Here’s an addition to my earlier reflections on standardized exams: this piece from the New York Times about the GRE.
After two false starts, the Graduate Record Exam, the graduate school entrance test, will be revamped and slightly lengthened in 2011 and graded on a new scale of 130 to 170.
The Educational Testing Service, which administers the G.R.E., described its plans Friday at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in San Francisco, calling the changes “the largest revisions” in the history of the test.
Although the exam will still include sections on verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing, each section is being revised. The new verbal section, for example, will eliminate questions on antonyms and analogies. On the quantitative section, the biggest change will be the addition of an online calculator. The writing section will still have two parts, one asking for a logical analysis and the other seeking an expression of the student’s own views….
(Aww, no more antonyms and analogies? I LOVED those. No, I’m not joking.)
But here’s the part that supports my earlier comments about testing’s place as a cog in a huge money-making machine:
Generally, [Neill] Seltzer [who is in charge of the G.R.E. for Princeton Review] said he saw the changes mostly as an marketing effort, to compete with the GMAT test, used for admission to business schools. The Educational Testing Service lost the contract for administering the GMAT in 2006 to Pearson. Since then, E.T.S. has been increasingly successful marketing the G.R.E. to business schools as an alternative admissions test.
Told you.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I aced the GRE and my scores were largely what got me into grad school, where I floundered for a number of years. I did eventually get my PhD, but I never felt that my work there matched the perception people might have had from my test scores.
I continue to feel that you can learn so much more about a person’s potential, areas of interest, approach, flexibility of mind, etc. from a sit-down conversation of fifteen minutes than you can from a page full of test scores. Even asking for an essay in which applicants sketch out what they would like to accomplish or learn in their grad school years, what problems they foresee, how they imagine themselves using that knowledge or degree, etc. would tell you a whole lot more about how they might fit into a particular program than the GRE — which, I believe, correlates largely with only the first year’s grades (this is also true of SAT scores).
Finland has an interesting exam for medical school applicants: they are asked to read one or two professional articles recently published and write an evaluative essay on the information and its implications for medicine. Hm. How about that? The problem is that you would need to have this read by people in the field, not those paid by the hour to walk in off the streets. Having worked several summers long ago as a grader for the entrance writing exams at the University of California, I can personally verify that the grading of written exams like this is pretty much like a game of darts played in total darkness.
I believe standardized tests only evaluate whether the institution from which a student graduated is guilty of grade inflation. If grade inflation did not occur and the student truly met the objectives of the courses, program and institution, then the graduate should be capable of meeting all academic requirements of the graduate program without needing validation from a standardized exam. This is especially true then the student applies to the same institution for graduate coursework after achieving his bachelor degree there. These tests cannot measure the character requirements for higher level education which are more important at this level: dedication, self-motivation and responsibility.
Theresa,
I agree with your point about standardized testing, but I want to follow up on one thing. Grade inflation can certainly be a problem, but another issue is the lack of clarity and consistency about “the objectives of the courses, program and institution” (to quote you for a moment) from one institution to another. If the objectives aren’t consistent, and if the standard for mastery isn’t consistent, an A at one institution can mean something very different from an A somewhere else. The problem is only compounded if no one has clearly communicated the standards. That’s one reason for the popularity of standardized tests, both for admission to programs and for validation of public-school students’ performance. The idea, I suppose, is to enforce a common standard through the back door of a common assessment.
I remember many times, as a student, being puzzled about grades I’d received, especially on papers – and the grade was usually higher than I thought I deserved. On reflection, I realize that the professors in question had not communicated their standards to me, so I was applying an extreme-perfectionist standard of my own! It certainly would have helped me if I’d known what the standards were.
But how can we balance the need for consistency and clarity, on the one hand, with the need for academic freedom, on the other?
As Justin pointed out, the problem with basing admittance solely on grades is that grades mean different things from different schools. I would go one step further than him to say, however, that it’s not just about nonexistent clarity and consistency in objectives, it’s about how you have to implement those objectives based on your students. My husband went to one of the most highly-ranked public high schools in the country and taught math to inner-city high school students in Los Angeles. Obviously he has seen both sides of the grading coin. An A from his high school, where most of his friends scored 1300-1500 (and above) out of 1600 on the SAT meant something different than his students who got As in calculus but didn’t reach (what would now be scored as) 1000 on the SAT. (There is now a writing component to the SAT which means that the scores are different than they were several years ago, so his scores were out of 1600 and now they’re out of 2400.)
