Cheating report confirms teacher’s suspicions
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/05/atlanta.public.schools.scandal/index.html
Shocking! Night follows day! Who could have possibly predicted such a black swan event?
I am dubious about this particular claim:
“Nobody knows yet how to write machine-scorable standardized test questions that are able to measure anything precisely excepting memory,” Brady says. “Memory is a thought process, but it’s a fairly low-level thought process.”
followed by this:
“There’s a whole range of thought processes: making inferences, generating hypotheses, and generalizing and synthesizing and valuing … that every human being engages in every day, and nobody knows how to test them (with standardized tests).”
I had a physics professor who I felt was diabolically clever at designing multiple-guess exams, he would calculate the ‘wrong’ answer (what you would get if you made some dumb assumptions) and put it along with the correct answer (instead of what appears to be the default, some random number). If you didn’t have a clean grasp of the material, you could not answer the exam correctly at all. What is your take? Can standardized multiple-guess exams be made to test anything besides memorization skills?
