Published: March 05, 2008 12:02 am            

John Cannon: Testing the testing system: 3/5/08

The current debate in the Kentucky General Assembly about statewide student tests, required under the Kentucky Education Reform Act, reminds me of two tests I took in college. While almost 40 years have passed since I took those tests, I remember them like they were yesterday and I think they are relevant to the current debate about testing in Kentucky.

One of the tests I wrote about in the early 1990s soon after KERA introduced a new form of testing in Kentucky. It was my final for a graduate level class in mass media at Ohio University.

The textbook covered a larger number of studies and surveys on how people are influenced by television, movies, newspapers, magazines, advertising, etc. In preparing for the final, I memorized — or at least attempted to — what each of those studies or surveys told us about how we are influenced by what we see, hear, watch and read.

However, to my utter shock, the final contained only one question: “From your readings, tell us why many people do not believe that man has walked on the moon.”

What? This was 1970, and Neil Armstrong had only recently become the first man to walk on the moon. However, we had never discussed the moon landing in that class. What in the world did this question have to do with this class?

For maybe 10 or 15 minutes, I shook without writing a word. However, as I began to calm down, I began to think about the studies that told us why some people think the way they do. I remembered a study that found a small percentage of Americans who didn’t believe anything they saw on television. They thought everything on the tube was staged.

I never picked up my copy of the graded test from the professor, but I must have given him the answer he wanted because I “aced” the class.

In hindsight, that was an excellent test. The professor didn’t want us to just be able to tell him what a particular study or survey found. Instead, he wanted us to be able to put that knowledge to use in a practical way. Knowledge is meaningless unless you are able to make it relevant by applying it to real life situations.

The second test was the Graduate Record Examination, taken while I was a senior at Morehead State University. Just like a high school student’s scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) plays a major role in which colleges accept that student’s application for admission, the GRE plays a similar role for college seniors wanting to attend graduate school.

A good score on the GRE was critical for me. In order for me to attend graduate school, I needed either a scholarship or a graduate assistantship. My score on the GRE would determine whether I was worthy of such financial assistance.

However, the GRE was like an advanced SAT, and I had done poorly on the SAT as a high school senior. I feared I was doomed.

Like the SAT, the GRE tests only one’s verbal and math skills. I wasn’t too worried about the verbal portion of the test because that’s my strength. However, I disliked math so much that I had taken extra science courses at Morehead State just to avoid taking a math course. Thus, here I was being tested on my math skills when the last math course I had taken was Algebra II as a junior in high school.

The only thing that saved me was that the GRE asked only multiple choice questions. Unable to do most of the math problems on the test, I decided to “prove” the answers. I selected one of the two middle answers and worked backwards. I did that all the way through the test.

I’m not saying that I got a great score on the math portion of the GRE, but I did score above average on a math test taken only by college seniors. And combined with my verbal score, my overall GRE score was high enough to earn me an assistantship at Ohio University.

But that math score in no way measured my ability in math — or lack thereof. Instead, it measured my skill in taking the test. If the test had required open-ended answers, I would have failed miserably.

The Kentucky Senate wants to replace CATS with the ACT — another multiple choice test — and with other standardized tests that I believe do no better job of measuring what a student really knows than the math portion on my GRE. On the other hand, the one-question test on the mass media test forced me to apply what I knew. Despite all its flaws — and I hear about those from the public schoolteacher who is my wife — CATS is better than multiple choice tests.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2649.

        

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