But the person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance.
William J. Wilson
This week we learned about creating our own standardized tests. I have yet to ever create a standardized test and do not see myself doing so anytime soon. The chapter gave some examples of various standardized tests that are used to test the English proficiency of ELLs. I think the most important thing in any standardized test is that it is actually testing what it is supposed to. Having taken my share of standardized tests, I do not always think that this is the case. For instance, I found the English section on the GRE (or at least the old version of the GRE) to be pretty ridiculous. This section pretty much determines whether or not we can figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words by using roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Yes this is useful, but I have never used or have even seen the majority of the words on the GRE and I am a college educated person who grew up speaking English. I ended up doing rather poorly on this section of the GRE (though I really did not spend too much time studying), but I still do well in all of my graduate classes. I think at one point I also had to take what I believe might have been the TOEFL but I am not sure. I had to take an English proficiency test for the military. I found it a waste of my time and kind of insulting because even an intelligent English speaking elementary student could have passed it. Though I did not have to pay for it, I am sure the military had to pay for it. So to me, it was neither cost nor time efficient.
Hi Daniele, I agree many of these tests have no relevance and asks questions that we have never heard of or learned about. When I took the Praxis 2, I had difficulty with the social studies section because most of the questions asked about people I never even heard of.
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely right in saying this about some of the standardized test we take. I believe that we need to measure what's important. When I took the GRE I found alot of the information really not relevant but I guess its there so I could see how dumb I was..haha.
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