Not On The Test

Unwelcome and controversial are among the many descriptors for standardized tests. For those in school, these tests can be very high stakes, linking important consequences to the results - promotion, graduation, scholarship money, etc.

Tests are used to help make decisions. Results can help individuals choose a good school, decide whether or not to move a child to the next grade, determine if a school is helping students learn all they can. For these and other reasons, testing and its results remain major education issues, despite their prevalence to spark more questions and controversy than any other topic in education.

Can tests really tell us about what students actually know? There are limits to what we can derive from test scores. Are they a fair, straight-forward measure of education, or do we overestimate what tests can tell us?

By the modern miracle of technology, this is posting just as I am being handed a test of my academic aptitude and understanding on various aspects of Quality Management. Will it be a reliable measure of my overall intelligence? Hard to know for sure, at least until the test results come back in three weeks.

It has been quite some time since I have felt that dread caused by my awareness that my future is not determined but must be freely chosen. The big question is: will I choose correctly?