- Oct 2023
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Barzun, Jacques. “Opinion | Multiple Choice Flunks Out.” The New York Times, October 11, 1988, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/11/opinion/multiple-choice-flunks-out.html.
Archived copy at https://web.archive.org/web/20231022192353/https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/11/opinion/multiple-choice-flunks-out.html. Internet Archive.
Barzun takes standardized multiple-choice tests to task.
A version of this article appears in Barzun's book: Barzun, Jacques. Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. University of Chicago Press, 1991. http://archive.org/details/begin-here-the-forgotten-conditions-of-teaching-and-learning.
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He pointed out that these questions penalize the more imaginative and favor those who are content to collect facts. Therefore, multiple-choice test statistics, in all their uses, are misleading.
He = Banesh Hoffman
This is tangentially similar to Malcolm Gladwell's claim that standardized testing for law school privileges certain types of thinkers over others, something which creates thinkers who are good at quick things with respect to time pressures rather than slower and more deliberate thinkers who are needed at higher level functions like the Supreme Court.
See: The Tortoise and the Hare, S4 E2 of Revisionist History https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-tortoise-and-the-hare
testing imagination versus fact memorization/simple recall compared with thinking quickly under pressure or slowly with time and increased ability to reason
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- Jan 2017
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www.huffingtonpost.com www.huffingtonpost.com
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Sara Holbrook had two of her poems used on the Texas state assessment tests. She verifies what I thought as a student. The questions are ridiculous. The test makers seem to think that their interpretation of a work is the only interpretation, and that they can read the author's mind and know their intent.
"Texas paid Pearson $500 million bucks to administer the tests". Is that right? Was that for just one year? What else could we do with $500 million?
She mentions a study showing that the results of another standardized test could be predicted pretty well using just three data points about families in the community: the percentage with income over $200K; the percentage in poverty; the percentage with bachelor's degrees. So the standardized test tells you nothing that you can't guess by looking at local incomes and education levels.
What a scam.
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