Sophie Callcott, a junior at Stanford University, has written a solid essay yanking down one corner of the myth of meritocracy in college admissions: There’s Still One Big Trick for Getting Into an Elite College https://nyti.ms/3y7IWil Yes, looking at, agreeing with, and promoting this essay are all proof of my obvious confirmation bias when it comes […]
Search for: meritocracy
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 […]
Myths of Meritocracy Are Entangled in Myths about Testing
The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin, a foundational text of modern assessment design, the science behind the making of tests, lays out the components of a formal argument that leads to a claim. (And remember the whole reason to have a test is to be able to make some claim about what someone knows […]
Nepotism, Networks, and Nature Outgun Test Scores
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 […]
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 […]
Read Freddie
If this post is shorter today, I swear that it’s not just because two NFL playoff games start shortly. After all, being a New York Jets fan, my season ended sometime in September. It’s because the purpose of this blog and its subset of 31 consecutive January jolts can be served that are at times […]
Just when I thought I was out…
Testing, I can’t quit you As the Tom Hanks character in You’ve Got Mail suggests the Godfather movies provide a plethora of metaphors for the dynamics of our careers. In my case, I welcomed the absence of actual physical ‘hits’ even though corporate board room often did resemble a meeting of the Five Families. The […]
Too Early for Apgar
I was born early. My mother, by then familiar with the routine of births via my four older brothers, insisted the nurse admitting her had made a wrong turn in the corridor at Union Hospital in the Bronx; the labor room was in the other direction. But the nurse replied that there was no need […]
Testing: A Personal History
Testing: A Personal History Our Commonplace Book: A Quotes Collection Contact Us [email protected] RSS Feed A highly idiosyncratic account of life as a series of tests exploring both their influence and infamy as instruments “by which the existence, quality, or genuineness of anything is or may be determined” — as Dr. Johnson described them. This […]