I was a phenomenal test-taker in high school and college. It was the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Tests were taken exclusively on paper. Some people say they are bad at taking tests. I was good. I would read the whole test first, quickly, to get a general idea of how difficult it was, and to get an idea of how quickly I would have to pace myself. I would specifically look for related questions and answers. I would also choose how to work the test, and I would often choose to start at the back and work forward.
I had a “concentration position” I would get into when I started a page of questions. Elbows on the desk beside the bottom corners of the test page, thumbs in my ears to block sound, palms of my hands like blinders on a horse bridle blocking everything to the right and left of my desk, fingers touching on my forehead like a short-billed baseball cap. Free of as many distractions as possible, I would concentrate and try to answer all the questions on the page before starting to write. If I couldn’t answer them all, I’d start on one I thought I knew, confident my brain was working behind the scenes on the rest. It was not uncommon for me to get a flash of understanding, and change the answers of several questions — from wrong to right I would learn when the tests were handed back.
40 years later I understand what was going on. Quite often the material the teacher presented prior to the test had not “gelled” into a solid understanding in my mind. The material was somewhat misunderstood by me. It was not well sorted and collated. The facts that should have woven themselves into a beautiful tapestry of understanding were as yet separate, snarled threads. Then the teacher would present a test on the material. He or she was in fact saying, “The proper understanding of the material we covered is indeed contained in the right answers to these questions.” In my process of taking the test as a whole I was, in fact, learning the material. In the, “If this, then this and that,” and the, “Ah ha!” moments I was unsnarling the twisty threads and weaving them into the gorgeous cloth of full understanding. I was sorting, collating and understanding the material. The test was the best learning process. In class I had been presented with lumber, concrete and nails. In the test itself I built the building, I finally put all the pieces together. It was not unusual for me to begin a test having only a “B” or “C” understanding. After the test I’d have an “A.”
Using these “test mining” techniques, as a high school senior I placed 3rd in a regional math contest, and 1st in a regional chemistry contest. I was a good test taker. No, I was a great test taker. A phenomenal test taker.
Aside: Is being good at taking tests, somehow cheating? No. Life since college has been filled with situations where the “correct answer” was determined from inferences of the relationships among many sub-situations. My ability to test well meant I performed well in many of life’s “tests.”
In my 50’s, fed up with the Washington, DC beltway-bandit culture, I returned to South Dakota and real life. Eventually I decided to become a welder and applied to Western Dakota Tech in Rapid City, SD. It was an ill fit from the first day. To begin with, they were apparently unfamiliar with The South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, part of the same higher educational system, the place I had received my B.S. in Computer Science in 1982, and almost within sight of WDT. “I just want to weld.” “We need copies of all your educational transcripts.” “Have you heard of SDSM&T, just that-a-way a bit? Punch it up on your computer. I bet you find the State of South Dakota already has everything about me.” “No, we need copies of everything. We have our policies, and like the Ten Commandments Moses carried down from the mount, they cannot be violated.”
WDT insisted I take an English class. I offered to teach one, saying it might be good for young students to learn from someone who has read resumes and made hiring decisions from them. I said I had given presentations to high-ranking Army officers, including one General, so my teaching on presentations would be based on experience. I said in my last English class, as a 2nd Lieutenant at Ft. Bliss, we were taught that sometimes it is ok to lie. “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Doe, Your late son was a dirt bag who rarely followed orders exactly. His failure to follow simple instructions got himself and three other soldiers killed this morning. I’m glad he’s dead. But I am extremely sorry he caused others to die needlessly. Sincerely, …” No, don’t write the truth. Write: “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Doe, Your late son was a true hero and will be missed greatly. He was an outstanding soldier …”
Nope. I was to be an English student, not an English teacher. It was extremely vital that I (re)learn how to write a resume! I was assured of a fact that is just as true as Pi is approximately equal to 3.14159. The fact: All WDT students are exactly the same! The one-size-fits-all instruction was decreed by God’s boss’s boss! They might repeal the law of gravity someday, but the hallowed policies on which WDT was founded can never, ever change!
Sitting seething in a chair outside the admin office, boiling angry at having been born when Ike was president but classified with those who, possibly, couldn’t identify him in a police lineup, I texted my two adult children: “Your total hatrid of unnecessary bureaucratic bullshit is 100% inherited. From me.”
But the worst part of the whole groveling, humiliating process of being granted admission to WDT was the test they made me take on the computer. First a little background. I was injured in Army training, and am a permanently-disabled veteran. The government pays me a small amount every month for my trouble. For over 20 years I have had pain that occasionally has made me need to use a wheelchair. The type of chair I can use is very important. All my recent vehicles have been seats comfortable for someone 6’3″ and 250#s, with wheels and an engine. I’m writing this from a $375 “tall person” chair. It’s good for about 8 hours. I have a $1000 desk chair I can do 16 hours in comfortably. The worst part of visiting someone’s home, or a long dinner out, is the pre-knowledge that, in 30 to 45 minutes, I’ll be thinking about little other than how damn uncomfortable I am.
