Four and a half hours on hold. That was the experience Friday afternoon that led me back to this argument: everything is a test. I had come across the phrase again recently reading the letters of Seamus Heaney. He cited his friend and sometime collaborator and my playwriting model, Brian Friel as the source of […]
Tag: #testing
A Christmas Dog’s Dinner
Yes, sit down (or stand up) for a special holiday canine repast of links about testing and its adjacent domains or what is known as a dog’s dinner this time. And why wouldn’t you be invited, anybody who is interested in measurement is part of a community. At least that seems to be the point […]
Dog’s Breakfast: Collected Links Going to Waste
In writing this entirely sporadic account of Testing: A Personal History, links surface in various streams where I wade: Twitter (could be leaving that ‘hellscape’ soon), LinkedIn, RSS Feeds, Newspapers, even emailed suggestions from faithful fans. Several that I will not likely get around to using in the near future deserve to be seen here […]
Myers-Briggs Antipathy: Maybe It’s Just My Personality Part V
Myers-Briggs Antipathy: Maybe It’s Just My Personality Part IV Myers-Briggs Antipathy: Maybe It’s Just My Personality–Part III Myers-Briggs Antipathy: Maybe It’s Just My Personality–Part II Myers-Briggs Antipathy: Maybe It’s Just My Personality Googling ‘personality change’ reveals many negative connotations for the phrase. “He had a real personality change” isn’t a statement that we associate often with someone […]
Myers-Briggs Antipathy: Maybe It’s Just My Personality Part IV
Part I Part II Part III Part V Imagine the surprise of an obscure septuagenarian blogger in discovering that the New York Times is writing about his latest subject — MBTI — and getting it wrong. See Overlooked No More: Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers, Creators of a Personality Test The ‘getting it wrong’ part […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]