The Testing Cycle

After enough rounds of government funding and curriculum design, standardized tests become increasing worthless as teachers teach to the test. The cycle of teaching what is on the test so that students do well on said test will only demonstrate they are able to learn the format of the exam and retain a few basic facts. These instruments have failed in their purpose to measure “knowledge” or “aptitude”, instead only they measure how well a person knows the format of the exam. Knowing the format of the exam is then related to the ability to afford a tutor, which leads to the idea that an instrument must be able to obtain results independent of where it is used and who it is used by.

This situation manifests again with the SAT and ACT. When I took these exams I was struck by how utterly useless or outdated the questions were. It finally hit me that while in school it doesn’t matter if you learn, comprehend, or deepen your understanding of the world around you, you must simply select the bubble choice the state or professor thinks is interesting and most correct. (Quite glad this class doesn’t crush spirits that way and gives us a chance to think and expand.) In some ways, these types of exams test one’s willingness and ability to conform to a prescribed way of thinking and answering, not one’s actual learning or intellectual growth. People accept this baseless source of legitimation in order to pursue higher education, where they later see it was all phony.

This misuse of knowledge measuring instruments was also present throughout my life. I was a loud, talkative, and easily distractible child. The school wanted to medicate me and even held a parent-teacher conference to suggest doping me. My mother told the teacher no such thing would happen, and could defend her protection of me by showing my test scores and grades, which were immaculate (young me had no friends). To keep me from distracting the other kids I was placed in some sort of “gifted” group. I was placed in these to occupy me when they realized the curriculum of teaching to the test resulted in a very distracted me. In a different “gifted” group, (and I shudder at that word), lead by the county attorney, the conformist thinking reared up again. For disagreeing with the county attorney during a discussion he determined I had an attitude problem. His fact making process used different criteria than my fact making process, and when we arrived at different conclusions he could legitimate himself because of his position as county attorney. In this case there was no letter or number to point to in order to legitimate one of us. The process of making facts about who is and who is not “smart” or “college ready” is again a legitimation issue, in this case resolved by the ACT College Board. In some of these cases it seems that the instrument is corrupted because it is owned by a group, suggesting that objective facts come from instruments not owned by anyone or subject to any specific legitimation scheme.