Different tests

What is a test supposed to do, anyway?

The venerable Scholastic Aptitude Test, something we all took in our youth and which retains a major influence in college-admissions circles, has changed.  It will no longer take the form of a pencil-and-paper event done at a desk, but be completed at a computer.  The format has also changed in detail.  Our tutoring consultant has been dealing with test and its changes.

From the first, he disliked standardized tests and especially targeted preparations for them.  A long series of multiple-choice questions is at best a crude measure of anything.  As one of his colleagues said, “Life is not a multiple-choice test.  It is an essay test with trick questions, and someone has lost the answer key.”  But he has been forced by circumstance to teach strategies for particular types of problems, strategies useless outside of this specialized environment.  He has consoled himself that this sort of thing allows his students to reach places where they can employ their real knowledge and imagination.

And tests have different purposes.  A unit test in a class, High School or college, is intended to show whether the student has in fact learned the material to be taught.  It could be completely successful if all students scored 100% (assuming each learned everything; though one could say, in that case, the class should have been more ambitious).  An SAT with all students scoring 100% would be worthless, since its purpose is to differentiate among them.  An SAT with half the students missing half the questions would go some way towards success.

Consider, also, something we don’t remember from our school days but which our tutor sees often: the test-correction and retest cycle.  Students take a test in class.  They get it back with errors marked.  Each then fills in a form in which they identify what mistake they made and correct it, giving the right answer; this done, they are allowed to take a retest, which allows some raise of the original grade.  In this way the test becomes part of the learning process.  In principle, it could be very useful and effective.  In practice, of course, there is a great deal of filling-in of forms and copying instead of learning.  Such things are inevitable when dealing with actual people.

So there are at least three purposes for a test, even before we get to the vital question: what is it supposed to measure?  A question may be about, say, a quadratic equation, but inevitably other things will affect the answer.  The student’s concentration and alertness (amount of sleep the night before, breakfast), confusion about the previous question, and pressure of time are obvious external things.  The format and wording of the question can be confusing, intentionally or not.  One of our tutor’s students missed a mathematics question because he did not know how much a dozen was.

Taking a test can be hard.  But writing a test that accomplishes its purpose can be harder.