Exams during COVID
In a recent article The Economist details the wrenches COVID has thrown in many countries’ plans for high school final exams. Some scrapped them, others delayed them, but despite this:
the disruptions of 2020 have made clear that exams are useful. Some teachers’ unions in France argue that inflated grades of the sort handed out this summer risk becoming a permanent fixture as a result of the government’s efforts to de-emphasise exams. Teachers in England did not enjoy helping decide who should pass or fail… Many will be pleased when external examiners relieve them of that burden.
This ain’t no fooling around
Unlike most of the world, America eschews a national curriculum, so the SAT and ACT are de facto exit exams. But it has long been known (and recently confirmed) that the SAT doesn’t offer college admissions officers much insight they could not already gain from an applicant’s GPA and the quality of their high school classes. The Economist notes nearly “70% of American universities … now operate ‘test-optional’ admissions policies, up from around 45% before the pandemic,” but I suspect this has less to do with COVID and more to do with ongoing debates over equity and access.
K-12 accountability was supposed to assess schools’ impacts’ on their students’ trajectories but from my perch in Brooklyn, support for that faded long before learning went remote in March. Even at the height of the reform movement’s strength we fought over annual reading and math tests, which esteemed scholar E.D. Hirsch called “among the most reliable and valid tests available.” And we ignored the main problem he identified:
that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.
Hope for an answer some day
The Common Core was a state-led effort to forge national standards but it devolved into a political punching bag. Lately in New York we can’t even agree it’s safe for students to attend school in person, the most effective way to teach at-risk kids. The Economist reminds readers that without objective assessments, learners form poor homes are more likely to be judged on their backgrounds than their actual achievements. Indeed.
In this context it is even more alarming to learn that the NAEP governing board has proposed changes to make their reading tests easier. While our 12th graders results haven’t shown progress in 30 years, it is the NAEP’s trustworthiness that has allowed us to understand the magnitude of this problem. Alas, it seems one thing we have in common with the rest of the world is the failure to see that half-cocked school reforms risk hurting those who can least look after themselves.
