What happens when an adult takes the 10th grade test?

@aidan,

See my reply to Cyclo, Aidan. I'm good at them and I think they're worthless.

@sozobe,

In other words, I'm skeptical of the article's introductory paragraph:

The New York Times wrote:

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

I suspect that future research will append the last sentence as follows: "It actually helps people learn what's likely to be on the test at the expense of what's not, . . ." That would be a problem because nobody knows what a teenager's life will be like once she is a grownup. We know she will have to draw on her education in some way. But the test of life will probe your education in some unexpected way, one that's unlikely to come up on the tests in highschool.

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@aidan,

Quote:

I excel at them too. I think people who excel at them think they mean something and people who suck at them want to believe they don't mean anything.

I'm an excellent test taker. My ability to pass tests was one reason I skipped out of school so much -- I passed all my classes despite really only showing up on test day. Standardized tests are even easier to pass.

I think they don't mean anything at all.

Heck, even Mo passes all the standardized tests and he has some neurological deficits.

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@aidan,

aidan wrote:

I excel at them too. I think people who excel at them think they mean something and people who suck at them want to believe they don't mean anything.
Human nature, innit?

I don't think they (standardized tests) mean anything, other than the fact that certain people are great at taking tests. I have been lucky enough in life to have an excellent (though I wouldn't quite say eidetic) memory, and this comes in really handy when faced with time pressures and problems related to them.

Test-taking is about being able to control your natural impulse to either panic and rush, or get bogged down in details, as it is the actual content of the test itself.

Cycloptichorn

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@boomerang,

Yeah, but you all as parents want to have some measurement of what your school has taught your child.
You all (parents in general) don't tend to look at it as what your child has chosen to learn- you guys look at it as 'What exactly has the school my child attends taught my child during his/her term of attendance?'
I seriously once had a mother tell me that the school hadn't taught her son the months of the year because she discovered her son couldn't recite them to her at the age of ten. I asked her if she had ever had a calender in her house and had she ever talked to her son about his birthday, her birthday, and the major holidays, etc...she still insisted that her son's school hadn't ever taught her son the months of the year...okay...learning is not a passive exercise- it takes some effort on the part of the learner- this seems to escape the notice of the parents of reluctant learners.

Quote:

I don't think anyone says "I'm good with fractions, I think I'll become a carpenter."

Really? Do they not? I know that I said exactly that to myself when, although I was interested in medicine I said to myself, 'I suck at science, I'd never make it through medical school,' or 'I love art, but I can't draw, so I shouldn't attend art school.'
But maybe I'm just different.

School board member, journalist, whatever. I'd like to see the math test that any university graduate could not ascertain any answer to without guessing. That's just absolutely scary to me.

URL: http://able2know.org/reply/post-4818398

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@Lustig Andrei,

Weren't worthless to me - got me into a good university and got me a scholarship to pay for my education, which led to a professional life that I have enjoyed.

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@aidan,

aidan wrote:

Weren't worthless to me - got me into a good university and got me a scholarship to pay for my education, which led to a professional life that I have enjoyed.

Oh, I didn't mean "worthless" in that sense of the word. I meant they're worthless as far as determining anything more than a person's general ability to pass tests. One can make capital with them, I'm sure.

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@engineer,

engineer wrote:

The SAT predicts college freshman performance when almost no other metric does.

Last I heard on the subject, family income was as reliable, if not more so.

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@Lustig Andrei,

Really? So you don't think the ability to reason, use logic and remember show intelligence?
I'd be interested to know how you would ascertain that one was intelligent then.

Would it simply be the ability to create?

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Quote:
I excel at them too. I think people who excel at them think they mean something and people who suck at them want to believe they don't mean anything.

I'm an excellent test taker. My ability to pass tests was one reason I skipped out of school so much -- I passed all my classes despite really only showing up on test day. Standardized tests are even easier to pass.

Bingo. I used to read every book for my college classes in the first two weeks and return them for full price, because I was too poor to afford my books. I would then proceed to skip 'most every class and just show up for tests and exams.

Cycloptichorn

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@aidan,

I get plenty of measurements from my son's school. I see the classroom tests he takes, I see what work is sent home, I attend teacher's conferences, IEP conferences and I am in regular email contact with his teacher.

I see his scores from standardized tests but I don't get to see what questions were asked, what he missed or what he got right. The test provides 0 indication of what the school has taught my child.

I know lots of tradespeople that would never really consider themselves good at math. I know lots of people who are good at math who can't build anything, though some of them can design things to be built.

