Severian discusses the problem of university students who know how to do well on multiple-guess tests, but don’t have the intellectual tools to work out answers if they’re not presented the same way as they were in class:
(Not Severian’s old employer, Flyover State) University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
Having realized I made a horrible mistake going into the Ed Biz, I used my last few semesters before pulling the pin as a kind of freelance lab. I’d ask a series of questions with canned answers about, say, the Battle of Gettysburg: The high ground occupied by Union forces was called a) Cemetery Ridge, b) Heartbreak Ridge, c) Federal Ridge, d) Ridge over Troubled Waters, and so on. Then I’d put in a “tie it all together”-type question, like so: In this famous Union victory, a failed assault against higher ground proved decisive. Was it a) Gettysburg, b) Chancellorsville, c) Port Hudson, d) Stalingrad. Note that the correct answer was actually spelled out in the previous questions …
… and I’m sure you can guess how the average student did. Just for fun, go ahead and guess how many students in a typical class of 30 picked “Stalingrad”. I’ll save you the suspense: Whatever you guessed, it’s too low. The reason is: Not knowing how to handle a question that isn’t straight regurgitation, students assume it’s a trick. Since they’ve never heard of the Battle of Stalingrad, that must be the answer (alternate explanation: They knew they skipped a lot of classes, and since they’ve never heard of a Civil War battle at Stalingrad, I must’ve covered it on one of those days they were sleeping off a hangover at 2pm, so it must be the right answer).
Since he teaches high school, Education Realist is more concerned with the “false positives”, the kids who ace the standardized test yet are dumb as fence posts … or, to be fair to them, are just slightly-brighter-than-average, but get the Certified Genius™ stamp on their high school transcripts, because they trained their asses off to ace the standardized tests. Me, I’m more interested in what this says about social decline.
My hypothetical question about the unnamed battle, above, isn’t genius-level stuff. It’s pretty basic, obviously, and at the start of my professing career I never would’ve tried it — NOT because I was so much more conventional back then (though I was), but because I considered it an insult to my students’ intelligence. Back then, I’d expect the average high school freshman to be able to figure that out, with no real strain on the brain …
It takes very long, very diligent, very expensive training to make kids into mere flowchart-followers. It takes even more of all that, plus a kind of sick genius, to turn them into the meat robots I saw at the end of my career, who were so robotic — and I swear this is true — that I could confound quite a few of them simply by switching up the word order. The powerpoint presentation said “The Union won the Battle of Gettysburg”, but the test said “The Battle of Gettysburg was won by ___”, and some large percentage of them would be stumped.
This has been a public service announcement, for all of you who’ve ever felt compelled to come up with some elaborate 4D chess theory about why our overlords do such seemingly stupid, indeed bizarre, things. These are the test-acers … and those are the kinds of tests they’re acing.
