Fight Fire with No. 2 Pencils

I just paid $150 to the Educational Testing Service (ETS) for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). When I was a high school junior, I gave them money for the SAT; in college it was the PRAXIS, so I could get my teaching license. This is a huge profit industry. Yet colleges say they give less and less importance to SAT and ACT scores. And most educators and SAT-prep course instruction will say that standardized test taking skills are just as important as the content knowledge.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on the case of the New Haven firefighters has gotten press mostly because of race issues and Judge Sotomayor. But it also raises questions on the use of standardized tests to evaluate current and potential employees. As an educator, it reminds me of the debate and frustration over standardized testing to not only evaluate a student’s knowledge, but also the school’s performance (see: No Child Left Behind). Both cases – the firefighters’ and students’ exams – involve money: the results determine the employees’ salaries and the school’s federal funding. That puts a lot of faith in standardized testing as an accurate measure of skill level and knowledge.

Should these exams carry so much weight? If not, what alternatives does one have when trying to give a fair evaluation that gets universal recognition? Surely licensing boards and college admissions need a standard measure to judge candidates by. And it’s not just in the USA. In France, all high school seniors spend their final days of school taking the BAC, the scores of which then determine what universities and programs the student can enter. The main difference between the SAT and BAC, however, is that the BAC isn’t a multiple choice, scantron test. No bubble filling. All work must be shown, all responses written out. So is it the design of the exam that needs attention, or simply the idea of standardized exams?