The second bit of background is my knowledge of the importance of good computer monitors. I spent about 30 years writing software. If I’m going to apply for a job writing software I want to see the equipment they provide for their programmers. If the monitors are small and in the eye strain class, I know I don’t want to work there. Management is ignorant and clueless — and probably proud of it.
WDT insisted I take a math test on the computer. My transcripts showed three semesters of calculus, differential equations, and three semesters of statistics, and that didn’t mean squat to them. “If you ignore what’s on my transcripts, why do you need them?” “At WDT, prospective students are to be seen, not heard.”
They took me to the computer. I looked in near horror at the tiny, wobbly chair in front of the computer. I knew I was but 10 minutes away from wanting to stab pencils in my leg to have a different flavor pain to think about. Then I looked at the monitor, and the sense of horror changed to near rage. When that piece-of-shit CRT was new I wouldn’t have made Hitler’s ugliest and meanest dog use it! Made for and marketed to the don’t-know-any-better class of Walmart shoppers, it shipped straight from the factory with extremely noticeable edge distortion and the 60 Hz flicker some of us perceive with our straining eyes. Having apparently been dropped several times in its way-too-long-life, the mask inside the CRT had shifted, resulting in fuzzy-rendered letters everywhere on the screen. My reading glasses only changed the character of the unreadability.
“I’m a great test taker,” I told myself. “Despite the odds against me, I can do this!”
Nope. WDT in essence, lied. They told me I was to take “a test.” They lied. The software did not allow me to view the test as a whole. I could only start with question one, answer it, then move on to question two, answer it, move to question three, and so on. I could accidentally hit “B” when I meant to hit “C” but not be able to go back and fix my typo. I was not permitted to get a “30,000-foot view” of the whole test. I could not “get inside the heads” of the person or people who wrote the test, to get an idea of how they wrote their questions — something critical to test-taking IMO. And as time went by, I had no way to gage my progress. I had no way to know if I was 10% done, 50% done, or 99.44% done. It was a horrible experience.
WDT lied. I did not take one test. If I had taken just one test, I know I would have changed some answers. It’s somewhat difficult to do, but even a math test can have ambiguous questions. In later questions the test author’s or authors’ slant became clearer. If it had been one test, I would have gone back and changed some answers. I had gotten inside their heads and better understood what common English words mean to them, in specific context. But despite WDT’s opinion, I did not take “a test.” I took a whole flock of stand-alone, completely independent tests. As I was taking the test, excuse me, tests, there was no one of whom to ask questions. The test, I mean tests, had rolled downhill from somewhere. Drenched in perfection, no one could ever possibly question its clarity. No question was ambiguous. Or so I was told. They lied. Anything humans do can be unclear to someone else. Many questions, if you read them with 30 years experience telling computers exactly what to do, if you have been trained to think in true/false, yes/no, 1/0, on/off, are very subtly of this nature: “A dog has three or four legs. True or false?” The correct answer depends entirely on what the author had in mind when he or she wrote the question.
I have no idea how long the test — excuse me, tests — were. My back, butt and legs said there were about a million individual tests. My aching old-man bladder put the number at a billion, three-hundred and twelve million, give or take six.
It was horrible.
I came out of that experience convinced no child or adult should ever be subjected to taking a test — or tests — on a computer. I am a nerd’s nerd. I have all the following working equipment: Desktop PC, laptop PC, Mac desktop, Mac laptop, two iPads, two iPhones, iPod, Android phone, and Android tablet. I would 10,000 times rather take a test on paper than on any electronic device. There is no electronic device with which my “concentration position” works as well as it does with plain old paper. When I take a test, I want it to be a learning experience. I want to look at the test from 30,000 feet, to gain insight into the author’s bias, to see the level of effort needed, the pace I need to maintain. I want the test to be a learning opportunity. As I assimilate and understand the material, I want the ability to go back and change answers — “Oh! That’s what that meant. I get it now!” And I want to know if I need to take a pee break. Compared to taking a test on paper, taking a test on a computer should occur only as a result of having been found guilty of a significant felony, like murder or treason, by a jury of one’s peers.
If I were king of America’s educational system, I would immediately implement these three decrees.
First, all tests will be on paper. “But the teachers will have too much to do, grading all those tests!” I agree.
Second, no teacher will spend over, say, four hours per week on testing. To my mind, I think we have proved that the ability to regurgitate “facts” of questionable authenticity and dubious applicability, has almost nothing to do with students learning the skill of critical thinking. Endless testing, testing, testing comes straight from hell.
Third, I would disband the US Department of Education, and encourage all The Several States to likewise disband their propaganda bureaucracies. If we have conclusively proved one thing with this idea of ever-increasing bureaucracy over education, it is this. The further removed a teacher is from being hired or fired by the parents of the students in his or her class, the worse is the educational result.
Lift Up Your Eyes! 