That is very good food for thought, especially for those of us in the beginning stages of homeschooling. I live in New Jersey, where no testing is required. I might be tempted to bypass it, but now I can see there are some good reasons to test and to teach our children how to take these tests. Thanks for the post!

This way colleges and universities have a way to compare what students have actually done. My son’s AP Lit class is way too easy. He will make an A that you might think looks great on the transcript, but when colleges see where he earned that A, what type of school it is, they will be able to discern it was a different sort of A than a more rigorous public school or private school. He must nail the AP test itself to show that he has ability.

I do believe that there is an ongoing and genuine effort to compare “apples to apples” in this huge system of college education. At least by the colleges themselves. They have to cut through a lot of hubris though, such as the unending programs and arrangements to even everything out, and the high school ranking systems which use inflated GPA’s in order to name their (10 or 20!) Valedictorians.

AP Tests (not just the classes), SAT IIs, SATs IBs are their attempt to objectify and rectifiy. The same goes for the graduate level of education at better schools, only it is tests like the LSAT instead of the SAT. Oh, and then, when you’re all done, you can take the Bar Exam…….two or three times!

Whew!

Bright (or mainstream college material) homeschoolers, like I said in my post below, can learn to win at this testing game, if they will embrace the challenge, spend a bit of time testing each yearand following up where results indicate we should be. I wish we could see it as a help rather than a hindrance to our children; more a clarifying than strictly narrowing experience.

We basically told our sons that their life is defined by their SAT scores in a real sense. We didn’t really spend any time lamenting it, we just sucked it up and are working with it. That is just one of many things they have to perform well on in high school. There’s college classes, music and speech competitions, leadership, service, jobs, oh…..and a rigorous, multidemensional, multi-perspective academic program…..there’s enough going on that the tests take their place as one of a number of important efforts. With a well rounded, rigorous program, and lots of chances for service and leadership, kids come out of high school with a fairly decent sense of their place, not an SAT -distorted self image.

Sandra – hoping our experiences so far are helpful to those coming behind.

Sandra

I think homeschooling has a great advantage over classroom students in learning how to ace these tests. We can prepare our kids for standardized tests much faster than a classroom teacher can. For one of our children I bought a test preparation book and sample test and we flew through it 20 minute segments over a week or two. The test prep books are a spring board for other tips and hints that you give the child.

Now that our daughter is in a selective private college and our son is competing for acceptance in selective schools, I am glad we emphasized the standardized test. It gets them “in”. It just does. Our son was given preferred admission to two private universities in the Pacific NW based just on test scores – no fees, no essays, no teacher recommendations, and acceptance letters in two weeks of receiving his documents. So “you get it back” in a sense. The work and money spent on SAT test prep starts to pay dividends even in the admissions process. Since then, he has been invited to compete for a full ride at one of these. For kids who win these, that’s big pay back.

We think test taking should be one of the skills that we teach our kids, along with study skills, student organization – portfolio and portable file system – and time management – using a planner for long term planning. Our kids took about 10 practice SATs and three with College Board. When you add 7 more achievement tests to that and the PSAT, that’s 21 tests. And it hasn’t hurt learning at all, it has enhanced their academic profile.

If you wanna play the game, you gotta do it by the rules. That goes for transcripts, grades, the whole thing. We must speak their language. Learning to do this as early as possible in your child’s education will help them.
I’d say, no matter what you think might happen, plan that college is the goal. For most kids, this will not be a hindrance should college not pan out, but if you do not prepare them for college admission, doors will be closed to them. And those yearly standardized tests are part of the preparation.

Sandra

“The massive emphasis on external, standardized exams, often with high stakes attached as with the federal No Child Left Behind law, has intensified the domination of summative tests over curriculum and instruction — even though the research examined by Black and William supports the conclusion that summative assessments tend to have a negative effect on student learning….”

Great. So all public schools are now gearing everything toward summative NCLB tests, and the research is indicating this has a negative effect on student learning. Sigh. We as a country circle the drain a little bit faster.

For anyone who’s interested, here is the link to the article:
http://www.fairtest.org/value-formative-assessment-pdf

It will be interesting to see if this recession drives more people to homeschool (fewer dollars for public school).

