Oh, wait ... despite all the articles I've read asserting that over the last 40 years, that isn't actually happening. Instead, the test business is booming. For example, the number of students taking the ACT (the Iowa-based college admissions exam has gone up 128% since 1986).
More and more high school students are taking both the ACT and the SAT.
Because you can't test prep enough.
Because you can't test prep enough.
In general, we live in a world where increasingly more people behave like devout readers of iSteve, while everybody swears they don't believe in what they are doing.
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8 comments:
Testing?? I thought you mean TEXTING!
From the article:
"Speed is more of an issue on the ACT, she said, with many students finding that they do not have enough time to work through all the questions."
True. I didn't finish the science section. I was shocked I scored at the 92nd percentile (I thought I'd have to re-take the test). So I ended up applying to better schools than I orginally planned to apply to (my gpa after jr year was 3.125). The high score didn't help.
Very informative/instructive book.
http://www.montana.edu/wwwsfp/docs/facultypages/monaco.html
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sixties-1960-1969-Paul-Monaco/dp/0520238044
"The Sixties, 1960-1969", in The History of American Cinema Series, University of California Press, paperback, May, 2003
For a similar inconsistency, see greenhouse gases/energy use
Steve,
A big reason why the number of students taking the ACT has gone up so much in recent decades is that several states require that all public high school students take the ACT. Some of them require the standalone ACT; others incorporate the ACT into their statewide accountability exams.
Currently, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky (my home state), Michigan, and Tennessee require the ACT. (Colorado and Illinois have required it since 2001.) Wyoming requires students to take either the ACT or ACT WorkKeys, the latter of which is a more job skills-focused assessment. I know that North Carolina and Ohio have considered requiring the ACT, but I haven't seen anything indicating that they've done so.
Booming! Indeed. The ramifications of testing are so large that an element of the whole show that'd be headline worthy in
topic fields like crop rotation,
high-tech patents for "chastity belts", or new techniques in painting highway lane markers--is
an element totally obscured. I refer to the lush profits of the commerical giants ( Pearson,leading the pack with it absorption of what was formerly called "The Psychological Corporation" ) Lest this topic manage to attract "flies" the pink ones can stay away because the culprit here is not free enterprise but the lack of free enterprise and the peculiar monopolgy circumstance that has always characterized the big players--The Psychologial Corporation being perhaps the leader of the pack with a profit margin described by insiders as "osbscne" and "the envy of any cocaine cartel". How competition could in infiltrated into this circumstance is not clear.
When you hear about testing going out of style, it is in reference to the No Child Left Behind era of Bush/Obama policy and Bill Gates philanthropy that wanted to drive all K-12 policy and staffing decisions based on statistical inference from standardized student test data. I thought this was brilliant back in ~2001. But these ideas really didn't work in practice. Even the super test-data advocates are admitting it didn't work.
Brilliant summary: The schism
between (a) what people inwardly believe and guide their responses toward and (b) what they overtly profess is to a point that'd be considered hospital loony if it happened to a person. But since it's happened to "our" society, it is considered PROGRESS: Macro-psychotic MSM consensus!
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