“This test only tests what the test tests.”
- Speaker at an educational conference
A friend of mine is really being put to the test trying to get into a good school. For one school alone there were five separate entry tests – two paper exams and three interviews – not to mention a slew of previous test results that she had to submit. This battery was repeated at a number of institutions where all those tests will be graded and analyzed to create a final score that will determine her future, at least as far as each school is concerned.
My friend is three. She is trying to get into nursery school.
When exactly did test scores become the primary way that we understand ourselves? We are without doubt the most tested, assessed, evaluated and diagnosed people in history and the most evaluated animals as well. From in vitro testing to early IQ tests, through grade school report cards and all those exams to get into and through high school and college, and the endless medical tests of adulthood, our mania for rating and grading marks, and in some cases determines, every aspect of our lives.
Everywhere you look, our key means of applying judgments to individuals relies increasingly on a test score, a bell curve, an average, a mean. Intelligence tests to determine who is smart, quizzes to figure out who is listening, aptitude tests to decide who can continue, standards tests to limit those who can apply. But education is not the only realm that has become test obsessed. Notice, for example, the subtle shift in our use of the word health.
Health no longer refers to how we feel; it now means how we test. Feeling good is fine, but our real well-being depends on a long list of test result numbers for cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, body-fat, cardiac stress, cancer, and on and on. A slight change in any of these scores can put any one of us on permanent medication, change our finances, alter our future and our attitudes about our own lives. Other than the fact that adults want lower scores on their tests while kids want higher ones on theirs, my friend and I are in the same position…relying on test numbers to tell us who we are and what we will and will not be able to do with our lives.
A bad score on an aptitude test can keep you out of a profession. A bad one on a blood test can send you into a frenzy of worries, appointments, prognoses, and of course further tests. Talk about test anxiety!
Testing and scoring are, of course, expressions of our technology, another set of tools generated bu the Gizmos. We could not test without computers, could not calculate without digital apps, could not evaluate without software. As such, all these tests raise the standard question of Lipshitzean evolution….does our use of them make us more human or more humanoid?
The answer for me is fairly straightforward…both. But I think there is a much greater danger that the tests will dehumanize us by reducing the complexity of our lives to a numbers game.
As a teacher I have never even liked grading my own students. I would much rather focus on reaching out, communicating, inspiring – even entertaining – than judging. And although I administer them as part of my job, scores on tests tell me nothing useful about my students. Nothing at all. Tests give me data but not information. Much more significant is the understanding I get from making a connection with them as individuals with their own experiences, sorrows, talents, limits. But this takes time and energy to utilize; a score is instant.
Some of my colleagues tell me that one of my jobs as a professor is to uphold standards and that tests help us do that. But that is not my concern. My interest as a teacher is in trying to get in touch with each student’s sense of enthusiasm about the matter at hand…or perhaps about life in general. When this works, I can help them practice motivating themselves and therefore learn to learn for the rest of their lives. And even though I am not always successful at this, I know that everyone can do it, to the best of his or her ability.
There is nothing to test in that kind of process, only something to work at.
Once when I proposed that we eliminate grading completely and simply pass or fail students based on their overall effort, I was accused of being a nihilist. Do away with tests? The system would fall apart! How would we know who was learning? But I suspect that we would know the same way we did throughout the 40,000 years of history before Stanford and Binet. By life. By outcomes. By the learners learning and the others not.
We could not really do away with tests of course. We are far too hooked by the technology of testing – to the paradigm of standards, averages, bell curves, and scores – to understand ourselves any other way. But we should at least hold onto the techuman notion that testing and grading are not the only ways to make decisions about human beings and should adopt some Neolud (which see) some sense of ourselves as untestable, ungraded, inassessable. Those of us who test – educators, doctors, parents – could and should fight the impulse to think of the tests as distilling some magical essence from the takers who become mere points on a scale.
“I am not a number, I am a free man,” shouted the Prisoner in the classic TV series. Not any more. But perhaps the trick is in not comparing outcomes to some generic pattern but instead only to those of the same person. In other words, to use testing to measure changes over time for people as individuals rather than how anyone fits into some idealized goal.
Meanwhile, I guess my friend and I are still waiting for our results.
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