I’d pay teachers enough so that we could hire the best people in their fields, and trust them to do their jobs. Test the kids maybe three times, in elementary, middle, and high school, but just let the teachers teach. It works great in the rest of the world. Here we just complain because they’re paid a poverty wage but have a retirement plan, and NO ONE should get a retirement plan!
Standardized testing is not necessarily bad — how can you tell if someone has learned vocabulary or addition without testing? Also, an essay is part of the SATs.-Obviously, it’s not the be all and end all measurement of someone’s education. But, it’s the only one most people trust.-Even then, it wouldn’t be so bad if some teachers, administrators, and schools districts didn’t cheat for monetary reasons. -Not to mention how the ‘improvement’ is ‘proof’ that some politicians know how people should be educated.
It is possible to develop good and valid standardized tests (speaking as a PhD psychologist and expert in assessment), but that is not what is being done, because those are harder to develop. Instead, they are relying on the psychometric principles used for decades — without success.Ivy League schools haven’t used the SAT for years now. There’s a reason.
‘What will you replace Standardized Testing with?’-A valid question, IMO. How can someone be assessed on their education level/ achievement?- But, motivemagus (above this post) says that it can be done, only it’s hard.-That implies that there is real laziness on the part of those who develop the tests and that effective tests could be developed.-BTW, I am very much in favor of a significant (not excessive) amount of required memorization, because it teaches kids how to memorize. And, the information tends to stick for a long time. That kind of learning is something that can be tested and it’s not too hard to make tests that are accurate.
Hence America’s continued drop in sciences, mathematics and all that snobby stuff since the 80’s.Neither party has done particularly well, STEM fields remain in low supply, the cost of education has remained universally high.trying to get people once again interested in these fields might be the best start, its kind of hard to try to get most kids interested in quadratics and algebra when most of them have no idea why they are learning.I personally like the idea of having a direct branch block as 1 of 8 classes from grade 3 onward, by direct branch that may mean attempting to be able to do programming in 4 years, or attempting to cover the field of quantum physics in the same amount of time, to learn to sympathize and work with chemicals focusing on current and predicted industrial practices.as of the present most of these wait till you are in university or if lucky you can take AP programs in grade 12, By which point most people have decided their interests.It would be a steep difficulty curve. the program itself should be based on improvements, with the thought that an improvement from 40-60% would be impressive versus punished.
( this can also be summarized as making low test scores better by giving actual challenge ********************************************************The current system of standardized testing would harshly penalize any school attempting to genuinely challenge the students in a way that could lead them to branch into advanced fields———————————————————————Additionally for a much more moderate education reform one could simply base teacher pay / cuts and school board budget increase / cuts would be to base things off of improvement in grades versus the grades, in other words a teacher whom takes a class from 60% on tests to 70% should be paid more than one whom gets the class from 75% to 76%
“With what should we replace standardized testing?” is not a good question. ST is akin to a disease in our schools; when your doctor removes a tumor, you do not expect to go home with diabetes as a replacement, you just go back to healthy living, or, in this case, educating. Or I can answer your question another way: replace ST with books. That, after all, is what we got rid of to make room for the tumor.
How many of your students have taken the SAT? As motive mentioned, a lot of schools in the US don’t require it anymore.+Why replace the standardized tests with anything? Why give grades all the time anyway?+I was a private music teacher for many years, without giving any grades. The students learned what they learned. I knew how good they were and how much they had learned, by and large they knew, there was no problem.+In some fields, however, certification is necessary, and in those fields there should be some mechanism to determine who is qualified and who isn’t. But why not pass/fail? After all, the worst student who passes medical school still gets to be an MD. In graduate school, at least where I went, almost all the students were graded between A minus and A plus. If you got a B that was a signal that you should probably quit. When the grade range is so narrow it really doesn’t mean much. And of course dissertations aren’t graded — if you pass the defense, then you get your degree. And it’s very rare these days for someone not to pass the defense. The idea is that your committee doesn’t let you defend until you’re ready. Mostly the people who can’t cut it never finish writing and therefore are never judged.
An interesting perspective from a high school teacher: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/09/a-warning-to-college-profs-from-a-high-school-teacher/
(Serious answer. Serious attempt at the beginning of an answer, anyway.)