You might be interested in this book reviewed in The Washington Post yesterday. http://www.amazon.com/Making-Grades-Misadventures-Standardized-Industry/dp/098170915X/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258974385&sr=8-7. I have it on my list to read.

What has also shaped my beliefs about the relatively uselessness of standardized testing is my daughter’s disability. She has Asperger’s Syndrome, and with it an amazing combination of strengths — reading at post-college level at age 11 — and weaknesses — being unable at thirteen to draw a straight line using a ruler or to evaluate character motivation in a socially realistic novel due to autistic spectrum disorder’s interference with social understanding. She has been tested by a neuropsychologist, a multi-day project, eleven hours one-on-one in total; and watching through a one-way window, I have seen how her disability impacts on how she answers and responds to the testing situation and the person testing her. She tests stunningly high in standardized tests using non-fiction as the reading comprehension selections, and this is both ironic and unfortunate in her case, because her intelligence masks the level and nature of her disability and her scores tell an evaluator or teacher nothing that is helpful about how she learns, what she understands, what she can fake or guess her way to, where she most needs help. No single test score tells anyone how to best help her. The overall learning profile that emerged from the huge variety of different kinds of tests the neuropsych administered, on the other hand, was very revealing and helpful; the academic tests alone were pretty worthless.

My daughter may or may not need to take the SATs and GRE some day. What I do know, given her abilities, is that she doesn’t need years on end of practice test-taking, cramming, or prepping to get where she may or may not need to go. She needs a whole lot of help, a whole lot of experience, and a whole lot of practice: but not at test-taking.

I value my daughter’s intelligence very much. It has thrilled me to be her teacher all these years and to see a mind that powerful at work despite her continuing weaknesses. But I have come to believe more and more strongly, even as I am thrilled by her mind, that academics isn’t everything — and that tests do not measure what is most important and necessary to know, about my daughter or about any child. I’m aware how wishy-washy this may sound. But I’m also aware, after teaching at a homeschool co-op for a number of years and lecturing at two local universities for over a decade, that I can tell as much about a kid from a good fifteen minute conversation — maybe I can tell a more — than from any file of test scores and grades. It doesn’t come in the form of a neat number and therefore it seems subjective rather than objective; but I am of the opinion that the neat numbers of standardized test scores are just as subjective and that they do not measure what we think they do.

Being likewise a realist, I will see to it that my daughter knows how to take a standardized test should she ever need to. But I will also do my best to get her where she needs and wants to go without having to take one. And I will be having her read a couple of the books about the history of testing and college admissions so that she is quite sure that whatever number comes out of the Great Testing Machine attached to her name, that is by no means the measure of her intelligence or her worth.

But I do wonder how colleges and post-college programs can efficiently decipher how well a student will do in their programs if they don’t have something standardized to go on. For example, my husband taught AP calculus to inner-city students in East Los Angeles. He taught them what they were able to handle and some of them got As and Bs. However, on the AP test, I don’t think anyone (except maybe one or two) scored above a 2. In high schools in places like northern VA, however, those same students getting As and Bs in class get 4s and 5s on the AP test. If a college just gets high school transcripts they have to take a lot of time figuring out what an A means from this place versus this place. Another example is this: my father-in-law ran a graduate degree program at a university in Washington, D.C. He said that several colleges have started sending narrative transcripts instead of straight grades for students. He said that he basically had to ignore them because the time it would take to sift through them would be far too much, and what he needs to know, more or less, how students will perform in his program are college transcripts and GRE scores.

I am not trying to disagree and say that I think standardized testing is some gift to humankind. I just wonder if it would be worth the overhaul required of degree programs to re-do how they do admissions.

As for standardized testing in the lower grades, I think a similar logic applies (how are my students doing as compared with students of the same age around the country), but if left unchanged I think it should just end. It’s helpful to know how your students are doing as compared with students who are exactly the same. When I taught in inner-city Los Angeles knowing how my students did compared with schools that had a similar demographic was helpful, but not so helpful when compared with those in Beverly Hills. I don’t know what the changes needed are to get both that helpful information but also not get the please-make-the-pain-end look from those kids.