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But that's the thing, they don't identify bad teachers. And they do penalize good teachers. Being taught to pass these tests is not the same as being educated. All the tests do is identify teachers who don't put the majority of their teaching effort into getting children to pass the tests, to the detriment of everything that matters.

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Being taught to pass these tests is not the same as being educated.

How do they differ?

And once you have a definition of "being educated", why not simply measure this? Once you change the tests to a measurement of "being educated", "passing the test" and "being educated" would be identical.

At the extreme, I can be taught to identify metadata in the test and use that to answer the question. E.g., if the question begins with "Why ..." the answer is 95% (c). If the question is an inequality with an irrational number than answer is almost always (b).

Princeton Review was particular good at teaching metadata identification in helping to "guess" when you didn't know the answer.

Princeton Review teaches students to use logic and some knowledge to exclude wrong answers, to help the top 10ish percent raise their scores. Students who are capable of using these techniques are much more intelligent/education than students at risk for failing state tests.

E.g., if the question begins with "Why ..." the answer is 95% (c)

This sounds like a job for random.shuffle.

Incidentally, independent (i.e., not funded by Kaplan) investigations of test prep centers show minimal effect on performance.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html

Here are two tests: one expects you to quickly provide low-precision values for common trig calculations which can be easily passed using rote memory to learn sin/cos/tin for common values. The other is a free-response question requiring you to explain what sin/cos/tan actually mean and label a triangle accordingly.

Both of those are standardized tests. The latter actually tells us whether the student understood the material but the former is much cheaper to grade and report on.

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