When I was a music teacher, I saw each student individually for half an hour or an hour a week. I would give them exercises to work on, organized progressively, and then pieces to practice. If some passage in a piece presented a particular difficulty I would find or invent an exercise to deal with that difficulty. I would hear each week the result of that week’s practice. Over the years teachers have roughly graded the repertoire into levels of difficulty — not perfectly, but pretty well. In Canada the Royal Conservatory has a list of pieces in ten grades. So over the course of a few years or longer working with a student you can work your way up the grades. There’s a long tradition of pedagogy, and generally it works pretty well. The Conservatory has an exam system, but I rarely put my students in for exams, because I didn’t see the point. They aren’t better because they have taken an exam. It is true, however, that some students will work harder if they have to take an exam. So they take the exam and they get some grade. Big deal.+I am fortunate in my university teaching that part of what I do is teach Latin and Greek, and the classes are small enough so that I can almost replicate the experience of private lessons. I can tell from a student’s participation in class how well they are doing. If they can translate in class, then why bother to make them translate on a test? Well, I do recognize that there are some pedagogical uses to testing — tests are a time to go back over material and put it all together, and that process can be helpful. But why give grades? Why not just give back the test with comments — “You need to work more on your verb forms”; “be more careful about case endings”, and so on.+In bigger classes it’s harder to keep track of everyone — particularly the quiet students who are actually on top of things. There are perhaps different approaches — tests, okay, but in my subjects essays are a better index. But why not spend the money to reduce class sizes, so I can get a sense of the students as individuals, or give me more realistic opportunity to see students individually in my office. If I have 400 students in a big lecture (as many years I do) then I can’t see them all. Where I work, the students are all in tutorials — two hours a week, 25 students per tutorial — but I usually teach just one of those tutorials, and the rest are taught by TAs; I have to trust that the TAs know what they are doing. I’ve had good TAs lately, but some years I have not had a lot of confidence in some of them.+How do I know how good a job I’m doing? Well, I could be deluded, but for the most part don’t you figure you know what you do well and what you don’t do well? I know when a class has gone well, and I know when a class has fizzled. And feedback — from students and colleagues — also helps.+As I say, the beginning of an attempt to answer. And you?
I think there’s a difference between “evaluation” or “assessment” in general and “testing” in particular. An essay is a form of assessment, but it’s not a “test”. I do think that “tests” in the strict sense of the word can have some pedagogical value, but I just don’t see why we have to be ranking everyone all the time. How many times does a student receive a grade in 12 or 16 years of school? What cultural work is being done by all this grading? I remember when I took the PSAT in grade eleven, we got our scores back in English class; we marched up one by one in alphabetical order to the front of the class, and Miss Curling handed each student a little envelope with a little piece of paper in it, and each student would go back to his or her desk and open up the envelope and learn the judgment of the great ETS. It was all supposed to be oh so private, but I remember Judy squealing and saying “Oh, I didn’t think i would do so well!!” And then in college there was the SAT comparison game — “I got 750 in Math, what’d you get in Verbal?” And now my academic colleagues rank their Amazon numbers — “Hey, I see you’re at 2,457,843. That’s pretty good. My new book is at 3,654,782, but it’s moving up fast.” Can’t we get over the ranking?
I’ve worked with a lot of smart people, and I resist ranking them. I have no impulse to say that Sally is smarter than George if they are both smart and interesting and do good work. Sally may be quicker on the uptake, but maybe George in his slower way gets to something really interesting. There’s a great classicist of the mid-twentieth century whose reputation is based mainly on two articles — he didn’t write much, but what he wrote really changed the way we look at archaic poetry. Was he not as bright as someone more prolific? I just don’t see the point of this kind of comparison. From the evidence we see from your posts so far, you’re plenty smart, and that’s enough for me.
Just a footnote — I had a couple of friends when I was in university who had “photographic” memories. I envied them, but one of them told me he thought it was not much use to him when it came to creative work. He actually did good creative work, but so did other people who didn’t have photographic memories. The other one, I eventually realized, remembered well but had nothing interesting to say. I still would like to have a better memory, but I’m not so envious.
I guess I would ask two questions: what is the point of the assessment?And what is the effect of the assessment? I fear that all too often the effect of the assessment is just to create needless competition and bad feelings.
