Test Optional
I note an article in the New Yawk Times [Link] describing how colleges are increasingly making the standardized tests optional. At one time, every college required one of the two standardized college admission tests.
When I was a student, standardized tests of some sort were associated with rites of passage. When I was a high shul junior I had to go take both of the college admission tests. In those days people did not study or even cram for these tests like they do today. They just went and took them. At least that is the way I recall the activity.
Then when I was finishing my undergraduate work, I went and took the Graduate Record Exam, and to humor my mother, the Medical College Admission Test. Again, the format was the same: large room; number two pencils; multiple choice questions whose primary challenge was figuring out how stupidly one was suppose to consider them. The latter was a new consideration that had crept in somewhere during the college experience.
My next testing experiences, with qualifying exams in graduate shul were entirely different. These tests were not standardized except in the sense that they covered areas of the discipline, but the question of how simple to consider the problem was even more central.
This points up the problems with standardized tests. The primary problem is that it leads to standardized learning, which in turn results in students who are amply trained but woefully uneducated. And the results of the testing increasingly demonstrate nothing more than one knows the answers to the questions on the tests. Because of the problem with figuring out how simple to treat the question, those who are educated tend to make as bad or worse grades on the tests than those who have learned little.
So I am not particularly upset that colleges are abandoning these tests. They do not seem to have very much to do with who is smart but with who is crammed.
