You cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Or is it possible that the saying really should be that venerable canines like your correspondent cannot unlearn their old tricks? This conundrum confronts me almost daily as my neural tentacles quiver at the sight of some factoid or phrase they were trained to retrieve — and […]
Tag: testing
Do Tests Cause Cheating?
Survey: 37% of Students Say Their Schools Didn’t Try to Stop Cheating This publication, The Cheat Sheet, offers lots of interesting tales of cheating. They seem to be UK based as evidenced by stories like this one: Cheating Cases Almost Double at Oxford Oh, it only increased from 35 to 77 cases, but still… Oxford!!! And […]
The Reaction Was Swift
“The reaction was swift” Now there’s a cliche. We are three times more likely to come across that phrase in newspapers than to read ‘the reaction was slow’. and as George Orwell advised in his essay Politics and the English Language over seventy-five years ago, “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech […]
NO Tests But For Learning: The Provocation Proceeds
The proceedings of this blog began back in September with an invocation of the metaphor of exorcism. Some might have found that strange, but the comparison seemed apt to this old altar boy because impressions and ideas, objections and observations, frustrations and fancying associated with the world of testing do afflict me like distracting spirits. […]
NO tests but for learning
NO exams but for education When I set out to craft thirty-one straight posts on the blog Testing: A Personal History, my outline of topics designed to effect the exorcism of my educational measurement experiences seemed to fit within that January timeframe. I was wrong. Again. This erroneous estimation is of a piece with 28 […]
Are Problems With Tests Really Problems With Authority?
An unexpected telephone conversation this morning, on the 27th day of for this blog, exposed me to a loved one who trusts what Joe Rogan and his guests say about the pandemic. In other words, that person believes that those voices speak with authority. To do so requires a corresponding belief that the so-called official […]
The Baseball Hall Of Fame Is A Meritocracy; Our Society Is A Ganglion Of Oligarchies
Being a baseball fan my whole life, the conversation about yesterday’s most recent Hall of Fame (HOF) induction interested me because I think that institution for whatever its other faults acted in accordance with its meritocratic nature. Critics of yesterday’s election results missing that point also mistake how arguments for admission to a meritocracy should proceed.. To say that […]
MailBox Monday #3: Tests, Time, Teachers, and Inertia
It is a beautiful but cold Monday morning here in Princeton New Jersey. Well, just barely morning as I am writing this a shade before noon. But my ebullience arises in part from finally shedding my obsession (as noted in y’day’s post) with reading critiques of the SAT. Earlier today, I gleefully informed the Google […]
Dog’s Breakfast or What My Algorithm Hath Wrought
According to Merriam-Webster, a Dog’s Breakfast is defined as “chiefly British. : a confused mess or mixture.” I don’t know about the British part because we certainly heard the phrase in our exclusively Irish household where I knew that it meant something that was thrown together. (The first use of the term cited by OED is […]
Cognitive Gadgets Are Not Lego Toys
Let’s review the bidding here as we enter the bell lap in. our January Jolts with more than 2/3 of of the thirty-one pledged posts now up. The posts so far have included: An avowal that everyone has a personal history of testing, which means we all have experienced tests. Some wondering why our takes […]