Another Brick in the Wall
Just the other day I spent a few minutes talking with my niece– a college senior– while she took a multiple choice test in an online interim Political Science course. One tiny part of my brain was concerned with ethics– is this cheating?– but the teacher in me was more concerned with trying to help her ‘talk out’ the answers. I was never good at these tests and so I was not always sure of the answers myself, even though I am very familiar with the subject.
Many questions were designed, it seemed, to fool you into going in one direction when the answer lay in another. Perhaps the purpose is to get students to to think twice before they answer. These tests, though, help to explain why learning is so undervalued in our culture. (I would add to that dynamic the cynicism that pays administrators million dollar salaries while expanding the use of adjuncts.) It’s not about learning; it’s about winning the education game.
It’s difficult, in these tests, to keep your mind on the subject; your mind keeps trying to decipher the game the teacher is playing, rather than the content. This is why these ‘how to study’ courses can be so helpful. It’s not simply that some students have problems with authority; these tests really are manipulative. I think that the only reason we don’t see more open resentment is that so many students learn to be good, or to at least accept, these games.
School, then, becomes a contest against the teacher. Is it any surprise that cheating is so common? Standardized tests are an archaic, anti-learning technology that should be phased out. We need new strategies. Instead, though, schools are too often pursuing a kinds of arms race, struggling to beat the cheaters at the testing game (Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology). It’s a kind of decadence that has to end before any progress can be made.
It’s Broke, and It Can’t Be Fixed
If you took a picture of a classroom at the time of the War of 1812, a professor once pointed out to me, it would look roughly the same as a classroom today: teacher in front, a blackboard, students in chairs. Maybe our classrooms have white boards, or some sort of electronic board; perhaps there’s a computer on the podium and a screen that drops down. In any case, the modern classroom has changed far less than, say, transportation over the last two centuries.
Then as now we had grades, yet we know that grades are not good ways to guide learning. Most grades– even if derived from multiple choice testing– are unreliable. Still we continue to have this pre-modern urge to rank and sort in simple, easy to comprehend ways. Grades can be cruel too, which is why we have grade inflation as well as the perennial complaints about grade inflation.
An authentic assessment of learning is a complex portrait not a letter or number.
‘“It’s generally recognized that an A by itself is not very meaningful,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Giving statistical context to assist recipients of a transcript in understanding the grades is definitely helpful.’” (A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean) Context is necessary but not sufficient. Grades are old, worn out technology; they need to be replaced.
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.