Test Blindness

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education headline read “Hampshire College Will Go ‘Test Blind’” (June 18, 2014). While many colleges are “test optional,” meaning that students may or may not submit SAT or ACT scores and institutions may or may not consider those scores in making admission decisions, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has become a standout by simply refusing even to consider such test scores. Officials of the college based the decision on research that indicated the scores, in the words of the article, “did not help identify applicants who were most likely to thrive on the campus.”

This research (unidentified in the article) reiterates other longstanding research findings that have concluded, literally over decades, that SAT scores are less reliable predictors of student success in college than the students’ high school grades—in other word, high school teachers’ face-to-face evaluations of their students.

Tests in general, whether the mass standardized variety now dominating public schooling, predictive tests such as the SAT, or garden variety teacher-made classroom quizzes, are by their nature mere snapshots. They are never fully fleshed, robust portraits of the test-takers. Well-trained, observant teachers may take the results of various tests into account but there is far more information than mere test results flowing into their judgments regarding the students they come to know firsthand—up close and personal, as a TV commentator might say. Test scores are no substitute for actual day-to-day interactions over time between teachers and students.

Today’s public schools are suffering from another type of “test blindness,” the limited vision of student learning ranging from potential to performance caused by an over-reliance on mass standardized tests to determine what should be taught, how well students are learning, and how well teachers are teaching—three things that testing cannot tell us except in very narrow, limited, snapshot kinds of ways.

A better course would be to take a leaf from Hampshire’s notebook and simply stop using tests. Mass testing is costing citizens millions of dollars, it’s costing students and teachers many hours of wasted learning time, and it’s enriching testing corporations way out of proportion to their tests’ value to education. Moreover, and most significantly, mass standardized testing is blinding schools and society to the realities of students’ needs, potential, and real performance.