Why No One Cares That Much About Standardized Test Scores (And That’s The Problem)
I volunteered to proctor practice for my cousin’s 8th grade state standardized test last month, and I left more confused about the whole system than I started. I thought I’d be helping kids calm down, explain bubble sheet rules, that kind of thing. What I actually did was break up three different groups of kids passing a cell phone under the table, watch a kid fill in every third bubble in 15 minutes flat then pull out a basketball magazine to read for the next hour, and have my old 8th grade math teacher whisper to me in the break that 60% of this year’s 7th graders didn’t even hit basic proficiency, and no one is even surprised.
It’s not like these kids are stupid or lazy, at least not most of them. The problem is so obvious I can’t believe people still act shocked when the scores come back low: there’s literally no incentive for them to try. I sat there during that test thinking back to when I was their age, taking the exact same mandatory test my sophomore year of high school. What did I have to gain from a good score? Nothing. What would happen to me if I got a terrible score? Also nothing. My GPA didn’t change, I wasn’t held back, I didn’t get kicked out of AP classes, colleges never asked to see it. I remember finishing the math section 20 minutes early, drawing little dinosaurs in the margins of my scratch paper instead of double checking my answers, because why would I? I had a soccer game that afternoon and I was already tired from sitting in a hard desk for two hours.
One of the kids I was watching caught me looking at his half-blank bubble sheet halfway through the reading section, and he just shrugged and asked me straight up, “If I get a perfect score, do I get out of P.E. this week? My knee hurts.” I told him no, that the score doesn’t even go on his report card. He just nodded and went back to picking at a scab on his hand. That’s when it hit me. The only people who care about these test scores are administrators and state department of education people, none of whom are sitting in the room taking the test. Why would a 13-year-old care more about your school’s annual rating than they care about their sore knee or getting out early to shoot hoops before dinner?
I know, I know. We don’t want to go back to the bad old days where kids were shamed for low scores, or held back a grade just because they had a bad test day, or tracked into low-level classes forever based on one three-hour exam. I don’t want that either. That messed up so many kids, especially low-income kids and kids of color, and it makes total sense to get rid of those harsh punitive systems. But we threw out the punishment and forgot to put anything else in its place. There’s no carrot either. I asked my cousin what he gets for scoring in the advanced range. He said the principal says your name at an end-of-year assembly once, and you get a cheap sticker that says “I did my best!” That’s it. A sticker. I can buy a pack of 100 of those stickers on Amazon for $3. Why would a 14-year-old grind through three hours of tricky reading questions for a sticker?
Some schools do collective rewards, like a pizza party if the whole grade hits a certain target, but that’s just an invitation for free riding. If I don’t try, everyone else will still pull enough weight to get the pizza, right? So why bother? I remember my high school did that, and we still all checked out. It’s not like the pizza is even good anyway, it’s that cold cardboard crust kind they serve at school assemblies. No one’s acing a three-hour algebra test for a slice of that pizza.
My neighbor’s kid is a junior this year, he had to take the mandatory state science test last spring. He told me he studied for all of 10 minutes the night before, just enough to remember he needed to hit basic to graduate. He got a 10% above basic, called it good, and spent the rest of the test time playing chess on his hidden phone. Why would he try harder? If he got advanced, it wouldn’t change his college apps, it wouldn’t get him extra credit in his actual AP science class, it wouldn’t get him out of his final exam. Nothing. He said it was just a waste of a school day he could have spent working on his common app essay. He’s not wrong.
The thing that’s extra crazy to me is the whole point of these tests is supposed to be to measure how well schools are doing, right? But if half the kids aren’t trying, the data you get is garbage. You think a school is underperforming because 40% of kids are below basic, but actually 20% of those kids just filled in random bubbles because they didn’t care. What are we even measuring then? We spend millions of dollars every year on these tests, paying for proctors, paying for grading, paying for the people who write the questions, and we get useless data out of it because no one sitting the test has a reason to care.
I don’t know what the fix is. I don’t have a neat solution or a list of changes to make the system perfect. Sometimes I think we should just get rid of them entirely, but then people say we need some neutral way to compare school performance across the state, I get that argument. If we do keep them, though, why not throw the kids a tiny bone? Let them skip a final exam if they score advanced. Give them a $10 gift card to the school snack bar. Let them leave school an hour early the next day. Something, anything, that makes it worth their time to not just check out.
I talked to my retired teacher mom about this the other day, and she said back in the 80s, if you scored high enough you could test out of freshman year math, which was a real reward people actually cared about. No one wants to do that now, because it’s seen as elitist or exclusionary, but I don’t think giving a kid a tangible reward for putting in effort is elitist. It just makes sense. Anyway, I’m still thinking about that kid with the sore knee who just wanted out of P.E. If we’d told him yeah, hit advanced, you get out of P.E. this week, he probably would have tried. As it was, why would he?
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why No One Cares That Much About Standardized Test Scores (And That’s The Problem)