Standardised testing

I like complicating things, mostly because it makes me feel smart. The trouble with this--apart from the obvious--is that I often arrive at popular (and therefore 'shallow') notions about certain phenomena after much mental merry-go-rounding. And having thus arrived, I feel that my extra mental legwork gives my shallow ideas more comparative depth than other people's shallow ideas (of course, I never entertain the idea that other people may also have arrived at their shallow 'pop' conclusions after considerable thought), and therefore, while my subscription to those ideas shows a resigned concession to messy reality, other people's subscription clearly demonstrate a general lack of grey cells.

Since the above analytical model puts me inarguably in a position of superior intellect to pretty much the rest of creation, I have great difficulty coming to terms with the idea that *I*, Rimi, can actually be subject to the same shallow and hegemonic normalising phenomena that I actually had to grace to briefly think about before scornfully dismissing. A great deal of practice (especially after I moved to the US) has done nothing to ease the process for me.

However, while usually I snort at this individualistic culture's total obsession with meeting homogenising norms in nearly every other aspect of life (in body images and concepts of beauty, for example), I have a genuine problem with the bell-curve approach to testing merit. And not merely because I am subject to it semester after semester, and frequently yield less than satisfactory results. I also mark students myself, and the idea that my grade distribution must conform to a certain "nice middle-heavy lay out" bothers me no end. The potol-shaped narrow-ended and plump-middled distribution simply does not fit actual grade clusters. Sometimes I have students performing rather well towards the beginning--straight As--and then petering off after they're sure they shall get at least a B in the course no matter what. Others take some time to realise that they *will* be marked down if they don't conform to assignment expectations in both form and content, and buck up towards the end to pull up their grades. The unevenness in this case might "look uncomfortable", but it is reflective of the actual performance of the students. The idea that one should 'adjust' this actual data set to fit an unreal norm--unreal because if every instructor is expected to 'adjust' to an ideal, no one actually ever achieves this distribution 'normally'--seems to me both unfair and silly, and quite preposterous besides. I quite understand, unfortunately, the need to have an abstracted idea of perfection against which actual merits can be measured, but somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that this abstracted ideal was chosen precisely because no person can meet it... unless of course he/she makes an effort to play the system (which a great deal of non-native speakers of English do with great felicity to the the GRE, for example).

And lest we forget, these 'actual performances' that I'm championing are already being judged on culturally predetermined parameters. And I'm not talking widely disparate systems, for to even think of comparing them is foolishness, but apparently similiar structures. For instance, the 'western' mode of education in various countries. At my old university, term papers were marked down (almost disqualified, in fact) if one used prescribed texts to write them. The idea was that midterms and finals were for textual testing; term papers were to demonstrate how well students could critique the theory learned in class, and apply it to texts outside the syllbus. In the US, or at my uni at any rate, term papers are nearly disqualified if they do not deal almost exclusively with prescribed texts, perhaps because graduate students do not have take textual exams here. Also, there is something called 'class participation', in which students get a small amount of credit for offering their opinions about the texts. But often the actual content of the contribution isn't taken into consideration, merely the fact of participation. This seems to me quite counter-productive, since students often speak for the sake of registering their presence, and not because they have something valuable to add to the conversation. But that is how America works, and appears to work just fine. Except of course for those who come from outside the system and have to undergo periods of adjustment. But even then, the system is more personalised. Normative parameters must be met, but there are professors and advisers and so on who smile and encourage and hand-hold them through it.

Standardised testing, however, is quite another level of absurdity. And yet again I understand it is a useful tool of separating the grain from the chaff without involving the terribly indelicate job of failing or turning down people personally. It would never do, after all, to have unpleasantness about. But I am forced to wonder how much of the grain gets thrown out with the chaff--and consequently how deeply the system becomes populated by mediocre talent--because standardised tests fail to take extenuating circumstances into consideration. It takes into no account illnesses, emotional upheavals, technical failure or alien attacks. When I took my GREs, for instance, I had a fever and a thumping heat-induced headache. Then, the computer I was at swallowed my essay and nearly all of my maths test, and had to be coaxed back while I waited for two hours in a sultry, drowsy, hot little room which nearly put me to sleep. The personnel tried to convince me that my current test was forfeit and that I should pay for a rescheduled test (which I woudn't do and honestly, couldn't afford to), and finally let an exhausted, anxious and very sleepy me take the test, but all over again.

I think I can say with a certain amount of certainty that my scraps from the second exam would not have yielded such mementos as "1129x2=1158" and similar had I been in better shape and been spared the assorted troubles. So if one goes by my GRE score's position on the bell-curve, I'm a right idiot. And I'm forced to say that this 'evidence' is patently false. I am by no means attempting to establish myself as a genius and am well aware that my intelligence is only of the moderate sort, but an idiot I am not. You can take my word for it. And therein lies the trouble, because of course no one *will* take my word for it--to do that would lead to the collapse of the entire concept of emperical evidence. But it's either my flawed initial scores while I was still trying to figure out the American system of grading plus my less than perfect GRE, or my own assurances that I am an intellectually competent human being. I think I can tell which would be treated as an objective evidence of my abilities, and which not. And frankly, now that I am back on the competitive market, it worries the hell out of me.

So much for you, then, Superior Scorn. Don't be a stranger.