Methods of assessment don’t necessarily result in complex rankings. A driving test, for example, just establishes two categories — those who pass and are allowed to drive and those who don’t pass and aren’t allowed to drive. You don’t get a B+ or a C–, you just get a license. When I was in graduate school, our qualifying exams worked more or less that way. If I was graded I don’t know; certainly I was never told what my grade was. I was just told that I had passed and could move from the MA program to the PhD program. And since everyone in my year passed, there was not much sense of ranking among us.
This kind of test may assess not by comparison with other students but by comparison with some standard. So when I test my first-year Greek students at the end of the year, I have a sense of what they need to know in order to go on to second year. I’m perfectly happy if everyone in the class meets that standard, and I don’t care much about ranking them beyond that standard. What good would it do? (But the students seem to care, I think they have been taught to care, and so I go through the motions of ranking. But I always tell them I don’t take these rankings very seriously.
This is interesting — it leads so many different directions. I spend my life teaching humanities, and that may have something to do with my attitudes. On the other hand, I happen to think that a lot of what goes in the humanities is nonsense, and evaluation in the humanities is often nonsense on stilts. I have worked very hard to develop teaching methods in the humanities that are testable — in the way, for instance, that math skills are testable. So in a way I’m on your side of this discussion as much as I’m on my side. Whatever my side is. But I also believe that it is possible to develop judgment (by which I mean something sort of distantly related to what Kant talks about in the third Critique). If judgment can be tested (or evaluated), it takes judgment to do it. Stilts again.
But on a different line, part of my objection to the testing culture is the place of testing in the culture. I grant the need to evaluate from time to time. (Though who is evaluating whom for what purpose is still worth asking.) I evaluate my own teaching after every class (and during class, too, so that I can switch gears if I need to.) I also need to have a sense of where the students are, so that I can plan what to do next. So there is constant evaluation going on. But I try not to make the evaluation part of a power structure, as I think it often is in our society.
Which reminds me, did you happen to look at 9 Chickweed Lane today? Very relevant to the discussion. In my opinion, Dr. Burber’s response is totally wrong, and definitely an imposition of power. She should be able to explain why what she is teaching is not just a matter of opinion. To return to what I said at the beginning of this post, way too much of what is “taught” in the humanities is just opinion; I work very hard to show the students that what I do is not just opinion, but I’m swimming against a very strong current.
Well, I wouldn’t trust any scientific method of interpreting poetry. (Or comic strips.) There’s a story about a German scholar who didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and he felt that he was missing something in life when everyone else laughed at jokes and he didn’t see why they were funny, so he undertook a massive study of jokes, which he published to great acclaim, but he still didn’t have a sense of humor.
I think your reference to Kahneman is very much to the point. But at some level judgment does come into the picture — I think. For instance, you have to make a judgment about what Kahneman says. Or take different kinds of mathematics — ordinary addition versus modular addition, say. Both work. Which to use? It’s a matter of judgment. Or Euclidean versus non-Euclidean geometry? Again, both work, it’s a matter of judgment which to apply in a given situation.
I certainly know about the good looks bias. That’s the secret to my own success.+And not for a moment am I suggesting that judgment, mine included, is problem free. I’m not sure, however, that standardized testing is problem free, either. Again, I mention my sister, who doesn’t test well, but who performs very well when she’s not feeling that she’s being tested. Someone who knows her would realize that no matter what the tests say she’s pretty smart and knows her stuff.There are other problems, some of which can perhaps be solved in ideal situations, but which in the real world do intrude. For instance, how good are the questions? I certainly have made tests that in hindsight I know included poorly worded questions. Some of the critique of the SATs has noted questions which had alternative correct answers which were disallowed by the ETS graders.But as I’ve tried to say, what really bothers me isn’t the testing — I do believe that tests can have a pedagogical value — but the obsessive ranking, which I think must satisfy some deep cultural need. Some societies do a lot of ranking, some not so much. I think we do more than we should. That’s my judgment.+martens is totally right to reference Kahneman. I loved “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, and it has certainly taught me a lot about these topics. I would recommend it to you, but I bet you already know what he says.