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(no subject)
I'm writing up a speach for finals about the problems and detramental effects of standardised testing.
What I'd like from all of you: Gimme a quote or paragraph summing up your experance with any standarized testing, be it the SATs or similar, or any sort test that your teacher did not make up that you were required to take. How long you studied/preped if you did, if you felt it ment anything, if you felt it helped or hurt your college changes, how many times you took it or how rediculous you felt it was and if you felt it didn't assess you very well, ect.
Ranting is fine too, just keep it clean enough to be repeated in a college classroom.
What I'd like from all of you: Gimme a quote or paragraph summing up your experance with any standarized testing, be it the SATs or similar, or any sort test that your teacher did not make up that you were required to take. How long you studied/preped if you did, if you felt it ment anything, if you felt it helped or hurt your college changes, how many times you took it or how rediculous you felt it was and if you felt it didn't assess you very well, ect.
Ranting is fine too, just keep it clean enough to be repeated in a college classroom.
no subject
The one thing I hated was in proficency test years, especally eighth grade. We had to do well, so all we did all year was learn what would be on the test. It was incredibly boring. My fear is, with NCLB testing every year, school will be completely boring for the kids. Learning should be fun, not spoon-fed stuff that we have to get through and everyone has to learn.
The worst thing is, often it is the gifted childern who get left behind. Between the funding cuts and increased focus on tests, it will be easy for them to get bored. If the school doesn;t have the resources to help them do as well as they can, they can easily become underachivers. A few weeks ago, we were talking about self esteem programs and such in my Honors Social Psych class, and our own preformance in high school came up. Back then, most of us weren't honors students. We did what we needed to do to pass, but didn't really bother with excelling. Even though we're all intelligent, we got so bored with public education that we stopped playing their games.
If no child is left behind, no child is allowed to go forward, either.
no subject
And the worst of it was that people asked why. In Ontario, we have standardized testing that doesn't correlate with the curriculum of learning. Literacy is NOT emphasized at any school level. Sure, children learn to read words, but they do not learn to understand what a piece of literature is saying, or how to take ideas from that piece of literature.
Now I am literate; I read and analyze books for fun. I got a 97 in university-prep English classes. My lowest mark in an English class was 90%. I find English and literature easy stuff. But in those two weeks before we had to write that literacy test, we took two weeks out of EVERY SUBJECT to prepare people for this literacy test. And I wonder - how can you be in the university-prep courses and doing well if you're not literate? I'm not a math student, so we neglected math for two weeks, and I was, well, pissed.
My main beef with my province's standardized tests are that they are unnecessary. If literacy was informally tested all throughout a child's school year, we could not have to take all this time out to make sure the kids are ready. And besides, a literacy test is not meant to have extensive preparation time. It is the sort of test that you just go in and write.
Yet here we were, losing Chem, Math, and Physics class time so we could learn how to read again.
I agree with the prior statement; that if no child is left behind, no child can go forward. It's true, even up here in Ontario. The focus is really on getting the kids who are barely passing to graduate, or to do well on the assessments (that's what they call the standardized tests up here). These assessments are written not to show the intelligence of children, but are made easy so as to give the illusion that the less-ambitious kids are doing fabulously as well. There is nothing in these assessments that gives a more ambitious child pride when they say that they passed the tests. There are even are no special classes in the public or separate boards for children who are smarter and want to go to university for hard science or engineering. Maybe it was due to that lack of attention, but my desire for learning almost ground to a halt halfway through my last year of high school. We spent too much time on the small, easy concepts, and rushed through the harder concepts that turned out to be the basis of our later university learning. Luckily it didn't, but the lack of attention I was shown in my final years (because the focus was on making sure the less-academic students who put forth no effort passed) resulted in me going from an A+ level student in high school to a B- student in university.
I do hope that made sense for you, Fran =)
no subject
They were pretty easy. I tended to take naps through the boring parts. (English sections especially, because I got done with them so damn quickly.)
I understand why in the current educational system people think they are necessary, but honestly, that's a load of bullcrap. Schooling should be about learning, not about getting prepared for a standardized test.
no subject
They give you the rubric freely, the college board, and it says things like "Has included an additional document," which basically means you have to say "I would like to see a chart of how many n were brought in because this would better illustrated x". Last I checked, this was not instinctive essay-writing. This was also not demonstrative of your knowledge of history. Anybody with an imagination and who spends a few minutes before the test memorizing the seven or so bullets could do well on those essays.
Then again, that's what saved my history-challenged self.