About tests
What are they good for?
Ideal
Have you ever asked yourself “What are tests actually good for”?
First, what should a test be good for? From the idealistic point of view it is a measurement taken by a teacher to determine where the student needs correcting.
However, reality shows otherwise.
Reality
Let’s examine how tests are actually used in the average classroom of secondary education. The flow is basically as follows:
A student studies the material given to him. He takes the test. The evaluated test results in a grade, and the collection of grades accumulated by the student determines his academic future. It determines whether he will have to retake the year or what type of college he can get into. And in the end most students do want to go to college, preferably a prestigious college.
And this is where the system unravels: motivation. Why do the students want to go to college? For the pursuit of knowledge? Some do, but most are motivated by the better paying job that can be obtained with a college degree.
The tests someone takes in their secondary education are therefor critical for someone’s future prospects. Getting good grades is therefor more important than obtaining the actual knowledge the test is supposed to measure.
The students will do what it takes to get higher grades: cram or cheat. If tests were really just a measurement being taken, no student would feel obliged to cheat nor cram.
As I said before: a test should be a measurement taken by a teacher to determine where the student needs correcting. In the current situation it is far from that. Let’s say a student has a hard time grasping calculating forces in physics and he fails the test on that subject. The class will just go on to the next subject which build upon that supposed knowledge. Now the student will have to try and catch up if he ever can.
In the mean time all that is registered in his report is that he failed the test on forces. While no action is taken upon this knowledge. Then what was the purpose of the test if the teacher takes no action upon it?
If he fails the year due to these grades, it is even worse: he wasted a year, is very demotivated and still doesn’t have the knowledge.
Goal
What you want is that a student gets the material at the level he is at. The teacher should regularly assess whether the student grasps the topic so he can give extra attention to the topic or continue to the next topic.
The student should hardly be conscious that he has been assessed, nor what the assessment tells the teacher. He most definitely should not be ‘taking a test’.
Grades should not be given. For the student they have no value: the knowledge is what he should have. For external parties an indication of what knowledge someone possesses is of interest; are grades useful for this? I think not. Even in the current climate, grades say little about the knowledge and skills an applicant has.
Even better, in the current age of AI, the assessment and level adjustment could and should be done almost completely automatically.
Nota Bene
The fact that grades are mostly counter-productive for a student doesn’t mean that they don’t give an indication about the student’s abilities. Of course, a smarter student will in general get better grades. And those with better grades will usually also have retained the information better.
Definitions
Test - A test or quiz is a specific interaction between a student and an examiner at a certain point in time with the purpose of determining the level of knowledge or skill of the student on a subject. The interaction can be written, verbal, physical or otherwise.
Assessment - refers to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students.
Grade - a value indicating the student's knowledge or skill on a given subject, usually based on one or more test results.