+Further on judgment — here are three kinds of judgment that I feel are important. First, a kind of sensory judgment, as in the perception of musical tones. It’s well known that people can get better in their ability to identify intervals and chord progressions, for instance, and I would argue that there’s a personal value in increasing this ability. Even if some electronic gadget can do a perfect acoustical analysis of a piece, that doesn’t replace listening to it yourself and learning to hear it better. Second, judgment in making things. The things I make mostly are written things, but the principle applies probably everywhere. Right now, for instance, I’m working on a new book, and I’m having to make a decision about how much of the prior scholarship I summarize in the introduction. My first version was about fifty pages long, and my judgment is that that’s too much. I think I can do the job in half the space, though I will have to leave out some of the detail. For a previous book I wrote two whole chapters which I later discarded. These decisions are matters of judgment, and anyone who makes things knows that there’s a constant necessity to make these judgements. Part of what we teach graduate students is how to make these judgments. Third, in general, decisions when there is imperfect information. Most of the time we just don’t know everything we might want to know before we make a decision, large or small. A student wrote me yesterday to ask if he could do an Independent Reading Course. He’s a bright student, and he’s actually one of my more interesting students, but he’s proved a little troublesome in the past, because he can’t get work done on time. He needs this course to graduate next spring. Should I take this on? Will it be more trouble than it’s worth? Or another, I’m thinking that I will retire in two years. I don’t have to, so it’s up to me to decide. There are all sorts of considerations, some financial, some personal. The information I have is not enough to settle it, so I will have to make a judgment. It’s not that I trust my judgment — I have lots of evidence that my judgment can be wrong — but at some point I have to make decisions. I believe that judgment can be improved, in all of these situations.
Hawthorne over 10 years ago
I sure hope he would replace it with actual skills testing. Of course, that would require skills instruction, which appears not to be forthcoming.
Never mind …
ARodney over 10 years ago
I’d pay teachers enough so that we could hire the best people in their fields, and trust them to do their jobs. Test the kids maybe three times, in elementary, middle, and high school, but just let the teachers teach. It works great in the rest of the world. Here we just complain because they’re paid a poverty wage but have a retirement plan, and NO ONE should get a retirement plan!
lonecat over 10 years ago
We test too much and we grade too much and we teach and learn too little.
braindead Premium Member over 10 years ago
Standardized testing is not necessarily bad — how can you tell if someone has learned vocabulary or addition without testing? Also, an essay is part of the SATs.-Obviously, it’s not the be all and end all measurement of someone’s education. But, it’s the only one most people trust.-Even then, it wouldn’t be so bad if some teachers, administrators, and schools districts didn’t cheat for monetary reasons. -Not to mention how the ‘improvement’ is ‘proof’ that some politicians know how people should be educated.
Kylop over 10 years ago
Democrats and Republicans want kids to grow up and donate money to them. Teachers want kids to grow up and succeed. Corporations want slave labor.
Motivemagus over 10 years ago
It is possible to develop good and valid standardized tests (speaking as a PhD psychologist and expert in assessment), but that is not what is being done, because those are harder to develop. Instead, they are relying on the psychometric principles used for decades — without success.Ivy League schools haven’t used the SAT for years now. There’s a reason.
braindead Premium Member over 10 years ago
‘What will you replace Standardized Testing with?’-A valid question, IMO. How can someone be assessed on their education level/ achievement?- But, motivemagus (above this post) says that it can be done, only it’s hard.-That implies that there is real laziness on the part of those who develop the tests and that effective tests could be developed.-BTW, I am very much in favor of a significant (not excessive) amount of required memorization, because it teaches kids how to memorize. And, the information tends to stick for a long time. That kind of learning is something that can be tested and it’s not too hard to make tests that are accurate.
Quipss over 10 years ago
Hence America’s continued drop in sciences, mathematics and all that snobby stuff since the 80’s.Neither party has done particularly well, STEM fields remain in low supply, the cost of education has remained universally high.trying to get people once again interested in these fields might be the best start, its kind of hard to try to get most kids interested in quadratics and algebra when most of them have no idea why they are learning.I personally like the idea of having a direct branch block as 1 of 8 classes from grade 3 onward, by direct branch that may mean attempting to be able to do programming in 4 years, or attempting to cover the field of quantum physics in the same amount of time, to learn to sympathize and work with chemicals focusing on current and predicted industrial practices.as of the present most of these wait till you are in university or if lucky you can take AP programs in grade 12, By which point most people have decided their interests.It would be a steep difficulty curve. the program itself should be based on improvements, with the thought that an improvement from 40-60% would be impressive versus punished.
