that talks about this stuff called, "The Truth About Testing".
It's blatantly obvious without any statistical analysis that test scores can be used for predictions. Someone with high test scores is either extremely intelligent to deduce results without study, or has enough discipline to successfully take a test. The better the results, the stronger this correlation is. With either of these traits combined with high test scores, it's a given, that these people will succeed somewhere around the range of their abilities. The question of interest is not, whether high test scores can tell us anything, but rather why some of the most intelligent people in the world have low test scores and thus subsequently end up not accomplishing anything due to the nature of university and job applications. If you title a study's result as "Do standardized tests matter?" and then only talk about how high test scores correlate to success in a positive way, the idiots sitting in our countries' educational departments will inevitably use this study as a legitimation of not having to do their job. It's a fact, that a lot of really intelligent people will end up wasting their potential due to standardized testing and a poor education system which does not care about bringing out the potential in its students. Needless to stay, this is a massive loss for the entire human population. tl;dr scientists need to learn how to science (and stop being oblivious to the implications of a statistic)
I may be misquoting this but I believe Jordan Peterson said there's like 33 traits that indicate success and intelligence is only one. There are any other number of personality traits that can also be predictors for success, which all together are a better indicator of success than intelligence alone. Just food for thought. And more food for thought, I feel like all this blaming standardized testing is just a cop out for teachers who can't teach and parents who can't parent. A progressively failing Society pointing fingers at everyone but themselves for failing their children. Yes, standardized tests are uncomfortable, but they aren't unbeatable. Teachers even have the standards that align with the standardized tests which provide a guideline to what their children will be tested on and the major of their kids still barely pass. I'm an early childhood education major and I have had a unique look at some of the issues with our educational system, on all levels.
They should have predicted my 4.0 in college, or selling computer programs to large companies - they didn't. I always scored between 35-50th percentile, largely due to reading difficulty, with IQ 'about' 100. IQ is just a glorified short-term memory test, and needs to be replaced with heuristic-analytic models. Abstraction breaks down in complex problems, where intuition and heuristics have to work efficiently to maintain elements, before they become integrated into a novel relationship. This is why APPLIED problems (such as math world problems), have a weaker correlation with IQ; where selecting and ordering elements is important to forming a solution. Dealing with complexity requires a level of computational persistence in long-term memory. Standardized tests are backwards, and fail many creative students.
David Andrews You should rationalized the matter, before you throw out your pathetic objection, against my sound argument. "You're wrong" doesn't sway anyone's opinion towards your position. Instead it highlights your own bias in the matter, and your ignorance on the subject. Because you're overweight, stuck in a basement, without a real job or direction, and have a grandiose sense of intellect resting on an inflated number (IQ), is your own problem.
Hey, I don't get this video. Can someone explain this to me? Why aren't top 10% SAT score achievers who come from the bottom 25% income-earning bracket of family households (17%) applying for college admissions in top universities?
Because no one wants loan debt, especially talented low SES students. If they really wanted and needed this bright students, then give them scholarships and grants
The problem with showing data is you're speaking to reason. Only the intelligent people who score well on standardized tests will understand the argument. The rest will be left just as dumbfounded as the tests left them.
Test were not as bad 5 years ago with multiple choice but now due to the new technology it makes it "better" by making it more complicated and confusing, and as taking the test on the first year It came out on my 8th grade year I decided to try my best because high school was right around the corner and as I did the test I wanted to ripe my hair out, test are inaccurate due to amount of stress they give you. Especially the new ones on Chromebook, which by the way is not my favorite OS.
Standardized testing is a business...that is why it exist. ETS, the company which 'own's the GRE has made billions...what's worst is that few people in academia, who are intelligent enough to know it are not saying enough about it. Most don't care.
Correlation shows a link between two things but it doesn't explain why and is extremely context dependent. But we don't keep a record of those context.
I think that they entirely missed the point. Whereas before students did well because they had learned those things, teachers are now teaching to these tests.
+Jan Norman If the purpose of the test is to test what people have learned during a course of study, and that test covers the whole domain of material taught in that course, if a teacher _doesn't_ teach to the test, the teacher is fucking the students over! If the test is aimed at measuring the level of skill performance in students as a result of the course of study previously undergone by the student, and the teacher has not been teaching those skills and helping to improve them, then that teacher has been fuckng the students over. Looks like YOU'VE been the one missing the fucking point.
David Andrews You're missing the point, which is that they are teaching memorization and not the practical application of concepts, which is why people are lacking practical skills so often.
Jan Norman You're still wrong. I trained in psychology, including psychometrics. What you say is not true - they're not just about memory. In fact - most subtests on an IQ test are anything BUT memory: only the Arithmetic subtest in the Wechsler suite deals with memory, and that's about using short-term memory as well as extracting salient information. Practical skills are tested in aptitude tests. Intelligence is raw ability. Aptitude is applied ability. And that is a separate domain of testing.
David Andrews I've been a teacher for ten years. My students are top performers and I see it all the time. They do well on their tests, but at the expense of cramming, because the frequency of these standardized tests is too great. I can appreciate your theory, but till you try it in the classroom, you won't get it. That's the problem. Non-teachers think they have a grip on what's going on in classrooms, which is how we got into the current mess we're in as an education system. Memorizing how to spell a word isn't the same as being able to understand it phonetically and being able to sound it out.
Jan Norman And I've been an educational psychologist for ten years. You are STILL wrong on what the tests are about. I was also a teacher: mathematics. So I understand very much the issue of practical skills. As well as what goes on in the class room. What the hell is your obsession with 'memorising' things? And why is it a bloody problem? In mathematics - if you cannot memorise a formula, you cannot perform the task that requires the formula. With regard to spelling - memorising the spelling of a word may not say much about soemone's understanding of the word directly, but that process of remembering the spelling is essential for recognising the word in a written or textual source of information. You work on the spelling - to - phonetics thing once the spelling is correct, and then you link that to a picture (usually prototypical) of the object, or some representation of the word if it is not a noun. But memorising the spelling is fucking important. How the hell does a teacher not KNOW that?
