Tag: testing

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 […]

The ‘people should judge people, not tests’ take ignores our biases

Okay. People. Let’s check out their ability to render valid and reliable judgments. Those who suggest that tests need to go away usually suggest that people can do the judging — teachers, HR generalists or recruiting specialists, admissions counselors. It is rare in my experience to have either a suggestion of the improvements or replacements […]