Un-believable. Fortunately my namesake (no relation) is possessed at least of some common sense.
Can you imagine it?
“How did you do in the exams?”
“Woohoo! I had a deferred success!”
Later…
“How did you get on with your driving test?”
“Woohoo! I had a deferred success!”
Later still…
“How did the job interview go?”
“Woohoo!!”
“Deferred success?”
“Yup!”
Much later…
Police Officer: “Please blow into this machine…that’s good…now we wait for the results… I have to tell you sir that you have achieved a deferred success on the breathalyser test.”
“Woohoo!!”
ah - we’ve had “proficiency reports” for years. They are sent home mid-term. I call them “deficiency reports” because you only have one sent hom if the kid if failing.
Oh yeah, and here is a good one: In the Education Code for the whole State, it is illegal to give an African-American child a standardized IQ test. Anybody else is okay, tho.
No, it’s not allowed, period. It’s but one of the diagnostic tools available for a teacher but the fact that it’s written into law is an interesting phenom.
All standardised testing is pretty much equally stupid, so I don’t see any problem with using different tests for different groups, if that makes anyone at all happy.
~~
When I was in grade school, I got selected for some kinda weird standardised testing that went on for years as part of some sort of longitudinal study. These were a few afternoons of multiple-choice, mostly general knowlege tests every year, or maybe every term–I think each year we did the ones for our grade, the grade before and maybe the grade after.
I suspect I was selected because I was known to be good at tests, and my results would boost the school’s scores or something.
Or maybe I’m overly conceited, and it was random.
Anyway, they kept going on about how these results didn’t count.
So I got bored, and one year decided that it was more interesting to get every question wrong rather than right, so for the remainder the study–I think it ended about grade six–I’d carefully eliminate every option which had a possibility of being correct and instead colour in the little oval belonging to an answer I knew was wrong.
I don’t know how my strategy affected the survey results. No one ever asked me about it, so I guess it was as anonymous as they promised.
Standardised testing is a political act. The paedogogical value of it varies between “slight” and “nil”, so this practise amounts to one politicised group subverting another politicised group’s political stunt.
That’s fine with me.
~~
From time to time I find old copies of my elementary school report cards. It’s interesting to read them with 30 years of hindsight.
The grades don’t tell you very much that’s useful about me, but the teacher’s comments were largely bang on.
~~
Teaching is an art. Not a science, and certainly not an industrial process. Standardised testing–or any other batch processing technique–doesn’t tell you anything worth knowing about a student.
High school grades, for instance, are useless at predicting even something as immediately applicable as success in university.
