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The best teacher I had in high school was Mr. Presowitz—my chemistry teacher.
Mr. Presowitz had a very unorthodox testing method. He didn’t like big tests. He liked quizzes—ten-minute tests with five to eight questions. And he gave a lot of them. And they were never announced. On one double-period chemistry day, I had to endure three quizzes. One at the beginning of the first chemistry class, then one at the beginning AND end of the second chemistry class. It was brutal. And his quizzes were never easy. And they were always cumulative in nature. You were expected to know everything that was taught since day one.
I worked my ass off for this chemistry class. I paid attention in class, took meticulous notes, and did my homework every night. And, yet, despite all that effort, I only passed a handful of quizzes throughout the year. On most quizzes, I would only get half the questions right.
The good news is that no one failed Mr. Presowitz’s class. He knew his course was rigorous and his testing philosophy was unconventional. So he graded on a curve. I got a 70 every quarter and a 70 for the year.* The brighter students got an 80 or 85 for the year. I don’t think anyone got a 90 or above for the year.
* Quick aside: My high school used number grades on a scale from 0 to 100. Below 65 was considered an F. Sixty-five to 69 was a D. Seventy to 79 was a C. Eighty to 89 was a B. And 90 and above was an A.
New York State has something called the Regents exam. These are statewide standardized tests given at the end of the year for the core high school subjects (English, physics, biology, chemistry, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, etc.). I believe you had to pass five of them to get a “Regents” high school diploma—a diploma that was allegedly more prestigious than a regular, non-Regents diploma. And the reason why I’m telling you this is because I took the Regents exam for chemistry at the conclusion of 10th grade. My score? Eighty-nine—a solid B-plus.
Now a question: Which was the more accurate assessment of my competency in high school chemistry?
My quizzes that said I was a moron?
My quarterly grades that said I was a barely-passing student?
Or my Regents exam score that said—at least to the grand poobahs of New York’s education bureaucracy—that I had a solid grasp of high school chemistry?
Call me nuts, but I think the Regents exam score was the truest gauge of my high school chemistry ability. And I say this confidently because it perfectly reflects the correlation I saw between my effort and my results in my long history of engagement with American education—especially during high school and college. Whenever I applied myself, save for one particular high school class, I did well. I got an A or a B. Whenever I slacked off, I did poorly. I got a C or a D. And, as already pointed out, I worked my ass off in this chemistry class. The odds that my Regents exam score was a fluke, and somehow managed to make a complete mockery of my time-honored effort-in/results-out pattern, is highly unlikely. My grade for chemistry was the real fluke.
And this is why standardized tests are so valuable. High school grades don’t always correlate with achievement. Some teachers are more demanding than others. Some schools are more challenging than others. Honor students in one school might be total frauds. Mediocre students in another school might be part of the cognitive elite when they’re compared to their peers on a national basis. Standardized tests are a way to control for the differences in rigor and integrity (hello grade inflation and outright fraud) found in our country’s K-12 schools. High GPAs can mask core academic deficiencies. High SAT scores can’t. Perhaps that’s why two selective colleges that dropped their standardized test requirements (MIT and Purdue University) have decided to reinstate them.
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. Don’t believe the woke propaganda that standardized tests are racist and a tool of white—and yellow—supremacy. Any high school student who has a solid command of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry and is well-read will score high on the SAT—regardless of his or her household income or his or her color or ethnicity. And don’t believe the woke propaganda that high school GPAs are a better predictor of college success than standardized tests. Anyone—regardless of his or her high school GPA—can be “successful” in college when your typical college has no shortage of soft courses and soft majors. But evenly populate a no-nonsense college calculus class with above-1400-SAT scoring “A” high school students and below-1000-SAT scoring “A” high school students and you’ll quickly realize that the SAT is a far better predictor of success than high school grades.
When designing a test you can make it easy or hard. (I’ve taught a few college-level classes.) If it’s too easy, your scores will all cluster around 100% and it’ll tell you (the prof) little about how well the students are learning the material. If it’s harder, you get a nice bell curve with enough space for the left and right tails to spread scores enough to rank students. Then assign letter scores according to this distribution and your target for the numbers of As, Bs, etc.
Conversely, you can grade on an absolute scale. And your test needs to be designed to account for this. Some standard of mastery must be set by some authority, and a rubric of learning targets must be set up that you test against. I never did this, but I think it’s the trend in the Department of Education. The drones must be sure to be trained in the requisite Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Equity (DIE) targets. Particularly in STEM. And set up the rubrics to show Math is a tool of white oppression…
The last part is tongue-in-cheek to illustrate the difficulty of establishing rubrics without baking in some kind of bias. When you decide upon rubrics you should always ask “By What Standard.”
A lot of wisdom there, my friend. I remember Charles Murray saying his biggest fault with American education is that it refuses, in the name of equity, to challenge our brightest students. Very few of our brightest high school and college students, therefore, know what it’s like to fail, to reach their cognitive limits. This isn’t good. We need our best and brightest to be pushed to their cognitive limits if we ever hope to tackle our most daunting problems, and we need our best and brightest to have empathy for the academically challenged. And it’s kind of hard for them to have empathy for the great unwashed when they have never failed anything academic in their lives. DIE will surely be the death of America. Thanks for stopping by, Steve. Awesome comment.
“Some teachers are more demanding than others.”
Amen to that, brother. And, if you’re like me, you found those more demanding teachers to be the ones who really taught you something and the ones you most fondly remember. And, the standardized tests were the metric to demonstrate that you had truly learned. What’s wrong with having a standardized system to truly test knowledge? The only folks who seem to complain are those who haven’t attained the knowledge. No knowledge, no gold star. What’s wrong with that?
“What’s wrong with having a standardized system to truly test knowledge? The only folks who seem to complain are those who haven’t attained the knowledge.”
Nailed it. I never did poorly on a test when I had a firm grasp of the material the test covered. Back in my day, very few of my high school peers prepared for the SAT. I certainly didn’t do any special preparation for it. I just joined my high school peers in the gym one Saturday and took the test. I scored in the 80-85 percentile on the math portion and in the 50-55 percentile on the verbal portion. And the reason for the disparity between the two portions was simple: I was competent in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry and incompetent in English (I didn’t read widely back then). And no parent, teacher, administrator, board member, or community leader back then ever suggested that the SAT was “bigoted” because the Jewish kids in my school did better on it than the Christian kids. Adults weren’t grooming us to be fragile, excuse-laden losers. They were grooming us to be resilient and accountable. Thanks for stopping by, my friend. Cheers.
You hit the nail right on its head, Mr. G. Of all the crap the woke left shove down the throat of this great country, this is the inanest of them. Scraping standardized tests will only catalyze the speed at which the average IQ drops with time — alas, this country will be saturated with more morons, and the destruction of the core fabric of the nation itself will be inevitable. Let’s fight to make sure this never happens. Peace and love.
Thank you, Nana. I really appreciate your kind words and your take. You’re comment nailed it as well. A sane country doesn’t kill the messenger—and that’s all a standardized test is. If this country ever hopes to avoid a Soviet-like collapse, we need to discard our insane woke overlords and get sane new overlords. But can we do it before it’s too late? The plot thickens, my friend. Hope all is well on your end. Cheers.
i think i got 100 on that chemistry regents exam. just like in your experience it was much easier than our rigorous classwork. then i became a chemist.
i hope you’re well, mr. groovy.
100 on the chemistry regents exam! Holy crap. Looks like you would have done very well in Mr. Presowitz’s chemistry class. Hope all is well on your end, Mr. Smidlap. Cheers.