Washington Post story on standardized testing
Posted on February 20th, 2006 by hardik
Jay Mathews writes the Class Struggle column for the Washington Post. He’s written an op-ed piece today about standardized testing and how the conventional wisdom on it’s effects on classroom testing is overblown. I grew up in an environment where everybody taught to the test and the effects weren’t pretty. Many of our classes explicitly revolved around questions that had been posed in previous public exams and we were encouraged to memorize model answers to the set of questions most likely to be repeated. Then again, this was in India and it’s not valid to assume that such perversions are the natural outcome of systems like these. The write-up is interesting enough. Have a look at Let’s teach to the test