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.

Big Test

Remember when the term Big Oil was coined? It was actually popularized in print beginning in the 1960s. It encompasses the world’s five or six largest publicly owned oil and gas companies: BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, etc. The term has become a pejorative, linking the excesses and blunders of the oil giants to the negative effects they have had, from political manipulation to environmental damage. When people think Big Oil, they think of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 or the Deep Horizon (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Effects of both are still being felt.

Now we have Big Test. I use this term in the same manner as Big Oil, to describe a conglomerate of companies that, following the pattern of Big Oil, are in cahoots with politicians and policy makers to shape a sphere of influence to their own ends, with little regard to who gets hurt along the way. Big Test is doing the same “environmental” damage in schools as Big Oil did along the shores of Alaska and the Gulf Coast. People and institutions are being negatively affected as testing companies are raking in unprecedented profits. Unlike Big Oil, however, Big Test is not yet being held accountable for the damage they are doing.

Schools are suffering from a massive “test spill.” Students are being enslaved—and I use that term intentionally—by seemingly unrelenting tests that deprive students of real learning time and rob schools of funds they need that are, instead, now diverted into the deep corporate pockets of Big Test. The message from the disasters promulgated by Big Oil should offer cautionary tales for citizens, parents, and concerned educators. Big Test needs to be called to account—before further damage is done to children, schools, and the very future of our democracy.

(As a side note: I use the term Big Test in a different manner from Nicholas Lemann, who wrote The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy, which is about the SAT. Lemann’s book, written more than a decade ago, is worth another look, however, in light of recent maneuverings by the College Board. Readers may be interested in a recent New York Times article, “The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul,” in the Sunday, March 6, 2014, issue. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html?_r=0)