Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Saga Briggs article on the The Perils of Standardized Testing: 6 Ways it Harms Learning is a great argument for the emerging realization that our Canadian education system is desperately holding onto the traditions of standardized testing at a cost to the student who will eventually have to “rejig” her/his/their mindset to value social and interpersonal skills more highly than content in the increasingly competitive job market. There does remain a certain utilitarian need for basic functioning knowledge such as syntax, grammar, punctuation, logical problem-solving, analytical thinking and synthesis and the like. Without these basics, we see part of the reason why post secondary institutions are struggling with students who do not meet these requirements because they have been trained to get good grades by any means, usually along the path of least resistance which leads to gaps in both practical and intellectual abilities.

It has long-been realized that the true expression of intelligence is not one’s membership card to MENSA, but it is the creative action one takes as a result of new knowledge. It is not how much you know, but what you accomplish with what little you do know. In this sense it seems previous generations were more intelligent in so many practical ways than we are in our current age of convenience, misinformation, and self-denying dependency upon Google and people who get paid to “do it for you”. So why has standardized testing remained a pillar in the education system of so many countries? As Saga Briggs states even the highest-ranking country for education, Finland, uses testing to determine its students’ suitability for its own universities. Perhaps it has something to do with its function in setting a level of expectations for those wishing to pursue academics. It may also unfortunately deter everyone from becoming life-long learners and in an ironic sense keep a balance between those who use their minds for income and those who are needed for their physical abilities to maintain the physical infrastructures of society. But this may be a simplistic if not somewhat Platonic view.

 

Standardized Testing to Legitimize the Bureaucracy of Education

It needs also to be stated that it is mostly the bureaucratic levels of the education system that have the strongest hold on standardized testing for it is a form of data collection and sharing that requires no actual student and serves immensely to justify many managerial and administrative positions. I might even go as far as to say that some of these jobs make absolutely no difference to the student emerging from such a system since many of the people in these positions have no idea who exactly their “client” is or what she/he/they needs to enter the job market or to create a new job for herself/himself/them-self. The education offices in buildings without classrooms need data generated from the “bottom” in order to determine the effect of their policy and subsequent funding changes. In this way, standardized testing does serve a purpose, but to what end and to the benefit of whom has become distorted and perverted as the natural growth of bureaucracies are apt to allow.

 

Top-Heavy and Slow to Change

Saga Briggs’ article sheds light on six pitfalls of standardized testing:

  1. They are misused and misleading putting into question their purpose and validity.
  2. Content knowledge (most easy to use in standardizing tests) is no longer a primary factor in an age where Google can answer anything. Motivation and skills should be the new commodities of education.
  3. Testing against a standard posits the hard and fast establishment of comparison and sets students up for a distorted sense of self-worth through external measures of success or failure. This increases the drop-out rate of bottom-scoring students who may only require more time, practice, discipline and motivation than those of top-scoring students.
  4. Testing ranks students, teachers, schools, and countries to the detriment of the unique knowledge and skill-sets that each student can express and has the potential to develop.
  5. Testing creates a culture of teaching only to the test which, in turn, has the potential to leave out valuable learning in other areas.
  6. Education policy changes made in hindsight have the obvious effect of having left students “holding the bag” of old policies that may have influenced them negatively. Standardizing as an accountability measure is a reactionary process rather than a proactive approach.

I propose a seventh way in which standardized testing harms learning: it feeds an unnecessary level of bureaucracy which continues to pull precious resources out of schools and into the pockets of those who do not face students desperate for the chance to exercise and develop their creativity and intelligence. It is the snake eating its own tail. It is a ship that has too many “observation decks” and in danger of listing too far to one side or the other. In reality our future demands that education evolve into something less biblical and didactic, to shed its structural Industrial Revolution-based model of training workers, and to become more fluid, transparent, and esoteric. If education is to survive the new age it must first reignite a passion for learning and discovery not only of the world outside the individual, but also a life-long hunger for self-discovery and self-learning.

Follow Saga Briggs on Twitter: @SagaMilena