Liberty and Justice for All!

I was bored so I decided to see what new garbage Jeff Sadowhad to say recently. I was not disappointed in the least. It seems that Mr. Sadow believes that standardized tests keeps the success of a student “honest”. His analysis could not have been more flawed.

He believes that current student grades are flawed because the teachers inflate them so they don’t have to hear it from the parents when the kid doesn’t get a TOPS scholarship. Sadow either forgets (or is ignorant of) the fact that with standardized tests and teacher performance tied to success levels on those tests, that teachers will often narrow their focus to the material tested for and not on the broad areas that should be learned in school.

 But one of Sadow’s gems has to be this statement:

Of course, there’s also the oldest fall-back excuse in the book that somebody “doesn’t test well.” Never mind that in the larger real work world tests of one kind or another are always being sprung on you so if you aren’t ready for them in school you won’t go far out of it, but in the smaller academic world my experience has been the students who make this claim, that aspect aside, almost always turn out to be fairly weak students.

I hardly think anyone should trust Sadow’s experience. One of the brightest students in my high school, and the valedictorian of my class, scored less than a 1000 on the SAT. Everyone else in the top 10% of the class scored at least a 1200. If you compared us by our SAT scores alone you would assume that this one student was not as good when in fact he was the best student out of the entire group. He was just not good at taking standardized tests. So this is one major flaw in Mr. Sadow’s logic. He uses his own anecdotal “evidence” instead of backing his claims up with scientific proof of his claims.

And there is also the link that Mr. Sadow seems to try and connect between success in standardized tests vs success in real world work tests that one may face. This is just absurd. No real world test that I have faced is analogous with any standardized test I have ever taken.

Mr. Sadow encourages the continued use of Graduate Exit Exams and other forms of standardized tests because he feels it keeps the system honest. He supports their use to prohibit individual advancement. But when you have students who actually test poorly at these kinds of test who are otherwise brilliant students, it makes absolutely no sense to hold them back. And when you have the case when teachers will teach to the test, it seems to me that you hold everyone back since you are limiting their exposure to knowledge when you restrict class material to items only on the test.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under Jeff Sadow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.