When I asked him about this grade discrepancy problem, and whether it could ever be practical to base admittance to a program on grades alone, he said no. It’s not that he wasn’t following the objectives for Algebra II and Calculus; he was, just like the teachers at the ritzy, elite private schools of Beverly Hills just down the road. The problem is that if he had to implement them as rigorously as teachers at some of those schools (where students are scoring 5s on the AP exam and very highly on the SAT), all of his students would fail. You cannot fail an entire class of students. You also cannot give an entire class of students As. Grading almost always comes down to comparing students with other students in the class and sometimes other students in the school (if they’re in the same course). So, while the elite schools with highly motivated students who come from rich academic backgrounds have classes that are able to move quickly through material, get good grades, and score 4s and 5s on the AP tests (a standardized test that colleges like), his students could not move so quickly. He had to move at their pace because it made more sense to actually teach them something and have them learn it than move quickly because that’s what other schools are able to do. So, he moved slowly, taught the material at the level at which the students could comprehend it, and some of them got good grades, including As and Bs. The highest score on the AP Calculus test, however, was a 2 (out of 5) and there were only three of them out of two AP Calculus classes.
It’s not just about grade inflation, it’s about the fact that you just can’t fail everyone, even if they would all (possibly) fail somewhere else. It may sound nice to have all students in the country in the same classes moving at the same pace with the same rigor (which would meet consistency in objectives), but like I said, that means that many many students in this country would fail most of their classes and never get a high school diploma. And that leads to a whole host of other problems; dropout rates for students drastically increase with each failed class and potential employment is severely limited without a high school diploma, just to name a few. (And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the fact that teachers are human and unable to grade like robots. Except with multiple choice scantron tests which sound a lot like…..standardized tests.)
Suzanne,
You’re absolutely right about the implementation of goals and objectives! Perfect, robotic consistency (I love your phrase) is impractical at best and impossible at worst, even though that doesn’t stop a lot of factory-model schools, both public and private, from attempting to achieve it.
Like your husband, I’m also a long-time public school teacher, but of Latin rather than math. (Full disclosure: Some of my favorite students over the years have been former homeschoolers who decided to try public high school, and I’ve done a bit of tutoring and support for homeschooling families in my community who didn’t know any Latin but wanted their children to learn. But that’s been a few years ago!)
Following up on your husband’s point about “moving quickly,” I think that time is a critical, but frequently ignored factor for all kinds of learners. Given enough time and enough support, I firmly believe that anyone can learn anything he/she chooses and desires. One big problem in a public school setting, of course, is that there isn’t enough time; another huge problem is that all learners are expected to move in lockstep, at the same pace; and another, equally large problem is that choice and desire aren’t even on the radar screen, especially in this testing-obsessed age. Of course, one great advantage of homeschooling is that you (parent and child) are in charge of your time, and you can structure the learning at the right pace and make provisions for choice and desire. So please know that you have at least one secret (or not-so-secret) fan applauding you from “the other side.”
I’ve been working on a more self-paced, ownership-inducing approach for my students, and I’d really love some feedback from you and from the WTM community. I have a blog about the project at http://joyfullatinlearning.wordpress.com
and would love for you to read and comment very critically. Pedagogically, it’s rather strongly influenced by the Trivium, but perhaps not in the way you’d expect….
Gratias maximas antequam!
Grades alone certainly don’t provide a standardized, objective measure for potential schools/grad schools; but then neither do the most standardized of tests, which correlate mostly to income level, zip code, and the education level of parents.
I come back to the idea that a written essay or a conversation tells you far more than either or both — for high school grads, saying what they have learned during the past four years, what they still want to learn, how they will go about it, what problems they have encountered, how this school fits their goals, where they see themselves five years in the future; for potential grad students, mapping out their short-term plans for study and their long-term ideas about what they’ll do with their degree or how they might fit into the field (or out of it, given the economics of university hiring and many businesses at the moment). The problem, of course, is that meeting with people or reading what they write is time consuming and needs to be done by those in charge, not those paid by the hour who are unconnected with the university in question.
By the way, I read Making the Grade (sorry, can’t yet figure out how to italicize here) recommended by a reader a few posts back, about the testing industry and how it works. This utterly confirmed my own experience grading the entrance exam in writing for the University of California system a number of years ago. Anyone who thinks test scores are more reliable than grades will be enlightened by this book and a handful of others about the history of the SAT and/or the writing tests that have become standard in elementary and junior high schools. Whether or not the testing industry ever had innocent days in which all concerned truly believed they were doing a service for both students and universities is debatable; certainly today, as Susan says, it’s all about money.