( this can also be summarized as making low test scores better by giving actual challenge ********************************************************The current system of standardized testing would harshly penalize any school attempting to genuinely challenge the students in a way that could lead them to branch into advanced fields———————————————————————Additionally for a much more moderate education reform one could simply base teacher pay / cuts and school board budget increase / cuts would be to base things off of improvement in grades versus the grades, in other words a teacher whom takes a class from 60% on tests to 70% should be paid more than one whom gets the class from 75% to 76%
Bandusia15 over 10 years ago
I did that all the way through university and got my degree. It was easier to do in school and got harder the older I got.
Sara Farris over 10 years ago
“With what should we replace standardized testing?” is not a good question. ST is akin to a disease in our schools; when your doctor removes a tumor, you do not expect to go home with diabetes as a replacement, you just go back to healthy living, or, in this case, educating. Or I can answer your question another way: replace ST with books. That, after all, is what we got rid of to make room for the tumor.
Sara Farris over 10 years ago
And no, the ST people are not well intended; they’re feeding at a big ol tax-funded trough.
d_legendary1 over 10 years ago
Standardized testing is so bad in Florida that the teachers don’t teach anything other than how to pass the test. Ridiculous!
Motivemagus over 10 years ago
I doubt it. But I am not a self-proclaimed expert. Clients have referred to me as a world authority. Sorry about that.
lonecat over 10 years ago
How many of your students have taken the SAT? As motive mentioned, a lot of schools in the US don’t require it anymore.+Why replace the standardized tests with anything? Why give grades all the time anyway?+I was a private music teacher for many years, without giving any grades. The students learned what they learned. I knew how good they were and how much they had learned, by and large they knew, there was no problem.+In some fields, however, certification is necessary, and in those fields there should be some mechanism to determine who is qualified and who isn’t. But why not pass/fail? After all, the worst student who passes medical school still gets to be an MD. In graduate school, at least where I went, almost all the students were graded between A minus and A plus. If you got a B that was a signal that you should probably quit. When the grade range is so narrow it really doesn’t mean much. And of course dissertations aren’t graded — if you pass the defense, then you get your degree. And it’s very rare these days for someone not to pass the defense. The idea is that your committee doesn’t let you defend until you’re ready. Mostly the people who can’t cut it never finish writing and therefore are never judged.
Motivemagus over 10 years ago
An interesting perspective from a high school teacher: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/09/a-warning-to-college-profs-from-a-high-school-teacher/
lonecat over 10 years ago
(Serious answer. Serious attempt at the beginning of an answer, anyway.)
When I was a music teacher, I saw each student individually for half an hour or an hour a week. I would give them exercises to work on, organized progressively, and then pieces to practice. If some passage in a piece presented a particular difficulty I would find or invent an exercise to deal with that difficulty. I would hear each week the result of that week’s practice. Over the years teachers have roughly graded the repertoire into levels of difficulty — not perfectly, but pretty well. In Canada the Royal Conservatory has a list of pieces in ten grades. So over the course of a few years or longer working with a student you can work your way up the grades. There’s a long tradition of pedagogy, and generally it works pretty well. The Conservatory has an exam system, but I rarely put my students in for exams, because I didn’t see the point. They aren’t better because they have taken an exam. It is true, however, that some students will work harder if they have to take an exam. So they take the exam and they get some grade. Big deal.+I am fortunate in my university teaching that part of what I do is teach Latin and Greek, and the classes are small enough so that I can almost replicate the experience of private lessons. I can tell from a student’s participation in class how well they are doing. If they can translate in class, then why bother to make them translate on a test? Well, I do recognize that there are some pedagogical uses to testing — tests are a time to go back over material and put it all together, and that process can be helpful. But why give grades? Why not just give back the test with comments — “You need to work more on your verb forms”; “be more careful about case endings”, and so on.+In bigger classes it’s harder to keep track of everyone — particularly the quiet students who are actually on top of things. There are perhaps different approaches — tests, okay, but in my subjects essays are a better index. But why not spend the money to reduce class sizes, so I can get a sense of the students as individuals, or give me more realistic opportunity to see students individually in my office. If I have 400 students in a big lecture (as many years I do) then I can’t see them all. Where I work, the students are all in tutorials — two hours a week, 25 students per tutorial — but I usually teach just one of those tutorials, and the rest are taught by TAs; I have to trust that the TAs know what they are doing. I’ve had good TAs lately, but some years I have not had a lot of confidence in some of them.+How do I know how good a job I’m doing? Well, I could be deluded, but for the most part don’t you figure you know what you do well and what you don’t do well? I know when a class has gone well, and I know when a class has fizzled. And feedback — from students and colleagues — also helps.+As I say, the beginning of an attempt to answer. And you?