It reminds me of the old saw "What do you call the person who almost flunked out of med school?"

Doctor.

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@Cycloptichorn,

My dad told me to read the book assigned for the class then find out if the teacher had written a book on the topic and read that. He said I'd never have to worry about passing a class if I did that. He was right!

But I really loved college and took a lot of bizarre and off topic things, it hindered getting a degree but advanced my education in too many ways to mention. I rarely skipped class in college because I was interested in what I was studying.

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@aidan,

aidan wrote:

Really? So you don't think the ability to reason, use logic and remember show intelligence?
I'd be interested to know how you would ascertain that one was intelligent then.

Would it simply be the ability to create?

I never said that. What I said was that I do not believe the stanardized tests actually measure one's ability to reason or use logic. Much of this much-vaunted ability to pass a stadardized test is due to an ability to second-guess the test creators quite accurately and to arrive at correct answers despite a lack of knowledge of the subject matter.

I believe that essay type tests (not T/F or multiple-choice) are far superior in actually showing a measure of a subject's ability to reason as well as to articulate that reasoning.

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@boomerang,

Right, that's good. So you know how your son is doing as compared to the children in that class. The standardized tests are designed to show you how your son is doing as compared to ALL the third, fourth, or fifth graders in the country.
If you're only interested in how he is doing as compared to his next door neighbor - so be it.
But some people want to know how their kids are doing as compared to other kids across the country. And in this day and age, it's become more of a measure of how their SCHOOL is performing. It's become more of a measure of the teacher than it is of the learner.
So don't sweat it. If he fails - it won't be his fault - it'll be his teacher's.

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

My dad told me to read the book assigned for the class then find out if the teacher had written a book on the topic and read that. He said I'd never have to worry about passing a class if I did that. He was right!

But I really loved college and took a lot of bizarre and off topic things, it hindered getting a degree but advanced my education in too many ways to mention. I rarely skipped class in college because I was interested in what I was studying.

I was only interested in SOME of my college classes. Sure, many of them had great information, but nothing I couldn't learn on my own just as easily by reading books. I'm a fast reader.

I skipped class, because at the age of 20-21, I realized that I was a radiant and shining being, and 1000% alive. Moreso than I would ever be again. I didn't want to waste that time sitting in what amounts to a group office, so I didn't. I could have gotten better grades, but so what? I'm extraordinarily happy with my life and I don't regret skipping those classes at all.

I'm sort of in the middle on standardized testing; some is good, transparency of results is better than what we have now, but relying on it to tell you things about kids is asinine.

Standardized tests weren't designed for kids like me, in the 4th grade I tested out at 12th grade level in every single subject but math, on the old Texas' standardized tests that rated kids that way. I can remember getting the results and thinking to myself, is this some sort of ******* joke? They aren't determinative of much of anything regarding what makes people successful in life.

Cycloptichorn

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@aidan,

I'm the last one to blame the teachers and the first one to blame the politicians and the parents for the mess we're in with this testing. I ache for the teachers who are the cannon fodder of this war.

And I don't really care how he compares. Why should I compare him to the kid across the street or the one across the country? How does that change anything for him?

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@Lustig Andrei,

I do believe they are a test of logic. For instance the new functional skills tests (in England anyway) allow a student to use a calculator on the maths test. You might say, 'oh well, everyone should pass then.' But they don't
Because if you don't have any idea that multiplying a 20 times 30 should only result in 600 and not 6000, if you happened to press the wrong button and got a ridiculous answer - you wouldn't have a clue.
Yeah - it does take a certain amount of intelligence, knowledge, and logic to ascertain when you've made a mistake.
And these tests do take a certain amount of intelligence and logic to perform accurately on. Yeah - they do.

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@boomerang,

It might show you what you could be helping him to learn that he doesn't know that other kids his age know.

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The future of testing depends upon how the credibility of the results hold up. The more we hear about outright fraud by the school employees (to make them look good) and teaching the tests rather than the core subjects of education the less we will test. Testing was always about picking some parts of what is being attempted to be transmitted and seeing if the student has gotten the message, which is supposed to tell us that the student has learned all of the subject matter.....this breaks down fast when the test rather than the subject is taught, in these cases the results dont tell us what we assume that they tell us. The perception of which has be taught, the subject or the test, will determine how much value we place on the results.

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@aidan,

But what difference does that make?

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What happens when an adult takes the 10th grade test?

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