10 Reasons Why Standardized Tests Are Not So Standard

So after a minor kerfuffle over the necessity of taking our annual standardized tests--

     Tian: Tell me why we have to take these again?
     Me: Because next year you have to jump back into the box.
     Tian: So.
     Me: The Man would like you to have some proof that you haven't spent the year sitting in front of the TV.
     Tian: But they don't show anything important about who I am. These tests are dumb.
     Me: If you don't take these tests, I will never feed you again.
     Tian: Okay fine. If that's what I have to do to be fed...

--the annual testing rigamarole has begun. This year, some of us were motivated to jam through the tests and just get them done.

Yes, he wins the highly motivated tester
of the spring award. Yes, I was surprised, too. 

Others of us, however, were not so motivated because this year's tests were hard. This someone who will remain nameless throughout this blog post (I am feeling generous with my doofus children today since we are nearly done with school) made me shoot back to my days at the School for International Training, and straight into my Testing and Evaluation Course which, at the time, I just did not get. Okay, so I got the Testing part, because what teacher has never given a test? And I got the Evaluation part, because that is just like testing, right? But all of the other stuff that went with this course? Most of it, frankly, was lost on me, so much so that I cannot recall much of the course content at all. However, two things have stuck with me:

1.) The prof told a story on the first day about a seahorse and its aimless wandering around the Pacific Ocean. The story ended with the seahorse never getting anywhere because he did not know where he was going. The moral of this story is that seahorses do not know how to read maps.

2.) There is no such thing as a national test, or even a state test, that is standardized.

You can perhaps see why this second part threw me for a loop because of course there are standardized tests! Scads of them! And they all have nifty acronyms! The SAT, the ACT, the GRE, the GED, the CAT, the list could go on ad nauseam.

So here is how THE test (I won't say which test we used, but I will say it was one of the biggies) missed the mark on assessing Unnamed Child this year because her reality is not the same reality of the group against she is being normed.

Really, it was fascinating.

1. Climate Conflicts 
When this is your daily reality

 

and then you are asked a question about dew in the morning, you think this at 7 a.m.:

2. Architectural Conflicts

When this is where the leader of your current country lives, and all important buildings are flat and sort of simplistic

and then you are asked to identify where the most important decisions are made in the USA, you are going to choose this place, 

which is also flat and sort of simplistic, saying as you do so, "This looks like a place the Sultan would make a good decision in" as you bubble in choice C.

3. Sporting Conflicts

When you play rugby in your spare time and hang with a million other little kids who play rugby or soccer, the words "baseball pennant" mean absolutely nothing to you, and when you are asked to identify the picture with the baseball pennant in the middle, you are left wondering both "What's baseball?" and "Are you talking about a pen?". Sad but true.

4. Signage Conflicts 

Let's say you are accustomed to seeing this sign

Let's also suppose that you live in a country where signs and signals are more or less optional. When you are asked, "Which sign means that you should continue to drive at a set speed?", which one will you choose? 

Yes, this one:

Your rationale will be that there is a similar one here that no one ever stops for. And you will also rationalize this sign, saying that you sure don't know what "Yield" means since you have never seen that word before, but it sounds like "Yes" and that means to keep going.

I am not making this up.

5. Dietary Conflicts

When you have half of your childhood in a place where corn comes pre-scraped from the cob, in neat little cups, where it has been seasoned with butter and salt and sprinkled with chili, talk of a corn doll only serves to confuse. "Do you mean it is a doll made from corn? Like yellow corn? Like with chili? What?!?" The rest of the question was lost on Unnamed Child since the thought of making a doll out of corn kernels was pretty incomprehensible. I am still trying to wrap my head around what she must have been thinking.

6. A Phone Book? Is That Like a Reading Book? But For Phones?

Enough said.

7. Educational Conflicts

    This is similar to the school that appeared in the test booklet. 

Unnamed Child thought it was a villa and so she was completely flabbergasted, missing the rest of the test question. I guess to the untrained eye it looks like an apartment building. I don't know, I guess it is hard to believe that schools look like that when you are used to seeing this in the private schools that we regularly frequent here:

British School Muscat

Royal Flight Muscat

8. Clothing Conflicts

If the coldest the weather gets for you is a summer day in Europe, then this kind of coat is going to throw you for a loop:

And why did Unnamed Child not choose this as an answer for, "Fill in the circle under the item you would wear if you forgot your hat on a winter's day"? Because, as she said, "Is that a real coat? I have never seen one like that. And winter isn't even cold. Duh."

9. Equatorial Conflict

"Fill in the circle under the number that tells how many hours of sunlight are in a day in the summer in the United States." She was completely floored by this question as here it is 12 hours of sunlight in a day almost all year round. So I totally unstandardized the test and said, "Look, think of Europe in the summer. How long are the days when we go to Germany? Or England?" That fixed it. 

Don't tell the testing service.

10. "What?!? You can have a license plate with your name on it?!?! What the..."

The information that followed, "Suppose you see a license plate with the name 'Susan' on it..." went unheard and unnoticed.

Okay, so I can already hear my mother trying to puzzle this one out. How can she not know these things? She spends almost three months out of every year in the USA! The best I can do is say that, when kids are young, what is here and now is what is real and what dominates their perception of the world. What was nine months ago is so, well, nine months ago. 

Yes, sometimes standardized testing is a necessary evil. But how much validity does it hold? Culture is measured just as much as information acquired. I hope next year's school administration is kind and understanding. 

And I hope they don't laugh too much at Unnamed Child for not knowing her behind from her elbow.  Thank goodness there was nothing about that on the test.