Especially for multiple choice testing there is a skill. The ability to quickly eliminate two of the answers. The ability to work in reverse from the remaining answers to the question. etc.
Another part of it is some people just stress themselves out, others don’t care or some few like you and I enjoyed taking tests.
Jim
If you know the answer, you don’t have to resort to any elimination process. If you’re not sure of the answer, being able to quickly determine what’s not the answer should be intuitive anyway. I don’t know why anybody would have to be taught not to circle answers they know are wrong.
That has nothing to do with skill, though. I think if people stress themselves out, that’s their personal failing, not an indication of illegitimacy in the testing method.
Part of what they’re testing for is, well, the ability to take a test. If someone can’t cope with the stress to the point that they’re crippled in the testing room, that is just as much a serious shortcoming as not knowing the test material and needs to be treated as such, not excused with some bs legislation. I say this as a person on the opposite end of the spectrum: I do better on tests than I do in class. I might argue that this discrepancy comes from the teacher’s misunderstanding of my usual boredom and forgetfulness for arrogance or disobedience. The teacher may even KNOW for a fact that I deserve a better grade but cannot give it just because of the sheer number of homework assignments I’ve missed or whatever–because part of the classroom grade is just that, an evaluation of the ability to keep up with work you’re not stimulated by. None of that would justify me asking for a legislation that would slip my C in whatever subject under the rug in light of my outstanding scores on standardized tests.
Unless a kid has some omnipresent diagnosable anxiety problem, I would call a bit of BS on this test anxiety thing making kids that do know the material completely fail. My views may definitely by influenced by the fact that tests don’t really freak me out once I get to it. I’ll study for some like crazy, go in thinking I’m gonna fail, then am presented with the questions, know the answers, and write those answers down, and often finish very quickly. My nervousness (and I am a pretty nervous person overall) has never prevented me from succeeding on an exam I was prepared for.
These high school exit exams - they can be taken more than once right? For other people I know who get worried over exams, stuff like the SAT and ACT didn’t overly freak them out because they knew they could take it again. Seems like that fact alone could severely diminish “test anxiety” - you take it once and don’t have to put pressure on yourself because you can take it again, you’re experiencing the test so next time the test design will be familiar, you can review concepts you encountered on the test you had difficulty with, etc.
I never starting worrying about tests until I got to college and the dreaded “finals week” thing began. If these kids can’t take a dumbed-down* high school exit exam because of their anxiety, how are they gonna handle having finals in biology, political science, psychology, brit lit, and statistics - all in one week? High school stress has nothing on college - this coming from a high school nerd who took all the non-science honors and AP classes available (not awesome at stuff like bio or chem, but can get As in college because I study for exams).
If you don’t know the material, you might fail. If you do know it, you shouldn’t. And in my experience, students are taught multiple times throughout their academic career good strategies for test taking too - but most of it is common sense.
*ArizonaTeach stated the test in AZ at least is designed so sophomores can pass, yet it is the seniors who take it
Be careful not to confuse the average with the median. Of course, you know that, being a certified genius and all.
I always did well on written tests; poorly in actual life. But I don’t know how you get to earn an A in a class without being able to take tests. (Unless it’s a specially-structured class with a lot more individual attention than is possible in most public schools.)
Yup…The way it worked where I was is that if you did well on the ACT/SAT, you didn’t have to take the remedial exams (to check to see if you needed remedial work).
However, if your score was too low on the ACT/SAT you had to take the exams. If you did fine on them, then no remedial is required. I can’t imagine a college would do it differently, but you never know I guess.
I have one…
I used to teach college math. I received a request from the learning disabilities area (not its actual name) requesting oral exams for a specific student who was failing.
I was skeptical, but honored it. Almost all the time they still did poorly. Oral exams are MUCH harder IMO then written. I tried to mitigate what makes oral exams hard…I found a room with many chalkboards…put the problems up on different boards. Allowed the student to do them in any order he wished and to stop in the middle and go to a different problem if he liked.
Nope…he did them in order explaining them fine. He wasn’t a A student but was easily a B…but for some reason flunked written exams.
Not common I agree…but there ARE exceptions.
I’m not very convinced by what I’m reading about this particular case either; a student with a 3.2 GPA can still be bad at math. I see no reason she should be held back, though.
These tests don’t magically measure general knowledge. There are skills involved. Part of it is just the style of question they ask, but there’s also time management. Were you ever told on the SATs “If you aren’t sure, leave it blank?” [You lose .25 points on the SAT for a wrong answer, but if you leave the question black, you get a zero.]
On a related note…
In one of my classes there is this kid. I am pretty sure that he is being given some kind of help because he is likely diagnosed ADD or something. Now this kid is terrible. He sits in class and pretends it’s a one-way conversation with the teacher. He’s always trying to show that he knows what it was when he was wrong too. “Oh yeah…right.”
But this kid gets to take the test for like 4 hours. This is a computer architecture class. It’s not easy, but with a little memorization, it can be done. I would often miss all of the classes, show up and get an A on the test after studying for a few hours.
So this ADD kid gets all day to take the test. And get this… After the first test he bitches at the teacher for it not being “fair” etc. Mind you that we got a study sheet explaining exactly what would be on the test before we went. There’s no excuse for being unable to do it.
