I don't mean to imply that such exams don't measure anything useful. It's just really, really hard to know if the test you have constructed is really measuring what you think it's measuring. Assessment is very complicated, and constructing a multiple choice measure for something as elusive as intelligence is a nontrivial task. Add to that the fact that people don't really even agree on what intelligence is, and you have a big mess.
The SAT is actually a very good predictor of how successful students are likely to be in their first two years of university. It measures their "academic potential", as you probably know. It doesn't purport to measure how smart they are, or how much they learned in high school. It measures how good they are at "school", which is a reasonable indicator of how good they will be at "college". We can go on to ask what that says about schools and colleges, but that's a different discussion altogether!
But the way those tests are constructed makes them easy to analyze and "teach to", which gives test prep companies a lot of business. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. I'm all for beating a flawed system! ;-)
I'm not against standardized testing, actually. I'm just against the way most people use the results of standardized tests.
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Date: 2005-06-07 04:02 pm (UTC)The SAT is actually a very good predictor of how successful students are likely to be in their first two years of university. It measures their "academic potential", as you probably know. It doesn't purport to measure how smart they are, or how much they learned in high school. It measures how good they are at "school", which is a reasonable indicator of how good they will be at "college". We can go on to ask what that says about schools and colleges, but that's a different discussion altogether!
But the way those tests are constructed makes them easy to analyze and "teach to", which gives test prep companies a lot of business. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. I'm all for beating a flawed system! ;-)
I'm not against standardized testing, actually. I'm just against the way most people use the results of standardized tests.