lonecat over 10 years ago
I think there’s a difference between “evaluation” or “assessment” in general and “testing” in particular. An essay is a form of assessment, but it’s not a “test”. I do think that “tests” in the strict sense of the word can have some pedagogical value, but I just don’t see why we have to be ranking everyone all the time. How many times does a student receive a grade in 12 or 16 years of school? What cultural work is being done by all this grading? I remember when I took the PSAT in grade eleven, we got our scores back in English class; we marched up one by one in alphabetical order to the front of the class, and Miss Curling handed each student a little envelope with a little piece of paper in it, and each student would go back to his or her desk and open up the envelope and learn the judgment of the great ETS. It was all supposed to be oh so private, but I remember Judy squealing and saying “Oh, I didn’t think i would do so well!!” And then in college there was the SAT comparison game — “I got 750 in Math, what’d you get in Verbal?” And now my academic colleagues rank their Amazon numbers — “Hey, I see you’re at 2,457,843. That’s pretty good. My new book is at 3,654,782, but it’s moving up fast.” Can’t we get over the ranking?
lonecat over 10 years ago
How do you know they were brighter?
lonecat over 10 years ago
I’ve worked with a lot of smart people, and I resist ranking them. I have no impulse to say that Sally is smarter than George if they are both smart and interesting and do good work. Sally may be quicker on the uptake, but maybe George in his slower way gets to something really interesting. There’s a great classicist of the mid-twentieth century whose reputation is based mainly on two articles — he didn’t write much, but what he wrote really changed the way we look at archaic poetry. Was he not as bright as someone more prolific? I just don’t see the point of this kind of comparison. From the evidence we see from your posts so far, you’re plenty smart, and that’s enough for me.
lonecat over 10 years ago
Just a footnote — I had a couple of friends when I was in university who had “photographic” memories. I envied them, but one of them told me he thought it was not much use to him when it came to creative work. He actually did good creative work, but so did other people who didn’t have photographic memories. The other one, I eventually realized, remembered well but had nothing interesting to say. I still would like to have a better memory, but I’m not so envious.
lonecat over 10 years ago
I guess I would ask two questions: what is the point of the assessment?And what is the effect of the assessment? I fear that all too often the effect of the assessment is just to create needless competition and bad feelings.
Methods of assessment don’t necessarily result in complex rankings. A driving test, for example, just establishes two categories — those who pass and are allowed to drive and those who don’t pass and aren’t allowed to drive. You don’t get a B+ or a C–, you just get a license. When I was in graduate school, our qualifying exams worked more or less that way. If I was graded I don’t know; certainly I was never told what my grade was. I was just told that I had passed and could move from the MA program to the PhD program. And since everyone in my year passed, there was not much sense of ranking among us.
This kind of test may assess not by comparison with other students but by comparison with some standard. So when I test my first-year Greek students at the end of the year, I have a sense of what they need to know in order to go on to second year. I’m perfectly happy if everyone in the class meets that standard, and I don’t care much about ranking them beyond that standard. What good would it do? (But the students seem to care, I think they have been taught to care, and so I go through the motions of ranking. But I always tell them I don’t take these rankings very seriously.
lonecat over 10 years ago
This is interesting — it leads so many different directions. I spend my life teaching humanities, and that may have something to do with my attitudes. On the other hand, I happen to think that a lot of what goes in the humanities is nonsense, and evaluation in the humanities is often nonsense on stilts. I have worked very hard to develop teaching methods in the humanities that are testable — in the way, for instance, that math skills are testable. So in a way I’m on your side of this discussion as much as I’m on my side. Whatever my side is. But I also believe that it is possible to develop judgment (by which I mean something sort of distantly related to what Kant talks about in the third Critique). If judgment can be tested (or evaluated), it takes judgment to do it. Stilts again.