Honestly, when it comes to college, I think that there shouldn’t be any kind of help. I don’t care if you are ADD. What is going to happen in the real world? Are people going to continue coddling you? I think not. High-school is fine because it’s compulsory. Do we let stupid people take longer on a test? No!
It seems that the days have passed where one can give bad grades anymore. “Well you see… little johnny, might not be good at X but he’s really great at Y, Z, Q and F, so he deserves a better grade.” I hate to say it, but it’s not a terrible idea to let people who are dumb know it earlier in life. Whatever happened to, “Well timmy, you did your best, and I’m proud of you”? Eventually timmy will get it and maybe learn that he has a talent for carpentry or who knows what. And maybe he’ll be really good at it! Now it’s more like “You failed? But you’re so special and smart! There must be a problem with the system!”
I’m befuddled by this. If the kids don’t have a desire to learn, how do you expect their instructors to teach them well? A sixteen year old is old enough to take responsibility for his own actions. If a kid chooses to goof off and makes it clear he has no desire to be in school, why should the teacher take away time from motivated students who truly want to learn? You don’t have to be a genius to study the material and make an effort.
Okay. It’s good to know that you consider your personal experience definitive and that anyone who has a different experience is lying. I used to respect you a lot, but lately you’ve been demonstrating a profound lack of rational thought.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not even CLOSE. Arizona State Standards drive the AIMS test, and those have almost no correlation to the SAT/PSAT/ACT, which are **reasoning ** tests.
No, AIMS is untimed. There are three (soon four) portions on the test - Reading, Writing, Math (Science next year). There are essay portions. There are a lot of different styles, yeah.
Weeelll…NCLB has actually made grade inflation a hell of a lot more difficult, if that’s what you mean.
I mean that it makes teachers teach to the tests. That’s sort of the opposite side of the grade inflation/standardized test divide, but it still has the net result of neglecting educational foundations.
Hm. Well, I won’t dispute there’s a lot of teaching to the test, yeah (more importantly, to the standards), but since the standards are supposed to be the educational foundations, I’m not 100% sure if that’s a problem.
And people who are good at test taking (or who have taken classes from people who were good at test taking) know that that’s horrible advice. Because if you can eliminate at least one answer, mathematically you’re better off guessing than leaving it blank. The benefit from the percentage of right guesses outweighs the penalty for the wrong guesses. Even with the penalty, scores favor the bold.
There are standardized test taking skills. People pay money to companies and their (or their children’s) scores rise by learning those skills, not by learning any new information. There are also poorly written standardized tests where there is a faulty relationship between passing the test and understanding the subject matter that is being tested.
Looking quickly at the article, it seems that they’re basically allowing students a chance to have their records reviewed if they fail the test. So that if the student’s teacher says “Jane was in my class for the past two years. She does know what she was supposed to have learned in 10th grade English,” that can override the test score. But if during those two years, Jane never wrote a coherent sentence, then the student still won’t get the diploma. Neither of those outcomes bothers me.
Looking back on it I probably didn’t follow that advice because it wouldn’t be like me to admit I have no clue on a test question. But I know what I was taught and I know how I did on the SATs.
Because the jails are full?
I understand your point. There’s an overabundance of kids that are not proficient. I don’t think all of their deficiencies can be their fault alone.
No, it’s not all their fault. You’ve got plenty of parents who don’t value education, plenty of shitty, unsafe neighborhoods, and plenty of peer groups who are more into weed than books. And, yeah, there are some deeply crappy teachers out there. But if you’ve got a sixteen year old who is well and truly checked out of school, there’s not a lot that his teachers can do with him. Schools can’t fix every problem.
Anecdote Time: I was in special education classes until the 10th grade, where I beat out most of my small (rural) high school’s scores on a standardized test. When we graduated I beat everyone but my best friend on SAT / ACT scores… And My GPA was shit. I had some really big anxiety problems and all the normal diagnosis that kids get if they are different when growing up. ADD, Mild Retardation, tremors… etc… I went through college with much of the same performance. If I do homework, busy work and such I can’t take them seriously and well, do horrible. Stress makes me work better. I only ever failed one test from “Test Anxiety”. I found out two days before the test that my mom had been in a hospital for a week and my family wouldn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to do poorly in school. HA!
The point of the anecdote is that there seems to be little correlation between actual GPA and grades and peoples knowledge of the subject matter. This thread is full of plenty of other stories that reflect the range of GPA correlation and standardized test scores (Being tests that look at cognition or reasoning skills or what ever.) “Test Anxiety” would be a reasonable reaction of “Oh shit I have no clue how to answer these questions, I’m not prepared, my life is ruined, gotta toss some cookies.” Statistically, is there a way to test or show any correlation? How could that possible correlation be used to weed out effects of test anxiety or to better train students to handle this stress? Do people just have different cognitive abilities that are naturally inherent and can’t be taught past? If so, where do we set the bars?
We know that the anxiety exists, so I would say that calling BS is almost asinine. Is it an excuse to fail the test though? I would say not at all. Personally, getting to take the test 5 times seems to invalidate the anxiety part. Do it once, fail. Study material, take test, fail. Study Material in a different way, ask new questions? Profit?
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