The Problem with Those ******* Tests

I had an interesting box lunch at a state-wide teachers’ conference yesterday; English teachers of high school students on one side of the room and of students entering college on the other. On each side of the room, teachers were divided into small groups and each group composed a list of four or five things their students needed to know in order to succeed in their respective courses. Then each group joined with a group from the other side of the room, and compared notes, and finally there was a whole-group sharing of results

The results were both illuminating and disturbing. The high school teachers’ responses focused on specific skills and information apparently required to prepare for standardized testing; identifying genres, terms, vocabulary, even test-taking skills. The college teachers did not answer this question in terms of specific knowledge at all. In the final discussion, it became clear that our side of the room we are actually quite flexible about what, specifically, we are prepared to teach; if they don’t know the difference between an argumentative essay and a cause-and-effect essay, we are ready with numerous examples. At the same time, we expect resourcefulness and initiative from our students that the high school teachers do not; we want them to go look up things they don't understand and to ask us if they are still confused. Our responses to the question of student success had largely to do with what might be described as student identity: taking responsibility for their own learning, asking for clarification, knowing how to find and evaluate information, willingness to examine and evaluate conflicting information and points of view, and (curiously not mentioned by the high school teachers) understanding that they need to come to class, come on time and do all the assignments, and that not doing those things throughout the semester leads inevitably to a low grade.

Responses from these two groups of teachers were apples and oranges. High school teachers are forced, because of the high stakes of the standardized tests, to focus on knowledge specifics. Success in college depends less on what, exactly, students already know than on how willing and able they are to find out. Whatever it is those tests measure, it isn’t college readiness.

Perhaps a better test of college readiness might be a sort of individualized information scavenger hunt. Each student gets his or her own randomly selected list of questions, and an hour or so in a library to find the answers.