But on a different line, part of my objection to the testing culture is the place of testing in the culture. I grant the need to evaluate from time to time. (Though who is evaluating whom for what purpose is still worth asking.) I evaluate my own teaching after every class (and during class, too, so that I can switch gears if I need to.) I also need to have a sense of where the students are, so that I can plan what to do next. So there is constant evaluation going on. But I try not to make the evaluation part of a power structure, as I think it often is in our society.
Which reminds me, did you happen to look at 9 Chickweed Lane today? Very relevant to the discussion. In my opinion, Dr. Burber’s response is totally wrong, and definitely an imposition of power. She should be able to explain why what she is teaching is not just a matter of opinion. To return to what I said at the beginning of this post, way too much of what is “taught” in the humanities is just opinion; I work very hard to show the students that what I do is not just opinion, but I’m swimming against a very strong current.
lonecat over 10 years ago
Well, I wouldn’t trust any scientific method of interpreting poetry. (Or comic strips.) There’s a story about a German scholar who didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and he felt that he was missing something in life when everyone else laughed at jokes and he didn’t see why they were funny, so he undertook a massive study of jokes, which he published to great acclaim, but he still didn’t have a sense of humor.
lonecat over 10 years ago
I think your reference to Kahneman is very much to the point. But at some level judgment does come into the picture — I think. For instance, you have to make a judgment about what Kahneman says. Or take different kinds of mathematics — ordinary addition versus modular addition, say. Both work. Which to use? It’s a matter of judgment. Or Euclidean versus non-Euclidean geometry? Again, both work, it’s a matter of judgment which to apply in a given situation.
lonecat over 10 years ago
I certainly know about the good looks bias. That’s the secret to my own success.+And not for a moment am I suggesting that judgment, mine included, is problem free. I’m not sure, however, that standardized testing is problem free, either. Again, I mention my sister, who doesn’t test well, but who performs very well when she’s not feeling that she’s being tested. Someone who knows her would realize that no matter what the tests say she’s pretty smart and knows her stuff.There are other problems, some of which can perhaps be solved in ideal situations, but which in the real world do intrude. For instance, how good are the questions? I certainly have made tests that in hindsight I know included poorly worded questions. Some of the critique of the SATs has noted questions which had alternative correct answers which were disallowed by the ETS graders.But as I’ve tried to say, what really bothers me isn’t the testing — I do believe that tests can have a pedagogical value — but the obsessive ranking, which I think must satisfy some deep cultural need. Some societies do a lot of ranking, some not so much. I think we do more than we should. That’s my judgment.+martens is totally right to reference Kahneman. I loved “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, and it has certainly taught me a lot about these topics. I would recommend it to you, but I bet you already know what he says.+Further on judgment — here are three kinds of judgment that I feel are important. First, a kind of sensory judgment, as in the perception of musical tones. It’s well known that people can get better in their ability to identify intervals and chord progressions, for instance, and I would argue that there’s a personal value in increasing this ability. Even if some electronic gadget can do a perfect acoustical analysis of a piece, that doesn’t replace listening to it yourself and learning to hear it better. Second, judgment in making things. The things I make mostly are written things, but the principle applies probably everywhere. Right now, for instance, I’m working on a new book, and I’m having to make a decision about how much of the prior scholarship I summarize in the introduction. My first version was about fifty pages long, and my judgment is that that’s too much. I think I can do the job in half the space, though I will have to leave out some of the detail. For a previous book I wrote two whole chapters which I later discarded. These decisions are matters of judgment, and anyone who makes things knows that there’s a constant necessity to make these judgements. Part of what we teach graduate students is how to make these judgments. Third, in general, decisions when there is imperfect information. Most of the time we just don’t know everything we might want to know before we make a decision, large or small. A student wrote me yesterday to ask if he could do an Independent Reading Course. He’s a bright student, and he’s actually one of my more interesting students, but he’s proved a little troublesome in the past, because he can’t get work done on time. He needs this course to graduate next spring. Should I take this on? Will it be more trouble than it’s worth? Or another, I’m thinking that I will retire in two years. I don’t have to, so it’s up to me to decide. There are all sorts of considerations, some financial, some personal. The information I have is not enough to settle it, so I will have to make a judgment. It’s not that I trust my judgment — I have lots of evidence that my judgment can be wrong — but at some point I have to make decisions. I believe that judgment can be improved, in all of these situations.