Part I Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V In our play, The Oracle, which ran off Broadway at Theater For the New City this past May, Joe Queenan and I had one character demolish her colleague in an argument thusly: “…But you’re not for me. Not my type. Type! Did you […]
Author: testingapersonalhistory
Unmasking The Myth of Meritocracy: Sophie Callcott’s Excellent Essay
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 […]
Colleges Need To Pass A Test Too
The wrought-iron gate pictured above is called FitzRandolph Gate and stands at the main entrance to Princeton University. Its presence here on a TAPH post about the obligation of colleges is not just because I live in Princeton and bike through that area regularly, but because of a significance the gate acquired over 50 years […]
Is there another debt to deal with? Should colleges be put to the test?
The Internet is atwitter and abuzz and in some cases aghast at the decision by President Biden to cancel student loan debt. My brother Gene Bouie squarely raised the unsaid elements of at least some of that resistance in writing to a swath of engaging people this morning about the cancelling of student debt by […]
Does High IQ = High Intelligence?
Who doesn’t love an article about Mensa, the high IQ organization, that covers polyamory, Settlers of Catan, and this marvelously nerdy joke? Schrödinger is driving on the highway and he’s speeding, and a cop stops him and searches his car, and says, ‘Did you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?’ He says, […]
No Tests But For Learning Starts With Getting The Right Tools
Getting to NTFBL (No Tests But For Learning) will take time and enormous energy to flip the current status quo overwhelmingly favoring summative assessment. But we can start with formative assessment’s greater adoption by classroom teachers. Formative assessment seeks “to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching […]
If the ‘learner is at the center’ then shouldn’t all tests already be for learning?
Former ETS colleague Kate MIllet published an intriguing article recently here that pointed me towards the Big Education report where I read this sentence: “When the learner is at the centre, it is their strengths and needs, passions and interests that become the focus for transformation, wherever that learner comes from and whatever system they […]
Games as Tests: Where Does That Movement Stand?
Educators have advocated weaving testing and learning into games for years. Where does that initiative stand now? The question occurred to me in reading Ethan Mollick writes highly engaging posts about a variety of subjects often intersecting with the world of education. In this recent post, he wrote, “Hire good gamers! Video game performance can […]
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 […]
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 […]